My Anxiety and Me

One: In the beginning

4.53pm on a summer's day, beer in hand at a friend's barbeque, was the day that I died...or, at the very least, my life was 'flipped-turned upside down' (as the Fresh Prince might put it). My life, before that summer's day, would prove to become a distant memory as I slipped through the gates of hell leaving my saner self behind as a broken figure in the background of my life.

My saner self was an easy going, laid-back character that enjoyed all social aspects of life. Admittedly, perhaps, not the most confident of young fellows by the age of 20, I was never hindered by self-doubt or self-consciousness. It began as tightening in the stomach; a general whole body fuzziness that seemed both strange and alien. Was it, perhaps, the questionably barbequed sausage that stared back at me from the bun that was beginning to feel like a lead weight in my hand? Was it the over exuberant swilling of ice-cold lager that is the preserve of youthful vigour? It was hard to tell at this point. In fact, as my fight or flight mechanism began to whir into action, my naivety of youth responded in the only way it knew – panic!

Whirring from the garden, past the blur of faces that slipped away behind me like star-bursting headlights in a rear view mirror, I found myself lying on the bathroom floor of my friend's house gasping from breath. Certain in my mind that, at this point, I must be suffering from a heart attack or some other type of cardiac event I thought that the spectre of death was approaching rapidly,sharpening its blade and ready to pluck me from the mortal coil. As time passed in the bathroom, the feeling of utter body crippling agony faded and I was left utterly fatigued as if I had run a marathon backwards. Later, I returned to the barbeque as if nothing had happened. And it was at this point that my life would slide into an abyss of social anxiety.

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