Bird Brain. Chuck Mullin

      INTRODUCTION

      Anxiety is a wild ride. Often, there seems to be an assumption that if you’re mentally ill, you just sit around and cry all the time. There is a certain amount of that, true, but that’s not all there is to it. Sometimes, I walk around and cry!

      There is also a slew of complex emotions and experiences that accompany anxiety – nerves, fear, tentative happiness, the arduous business of forming human connections, the never-ending struggle to convince yourself that you deserve to be content, and so on – usually all experienced concurrently to form an unmanageable cocktail of emotional despair.

      I first started experiencing anxiety when I was around seventeen, as the prospect of jetting off to university (where I knew no one except my then-boyfriend), and fending for myself, began to loom over me like a giant blimp full of killer bees. (Side note: Don’t ever, ever, ever, ever, ever go to university solely to follow a romantic partner. It rarely works out well.) Initially I thought I was undergoing a completely understandable case of nerves. Nerves that just permeated my entire being 24/7 and suddenly made me hate myself for every awkwardly strung together sentence that left my stupid, gross mouth.

      The fact that something wasn’t right began to hit home one evening when I went with my flatmates to the university’s first freshers’ night. As soon as I entered the campus club, it was like being submerged in water. I couldn’t breathe. There were too many stimuli: too many bright lights, too much noise, and too many people. Way too many people, who I felt were all suddenly fixated on me, sneering at me, at how I looked, how I moved, how I simply existed. It’s funny how anxiety makes you feel like you’re simultaneously the most important and the most insignificant person in the room. I’d never experienced this tsunami of emotion before. I was probably standing in the entrance for all of a minute before I calmly walked out into the smoking area, hopped the security gate preventing people from sneaking in, and ran all the way back to my flat to bury myself under my bedcovers. I promptly cried myself to sleep. It was 10 p.m., and I had been at university for eight hours.

      Over the next few years, I experienced a steadily increasing number of these episodes, not only in densely packed environments but also over the most inconsequential matters. I couldn’t engage in basic conversation without feeling like I was sweating out my body’s entire water content. The thought of having a social interaction I wasn’t prepared for sent my heart rate into overdrive.

      I tried to brave the doctor and counselling services, but it was almost as if there was a physical barrier preventing me from getting help. I had no idea where to begin if I attempted to talk about what I was going through – I didn’t even know why the hell I was feeling this way in the first place. So I did what seemed like the only reasonable solution to this dilemma and kept all my feelings bottled up and squashed down in the deepest parts of my brain.

      As a consequence of this repression I became weirdly talented at presenting a well-adjusted persona to the world. I’d navigate through social situations with apparent ease, all the while internally screaming and looking forward to when I could get home and cry into my pillow. I think I told maybe three or four close friends about it, but only through rambling WhatsApp messages – never in person, unless I was absolutely shit-faced and couldn’t keep the bad feelings in their bottles.

      Eventually, despite feeling as though I couldn’t hate my life any more, I graduated from university and became increasingly disillusioned with where I was headed. I felt stuck in a full-time retail position, in an incredibly wealthy area where basically every customer was an arrogant toe-rag constantly in ‘Can I Speak To Your Manager’ mode.