I feel like I can let go, grip the wheel a little less tightly, let my fingers and my jaw and my shoulders relax. Realising you’ll never be ready for everything can be terrifying – but it’s also freeingIt’s not doing it to be malicious. I’ve spent so much time anticipating the worst, and yet when it came I’d completely missed it. Like almost everybody, everything about this year has been a complete blindside.That’s not to say I didn’t try. For me, anxiety is all about being prepared and in control. What will be, will be, and chances are I won’t see it coming – so maybe I can spend a little bit less time looking, and a little bit more time enjoying the good things that do make it through.It’s fleeting, lasts only a second, because there’s so much doomscrolling to do: Melbourne is still at stage four and NSW is on a never-ending knife edge, there’s another set of numbers due, another presser to watch, another thing to be anxious about. By identifying the risks and looking at ways to minimise them, I claw back a sense of control in a world that seems so impossibly uncertain.I’m far from the only one who thinks like this. It’s trying to protect me. My thermometer has never seen so much use. What if I can’t leave the house for two weeks? Death is the one certainty in life, and so many of us spend a lot of time thinking about it.But for all the time I’ve spent worrying about everything from tsunamis to trip hazards, I did not see Covid-19 coming. Each wave felt completely impossible, completely unexpected. Lyrics to 'Feels Like Letting Go' by Matthew Perryman Jones. Now I feel I can let go.’‘I’ve spent so much time anticipating the worst, and yet when it came I’d completely missed it. How much food will we need? We suffer emotionally, mentally and physically but we find ourselves too weak to make a call to quit. I feel like I can let go, grip the wheel a little less tightly, let my fingers and my jaw and my shoulders relax. These emotions are so strong that even when a relationship is full of suffering, we still want to drag it. What about the kids? Oh my love / Help me open my heart again / Tear it open let the rain fall in / Wash this hardness underneath my skin / Oh my love When word first came out of a strange virus in China, my brain went to work. The anxiety hit in tiny waves. While researching my novel The Morbids I realised that death anxiety specifically is more common than I could have imagined, and while a certain level of fear around death is normal, past a certain point it can be crippling.Recent research suggests that death anxiety is a transdiagnostic construct, linked to and possibly underpinning a range of mental health disorders including anxiety, depression and obsessive-compulsive disorder. FEEL LIKE LETTING GO. What if the wind catches one of our banners and sends it flying and it hits a passerby?
Now I feel I can let go.’f I have a motto, it’s: “Expect the worst.” My brain, anxious and overactive, is always scanning the horizon for disasters, dwelling on worst-case scenarios.
Home-schooling. What if the marquee collapses? I’ve found the more I’ve talked openly about it, the more people have told me about their own experiences with anxiety. I’m constantly working to stop the bad things from happening, but if I don’t, at least I’ll be in the brace position – and maybe I’ll come away in slightly better shape for it.At work, as production manager for the Newcastle writers’ festival, my constant catastrophising comes in use: I put together our risk management plans. I can’t be.It’s terrifying, but it’s also freeing. The first one was: “What if I get it?” Early on, even to me, that was more a logistical problem than a health one. Part of my brain wants to double down on anxiety, to be even more prepared – but another part is realising that no matter how hard I look I’ll never be ready for everything. But it’s there: the dimmest, faintest silver lining in the stormiest, scariest sky most of us have ever faced.Death anxiety: body bags, catastrophic thinking and facing the inevitable‘I’ve spent so much time anticipating the worst, and yet when it came I’d completely missed it. I see my psychologist and we work through these worries – but not well, because I’m constantly wondering if he and I will be the start of what will become known as “the Newcastle cluster”, and I can’t focus.But sometimes the sheer scale of this thing we’re all dealing with makes me feel something completely different.
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