When a spider crafts a web, it begins with the bridge thread. It waits patiently until a breeze anchors the sticky silk, and then weaves a second strand. It starts spinning, and its weight creates a bow shape. The spider then creates radial threads from the centre. Then it starts to spiral.
This is how my thoughts go.
The first worry I remember having was when I was eight years old. Our whole family was going out for dinner. Normally, this would be something I enjoyed, but today it felt different. I could feel the knots in my stomach tighten, and my bottom lip wobbling like jelly. I sat on my Grandmother’s bed as she clasped my hand in hers and gave me a pouch of lavender to keep hold of for the evening. She told me it would help me to relax and feel safe.
Experiencing the world with worry was like looking through a new pair of glasses, but instead of things looking sharper, they felt blurry and unstable. Suddenly everything I’d known and loved felt like an inevitable source of danger, or a trick waiting eagerly to catch me out.
I didn’t want to play with my friends after school anymore, and I didn’t want to put my hand up in class when I knew the answers. Everything was cause for concern. I’d latch on to phrases out of fear they’d become a reality - ‘put a jumper on, you’ll catch your death!’ was the worst possible thing you could say to me.
As I grew up, my worries grew with me. From anxieties about friendships and exams, long days of travelling or meeting new people. The feelings felt overwhelming and impossible to manage, but they had basis. There was reasoning and logic behind them. Even when I reached university, I could give you a Point, Evidence, Explain reasoning as to why I felt the way that I did.
When I left university in March 2023, I was elated. It wasn’t what I’d hoped it would be, and for the first time in years I felt like I could finally relax. To really decompress, we went away for a staycation in Devon. We stayed in a treehouse with no wifi and lots of neighbouring sheep. It was bliss! Waking up to sunlight and the sound of hooves on decking was the alarm clock I never knew I needed. However, the unsettling feeling in my stomach that was all too familiar was yet to dissipate. I was confused: there was nothing left for me to feel anxious about, so why did I still feel it?
For months afterwards, I would fixate on tiny worries and amplify them until they were uncontrollable. There’s definitely something to be said for feeling more comfortable in an anxious state than in a calm state. I think I’d spent so much time trapped in a cycle of anxiety that I didn’t know how to feel any different. And the only thing that could rectify me when I was in a state of turmoil?
Barbie.
That blonde baddie got me through it all. It was these weirdly animated, slightly dysfunctional storylines that helped to calm me down, maybe because they took me back to a time when I didn't feel the panic. I tried to make it better by telling myself Martin Short was in one of them so technically they’re musical masterpieces but there’s no way to get around it. I’m a little embarrassed to admit it, but if you can’t be vulnerable in your own public diary, where can you be?
I reached a point where my biggest anxiety was going to my Pilates class. I know, first world problems. I would spend my whole day thinking about it - whether I would do a move wrong, if I would hurt myself, if I’d say something embarrassing, if I’d suddenly get a nosebleed and have to run out of the room. None of these things ever happened, but that wasn’t the point. I’d tell myself there was always a first time for everything.
I was determined not to quit because of my anxiety, so to get me through, the hour before the class I would turn off the lights, get under a blanket and watch an old Barbie movie. Rapunzel was my fave, fyi. Look, I won’t judge you for your coping mechanisms if you don’t judge me for mine.
Anyhoo!
Things I’ve cried about when my anxiety was at its peak:
Harry Styles dating Camille Rowe meaning I wouldn’t have a chance (uh, yeah, that would be the reason hun)
The ending of Paddington 2
The bridge of Thunderbirds Are Go by Busted
Selena Gomez getting her first tattoo (I was, like, seven and my school taught me that tattoos were a criminal offence)
Any time when my sister has to leave our house and go back to her own flat
An essay about Brigadoon for my degree1
Twitches when they banish the Darkness
My anxiety is like running on a treadmill that just gets faster and faster and faster and I can’t turn it off. My legs move more quickly than they can handle, then I realise I’m not wearing the right trainers and there’s a blister emerging, my water bottle is out of reach, I’m breathing so fast it feels like my heart is going to explode until eventually I fall hard on the plastic with a slam.
