It's late. I've just snuggled down into my nice warm bed after an evening of making burgers for a bustling Chapel St and I am feeling pretty good about life. Then it happens.
A single shot
rings out through the night, the noise echoing and bouncing off the buildings
around my house.
In the 3
seconds that followed that moment I went from calmly going to sleep to almost
crying, feeling like shaky jelly and breathing rapidly and shallowly. The ONLY
thing I can think is that somebody just got shot.
Just earlier,
as I had been walking home, I had seen some people loitering for an oddly long
amount of time on my street, at the time I was able to dismiss it.
As I heard what I only assumed could be a gunshot, my anxiety helpfully jumped to one conclusion; The loitering men had been waiting for someone. That someone had arrived. That someone had died.
Deep down I
knew that there was a chance that my anxiety might be in the drivers seat, but
I was pretty convinced that my assessment was spot on.
Now I was
faced with a dilemma! If I get up and look out my window and it was just my
anxiety, then I have let my anxiety best me.
If I look out
my window and I was right, then I will be faced with one of my worst
nightmares, dealing with finding a dead body.
If I don't
look out the window and I was right, then I have relinquished an opportunity to
potentially save someones life, and I will wake up the next morning to discover
my suspicions were true and I slept the whole night while they lay out there.
By this point
I am panicking. If I get up, I lose, if I stay in bed, I lose. The only hope I
had was to stay in bed and somehow successfully determine that my anxiety was
in control and there was no dead body.
Anxiety is a
monster, it can simultaneously convince me that my thoughts are reality but
fill me with shame at the thought of voicing those thoughts to someone else,
because they are so obviously ridiculous.
My only chance
to escape the drain of fearful panic that I was being sucked into was to just
talk to someone in the hope that they could pull me out of the sink.
I have friend,
he is one of my best friends. He has no time for crying and his preferred
medicine is a teaspoon of cement. Although he cares and he really tries, I am
not sure he has a full grasp on my 'anxiety thing.' But I trust him, and he was
probably awake.
"All it
takes is the sound of a single gunshot to send my joyfully dormant anxiety
spiralling out of control."
My message was
dispatched to his phone and I was left shakily staring at the screen, praying
that he was still awake. The response came almost immediately and it was just
one sentence.
"It
wasn't a gunshot."
With that one
sentence he reached into the sink, grabbed my hand and pulled me out. The grip
that anxiety had on my heart, my throat and my thoughts dissolved.
Of course it
wasn't a gunshot.
Anxiety is
scary. It gets me from the inside. Sometimes its slow boils me. I'm fine and
I'm fine and I'm fine and then I'm not and I realise that I haven't been fine
in a long time. Sometimes, like tonight, it attacks me. It's an overwhelming
assault and all the tools and strategies that I hold to deal with it clamour to
the floor as I desperately try to pry its grip from my neck to keep breathing.
I am so thankful that my friends and family hear me when I yell, or cry, or
whisper, or silently wave for help. When I am not strong enough they help
wrench away anxiety's control over me.
