Escitalopram

But have you tried putting ice on it?

If I were a horse, anxiety would be my shadow. If I were the earth, it would be the human race. If I were my mother, anxiety would be the whippet that follows her from room to room. If I were a liver, it would be sweet, cheap wine. If I were you, it would be these emails. My companion, my cavity, my carcinoma, my kryptonite, my chaos, my cold, hard, gripping reality. I have known it for as long as I have known my own cratered, dimpled, asymmetric, living face. I have lost touch with it now and then, and I have spent intense months cradled in its cold-sweat arms biting into a pillow that smells of chalk. I have woken with it inside me like a lover and I have recoiled amphibiously and it has not stopped. I have met it with brown bottles and I have met it with a thousand sun salutations. I have met it with pleading and with praise and with grilled peaches and with packs of cigarettes, I have met it in my own imperfect ways. For years that feel like a lifetime, I have greeted anxiety with the rising sun and I have whispered a wet goodnight to it in the blue darkness. It is a tattoo on a hand and it is a split-end and it is a tooth moving like a continent - it is impermanent, irreversible, impartial, illogical, irritating. It is also terrifying.

Today’s post was either going to be a funny batch of restaurant reviews with kneeling praise for the underrated Ostrich fillet, or something ‘vulnerable’. What I consider to be vulnerable now is a helluva lot less vulnerable than what it once was. But, I learnt that lesson and I also need someone to employ me. Still, having not written in a while because of a cold, because of anxiety, I realised that I need to give the people what they came for, what they pay for, what they come for: truth. It is the main factor that separates a good piece of writing from a bad one and it is the reason I look upon claims of ‘fictional literature’ with the same amount of suspicion I do a friend’s Hinge matches. In literature there is no pure fiction, just like there is no pure nonfiction. But today we are having a dose of potent nonfiction in order for me to feel something and hopefully, for you too. Perhaps like any normal person, I spend a large amount of my life imagining what I will and won’t regret on my death bed. I frequently don’t jump off a rock into a river and then have to quietly whisper apologies to the future elderly me dying in my mind. I also have a habit of thinking the worst thing that could ever happen in the belief that if I have already thought it: then it won’t happen. There are a few other superstitious and downright mental habits I have that I won’t be discussing. Anyway, I have known for a while now what this old crone on her final breaths will most regret (other than the Butterfly tattoo). I will probably most regret not caring less these past 7…27 years, for letting my ghutzpa be bashed out of me. So, here is my bleeding heart wrapped in bacon fat so that I may take your money without feeling as guilty (please become a paid subscriber so that I may be less anxious about finances).

“Can I call you?”, “we need to talk”, “have you finished that thing?”, “did you tell them?”, “where is?”, “what if?”, “did you forget?”, “do you remember what you did?”, “they told me”, “don’t pretend”, “you know what you said”, “I can’t believe you did that”. Blood turns into icy gazpacho, heart travels like a toy soldier into a throat where it lodges, immobile. Veins throb and thrust so hard they disconnect from the human body and form their own entity, spurting blood and trying to finger my eyeballs. The entire back of my head and neck is alive with warm pulsing so that hairs lift like tendrils, mice snouts seeking the smell of soup. I have had panic attacks in stairwells and in the street, in hotel rooms and dinner tables, on boats and bicycles and in clubs and cars and beds and gardens and beaches and bathrooms. I have wrenched myself from the tube station to the emergency room to be tested for appendicitis. I have been stuck to a bench counting cars and when that proved too many, dogs, in an attempt to convince myself that I wasn’t going to die. I have adjusted plans for over two years with patient friends to avoid walking alone in the dark because of the hundred scenarios in which I always end up dead or worse. I have never left the house without an emergency Valium. I have run away from my own career screaming like a lunatic. I have never truly tried for fear of trying and failing. I have woken up an hour before every alarm and waited in panic. I have refused to leave the house. I have refused to fly, to drive, to walk, to swim, to eat, to sleep. I have become speechless, tetchy, shaky, twitchy while in bloody savasana. I have felt like I am being hunted for sport while often looking like I am having the time of my life. And my God, how I have named 5 things I can see and 4 things I can touch and 3 things I can hear and 2 things I can smell and 1 thing I can taste, metal.