And yet I still don’t know what I’m worried about.
When I left university, I started a new chapter in my life. I call this chapter ‘What On Earth Is Going On?!’. Up until this point, everything had been carefully structured. My life was scheduled, and so far I had been just about on time. The education system keeps us in a bubble: we are told what to do and when, given a list of subjects from which we can choose what to like or dislike, and allocated a group of people they will label our ‘peers’ - ‘friends’, if you’re lucky. When we leave this system, the bubble is burst overnight, and we’re free falling.
This is the first time in my life that my path has strayed from my friends. At first, I was really critical of myself for this, and so the anxiety flooded me with attempts to find solutions - how I could reconstruct my life to match theirs? The problem was that I didn’t want a life like theirs. Nor do they want one like mine. If there’s one thing the British education system doesn’t prepare us for, it’s individuality!
I’d start with a bridge thought: I should have my dream job by now. I’d then carry on with my day until the thought anchored itself in my brain. Why don’t you have your dream job right now? My mind would start to spin. Okay, let’s think of a solution. I need to make a better CV. So I need a better job now. But how can I get a better job without the experience? How do I get the experience? Then, I’d spiral. My thoughts would get so out of hand and I would be exhausted. I couldn’t figure out how to get a handle on them. It was like having a room of people shouting at me.
The irony is, all the while, I was in a job I really enjoyed, with people I really liked, and I didn’t want to change my job. So why was I worrying about it?
This cycle would repeat itself every day with a brand new subject, big or small.
I couldn’t put my finger on the root cause, and I don’t think there was one. I was just lost.
By June this year, I’d had enough. I was bored of feeling like a disaster. I was struggling to leave the house, I wasn’t finding therapy useful, I couldn’t get through the work day without crying, I was convincing myself that a) there was something wrong with me, b) I was friendless, c) I was chronically unwell, d) I must be stuck as fifteen year old me in a Freaky Friday-esque life swap.
One night I turned on Sleepless in Seattle. In the movie, Tom Hanks is grieving his wife. To get through the day, he says he just gets out of bed and breathes in and out all day long, and then he’ll do the same thing the next day and the next. I decided that’s what I’d do. I’d try and get through every day by breathing, and by trying not to let my thoughts spiral. To be honest, it was by doing this with sheer grit and determination that I found my feet again. I watched Sleepless in Seattle every day for about a month to remind me that I’d get through it. I also started my Sunny Side Up series, which I think was the best thing I could have possibly done. Instead of looking for my flaws and the ways in which I was ruining my own life, I began searching for things to add to my ‘joy list’. This has become easier and easier, and now it’s second nature. For the first time in over a year, I feel calm!
If you read my piece ‘Conquering My Fear of the Year’, you’ll know that a huge anxiety for me was going to the Eras Tour. Much to my own surprise, I did it with minimal anxiety on the day, and afterwards I felt a sense of serenity that I couldn’t comprehend. I woke up the next day with the worst sore throat and the realisation that I’d done it. I could relax now.
Apart from the fact that my mind is a tangled web, and business has now returned as usual.
Anxiety is a funny thing - we can’t banish it, so we have to learn to live with it. Over the past few months, I’ve given my all to tackling this irritating little shit of a feeling and with all my might I don’t plan on letting my hard work go out the window. So while I sit here typing this, worrying that I’m being too honest on the internet, I will remind myself that life is too short to worry about nothing.
Photographic evidence of this to make you laugh. Here I am waiting to ask my tutor for help.
Sending you all the love and warm hugs Ella, you've described this so perfectly.
As a chronically nervous and timid Eldest Daughter, I can confirm this was me post-university and through much of my twenties. It's really scary to be out there in the real world, entrusted with a job and watching as our friends all race towards different, dizzying milestones. It gets better, trust me, and the daily reminder that things always always works out really helps ❤️ (Always here for completely unsolicited big sis advice! 😂 )
As someone with anxiety, this really resonated with me Ella! It was all so well said. I very much know what you mean when you wrote that you feel more comfortable in an anxious state than a calm state. I was like that for most of my life as well. It's only been in the past few years as I've grown and settled into my own skin that it's finally started to lift!