Cracking from side to side...

... like an old plate

Anxiety is an apex predator. I was planning on comparing it with that most famous of apex predators, the shark, but I think sharks get kind of an unfairly bad rep, so instead I will compare it with something closer to home: Mo Tenzing, my cat.

Mo Tenzing’s job is to rid us of the mouse infestation that all owners of rickety Victorian building stock have to deal with. His task is incredibly easy, in that the mice got one whiff of him when he arrived two years ago and split, never to be seen again.

But Mo is still an apex predator and so his life is spent cruising around, looking for something on which to predate. Anything that slips or scuttles or scratches or moves in even a vaguely mouse-like way he goes for. Occasionally a mouse hiding out near the compost heap at the back of the garden gets it literally in the neck but most of the time, Mo is jumping on shadows, attacking leaves, our feet under the bedclothes, the ends of my apron strings, and his sister, Iris - who is less apex predator and more Marie Antoinette-but-make-it-a-cat.

Anxiety is the same as that. Anxiety is the Mo Tenzing of the mind. Anxiety also does a job. Rather than dealing with mice it keeps you from doing, I don't know, super-dangerous and stupid shit. It gives humans that nervy edge of neurotic, preventative what-if forward-thinking that they need into order to function in this world. To remain the apex of all the apex predators. But if you’re unlucky, when your anxiety doesn’t have all that much to do, it tends to jump manically on small things, to swat flies with a wrecking-ball.

And I find that as you get older, it misfires more often and gets more intense, like Mo Tenzing would be if he was literally never allowed to catch a mouse or chase a butterfly, which occasionally sates his bloodlust.

After Kitty was born my anxiety pounced on my post-natal confusion, drooling, claws out. I went to see a very good CBT lady, Dr Saskia Ohlin, and she sorted me out very effectively in 6 weeks. Then things bumbled along fine until about four years ago and then a series of random yet alarming events, (assorted in shape, size and description), culminated this summer in a full nervous breakdown of the no-eating, no-sleeping, arrhythmia variety. I became genuinely paranoid. It was really nasty.

I recovered-ish after a few months but I fear a terrible neurological-pathway cortisol-y thing has been set in motion and now my anxiety, like Mo attacking a balled-up pair of socks with claws and teeth unsheathed, is making mincemeat of me. I jump when the doorbell rings, I jump when the phone rings. I don’t massively want to go outside, but I sometimes feel panicky and trapped in my house. I find it hard to enjoy the good things about life, and there are loads, because in the back of my mind the apex predator of anxiety is stalking low to the ground, ears back, coiled, reminding me that something, somewhere, is about to go horribly wrong.

What to do? The temptation is to remain in a sort of spiralling silo, going round and round and round as I’m so used to it now. I would go and see a talking therapist if I could find one who had any availability, none of the ones I contacted even had a waiting list, it was just a flat no. A friend had described her almost exact anxiety “journey” to me - she is massively triggered by the ups and downs of her husband’s job as an entrepreneur - and suggested prescribed medication might not be an overreaction.

I am not one of those people who is opposed to medication for depression, anxiety or any other medical complaint, nor am I cavalier about taking pills. My inability for years to stop taking over the counter sleeping aids is not a good template for any other dosing situation. So, I don’t know, I don’t know. I don’t know what to do.

How about you? How is your anxiety these days? Do the drugs work?