I committed the past year to treating my anxiety without medication, despite my doctors pleas, “if you can’t swim just put bloody armbands on, you can always take them off!” He thought I was being unnecessarily hippy and I thought I was being holistic and we both knew I was just too anxious to go on anti-anxiety medication in case it… killed me. I read ‘The Body Keeps the Score’ and enjoyed a morbid fascination with the excessive trauma it details and I started seeing my therapist’s therapist and I sorted through my C-PTSD diagnoses with a small amount of satisfaction at the knowledge that I have LIVED a life and I went to yoga literally twice a day (one time) and I was a Montessori mother about what I put into my body and I learnt how to breathe for the first time. I chased a ball on a screen with tearful eyes bouncing right to left while recounting memories and I said no to plans with people I don’t actually like. I quickly looked away every time I spotted something about my body that shocked me to my core and I left over a week for deadlines. I walked down the street at night without turning to look behind me, while listening to a playlist I made called ‘Bad Bitch Walking’. I stopped all medication of any kind and enjoyed the Flo app. I didn’t buy anything I couldn’t buy thrice. I remained in love. I mostly went to bed at a reasonable hour (mostly). I walked a lot. I cooked a lot. I said ‘thank you’ a lot. I said ‘no’ without apologising (this one is a lie). I breathed so much that I got fucking sick of breathing. I was holistic!!! I was so zen that I was LEVITATING. I was GODDAMN FLOATING. Guess what? I was still PANICKING!!! On the 1st of January 2026 when we were all writing lists of things we won’t do and phoning our grandfathers and begging our exes for forgiveness and promising Father Christmas/God that we will be good I had a panic attack for no reason.

And when I say “no reason” I mean that I was sitting at a beach bar with my amazing boyfriend while the sun set, eating a disgusting plate of half-frozen calamari feeling tired. He gave me a game to play on his phone and I joined those blue bricks together like my life depended on it. My life did depend on it. He drove us both home even though I was meant to. Because I couldn’t, because I was an invalid for the pure fact of my faulty brain chemistry and childish nervous system. So, even if this leaves me prey for the droves of holistics out there who have a different physical body to mine, telling me that I just need to try sound baths, duh! I will come out and say it: this is the year of drugs. Much like 2016, but legal. This is the year of putting those armbands on to swim and this is the year of Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors. I sat down in the doctor’s room and gravely muttered, “it’s time.” He wrote me a script for the lowest dose that exists and I said, “can I bite it in half, I’m worried I won’t be able to write” and he looked desperate. I promised myself that if this exciting medication makes me too zombied to write, like some redditors said it could, then I would happily stop them, stop swimming and drown.. but still write. It has now been a week and I am loving knowing that I will not have another panic attack even if that is purely placebo. Some side effects: on day one I lay back in the same way that I imagine people on heroin lie and enjoyed drifting across plains of new blissful, tired peace. When I am falling asleep, I get suddenly jolted awake again and sometimes I have hot flushes (especially when it’s 29 degrees outside) and often I can’t possibly get my voice to return from a stubborn, flattened, monotone. But, as someone who has gone above and beyond to make my voice dance all over the place so that other people will be comfortable and happy, I WELCOME this new monotone that only happens for about an hour anyway. No, I will not be charming. No, I will not apologise for sending a follow up email (I will). Yes, I will behave like I am the first person to ever get treatment for anxiety. Of course, I am still anxious, only now the anxiety feels like shrapnel on the outside of a flak jacket. It looks like an earring at the bottom of pool. I no longer need to reply to every message that is sent to me immediately, if ever. I no longer need to post a funny restaurant reviews about Ostrich fillets. And now, I wonder if the thing I will regret most on my death bed will be that I didn’t treat my anxiety sooner.