You Can Call Me El

Something insidious about anxiety that I'm only beginning to realise is the way that it creeps up on you. Your thought patterns change, you're filled with fear and dread - yes fine, we know. But the particularly weird and not always noticeable part of this is that it makes you think that this is the normal way to be. You think these are normal responses to events, and there's no option to think any differently.  I must have seen mention of this in various self-help-y things online, but I sort of ignored them in the way you do with things that don't resonate. 'Name your anxiety', and 'remember this is just something that's happening to you and not who you are' and so on. I understood the concept, but I didn't really see why this helped. And then I had a holiday! For the first time since March, I left London for longer than a day and spent three and a half weeks in Norfolk with my family and various family friends. The term cottagecore is new to me...

I wrote the below post on 6 August, which is now over a month ago! September already, eh. I didn't post it at the time for superstitious reasons and because I was in the thick of it and everything was all way too much. But I'm posting now, for non-superstitious and full-disclosure reasons - it's not by any means a fun post, and writing it didn't feel as though it helped me at the time. But I like the intention behind it, and maybe it did help after all, because I do feel differently now. And for anyone worried: Marc was fine, and he didn't get ill. People are often fine! Not always, but often. That's the lesson I'm slowly trying to learn. ----------- It's about 2 o'clock in the afternoon and it’s been approximately one hour since Marc said he thought maybe he wasn't well. In that time, I’ve cried for about ten minutes, panicked, and done a bit more work. Marc is now watching a YouTube video. Nothing much has changed. It’s not normal, when your pa...