The Nth Columnist

 Well, of course it isn't, but as this is meant as a companion piece to the previous post, it seems only right to link the titles. So, I hope you weren't left with the impression that I am always in the deepest throes of anxiety: I am not. While I recognise it as the climate of my mind, it is nevertheless not actually the weather, as it were. Sometimes, the sun shines: at others, storms rumble and tear across the skies of my psyche. The good thing is that I have been able to forecast the problems a lot more accurately as I've grown older, and so I've developed several coping strategies which work, more or less. Not always, but they mitigate the worst moments and mean I climb out of any spiral just that bit faster. It'll blow over So the first thing is what I've alluded to in my meteorological metaphor - these moments when things are bad are temporary and they will pass. They always have done before, and there's no reason that they won't again. That is a ...

It was a beautiful November day - crisp, bright skies, the trees still full of Autumn colours, just the right amount of warmth in the sunlight and cool in the shade, a day to gladden the heart - but I was feeling low. Low and anxious for various reasons, one of which was the fact that I'd been in a full-on collision with an e-scooter a couple of days before, and was nursing my wounds. I just couldn't shake the feeling at all. It is, actually, a chronic feature of my life: sometimes fully in my face, sometimes gently rumbling in the background, but always there. At times, it makes me feel hugely inadequate, that I am just simply not enough. It is the little sibling of depression, but it can be just as debilitating. This is my own experience of it, and what I feel it does to me.  Anxiety is: distorting pervasive self-perpetuating exhausting isolating paralyzing deceptive Anxiety is distorting  When you are feeling anxious, you see the world through a warped lens. Negatives are m...