can sort out crises for others with some well-chosen words, a non-judgemental approach and a series of hugs. But I can’t do that for myself. Because that panic has its own life force. Like some kind of drunken zombie, it lurches from real problem to imagined wrong to supposed weakness, infecting everything. All of it. So eventually, in the middle of the night or just before dawn, I’m as terrified of being late for work as I am that I won’t get my leave forms in on time or that I don’t know where my passport is and I really need to look for it. Urgently. And then I get really frightened. Why? Because I get out of bed to go and look for it. That’s what I do – go and look for it. Even though I know where it is. And it’s the act of getting up and searching that makes it worse – that if I could be worried enough to get up and look then maybe it is an issue. And now it’s a whole new issue I will have to worry about. Something else to manage. Or to control.
Control. Now that’s the Big Bad Bear. Because it’s a short-term panacea. If I can control the problem, it isn’t a problem. So if I know where the passport is, if I can be sure I’m not letting anyone down or revealing this pit of sticky black need, then it will be okay. At some point, some time, it will be okay. And that’s why I obsess over the little things, those silly poisoning little things I can manage. I can own. Because if I can get that right, surely the other stuff will follow? Won’t it?
Sometimes I wonder if I can punch in a different code. Like the combination lock you get on hotel safes where you can reset the code for every guest. Press reset, enter your own code and voila! New security. Perhaps that’s what I need – new security. If I could key in a different code, I wouldn’t be like this. So rigid. So determined to stay within the lines. So obsessed with the safety I find in the order of little, meaningless, petty things. Because I do find safety there. There’s a hysterical kind of order to it. If the house is clean, everybody is fed and there’s water in the taps and power in the light bulbs, I’ve done it. The train’s on its rails. But it’s an exhausting process.
I don’t tell people this. I don’t think many of them would believe me. I do not look anxious and I have no reason to be. I am lucky. And I make jokes about being neurotic, but very few people have an idea of the depth of the problem. And I’ve always been afraid they will find out; that they will realise I’m a liar, a fake, a fraud, an imposter. I am not brave or witty or clever; I am just a good actress. And one day everyone will know. But if I keep the little things together, oil the smaller cogs to keep the big wheels moving, I’ll scrape by. So I keep searching for boxes to tick to prove to myself I have worth.
I don’t do it to be difficult. I don’t take pleasure in finding mistakes. I am not triumphant when I find a plate with a half-eaten sandwich on Christopher’s bottom bunk. I don’t enjoy the confrontations I have with Genevieve over why she shouldn’t leave her shoes in my bathroom. Or why I feel such immense irrational sadness when I find wet towels on the floor instead of hung up on the towel rail. Or how, when I hang them up myself, I sometimes press my face into their dampness and cry and tears soak into them until I clench my fists in the cloth, willing them to stop. And eventually they do.
On energetic days, when I walk through the house and see the wet rings left on the coffee table, the crumbs on the kitchen counter, I want to scream; on other days, I want to weep. Is this my default setting, the Crumb Police? On duty 24 hours a day, seven days a week, ready and waiting to swoop on the unclean, the untidy and the disobedient. Which, of course, I don’t, because it is not their fault. I am not their fault. I have two friends who are sober now. One was sad before he became a full-blown alcoholic; now he is sober, but still sad. The other was a hyper-excitable crazy woman. She took heroin to calm down. Now she’s sober, but she is still a hyper-excitable crazy woman. This was me. I was an anxious, panicky person who drank to calm down. Now I am sober, I am not calm any more.
Some days I am a silent buzztrack of moan. “Pick up your shoes! Where are your books? Get off that computer! Get in the bath! Get out the bath!” I wonder where my factory settings went wrong. Why dry towels became my standard of calm. And yet they are, as are clean dishes, neat beds. They are important. So important, in fact, that I am more frightened by dropped towels than I am by the fact that I cannot sleep through the night and that I count to 10 more times in a day than a Grade 2.
That is how I feel when I am anxious. I know there are medications for it. And I take them religiously. Sometimes there are more and sometimes there are less. They don’t take it all away, but they insulate me. They wrap it all up in cotton wool. But that just distances it all from me – it doesn’t end or go away entirely. It will be there all the time, like a corpse in an open grave. Medication might cover it up and plant grass and put up a nice tombstone, but the body will still be there. Waiting to be dug up. So I carry on, a loop that goes around and around. I thought I could dissolve it in a glass of wine, but when the glass was empty it was still sitting at the bottom.
I drank for all the reasons I don’t drink now. When I started drinking it was for fun. To fit in. I only drank socially and really not very much. But I loved the way it made me feel. I loved being part of something. The whole point of selling beer in a sixpack is so there is something for the other five of you. A wine bottle services five or six glasses. There’s a sense of camaraderie in drinking with other people. That’s what watered the seed, I think: that a drink was a passport to a new country, with new people. A friend who has stopped smoking four or five times insists that each time she goes back to it, it happens at work.
“You see everyone standing outside on the balcony,” she says. “And you just want to be out there with them.”
I ask the question, even though I know the answer.
“Why not go out there anyway? You don’t need a cigarette to have a conversation.”
She looks at me resignedly.
“Because it’s not the same. It feels like them and me. Before, it was us.”
She says the best times were in winter because only the diehard smokers ventured outside in the cold. They would huddle together like birds on a telephone wire, blowing on their hands and taking long drags, trying to make each one count so they could get back inside quickly – only to come out again an hour later. It was a ritual.
There’s an episode of Friends in which Rachel pretends she is a smoker just to get close to her new boss. Clasping a cigarette in hand, inhaling uselessly, she tries to wheedle her way into the group, the conversation, the clique. I think that’s how many of us start drinking. It’s easier to make friends with people when you have something in common, especially if the thing you have in common makes you relax and feel confident and pretty and alive.
When I was 14 I tried smoking. A lot of my friends were doing it, but I was conflicted. It was expensive and bad for me, and it would upset my mother. She had a love-hate relationship with cigarettes. She enjoyed every single one she smoked, but spent most of her life ‘trying to cut back’. But … my friends. Eventually, I decided I would try it out in front of the bathroom mirror to see what I looked like. I waited for everyone to go out and then lit up one of my mother’s Benson & Hedges Special Mild. I took a puff and then stood and watched myself trying to exhale. I didn’t look like some mysterious fifties’ film noir Hollywood starlet. I looked dreadful. I had, and still have, very short fingers, and I looked ridiculous, like a child who had stolen a cigarette – which of course I was. My eyes watered. I stubbed it out. I didn’t end up smoking. Later I started drinking. By then I didn’t care what I looked like.
Drinking was different. It was warmth in a glass. It allowed me to be my best self. Well, let’s qualify that … It allowed me to feel like my best self and that varied depending on whom I was with. On my way out to a date once, I confided to my flatmate that I worried whether the man would like me or not.
“He’ll love you, Sam,” Zev said confidently.
“He doesn’t know me,” I said with trepidation.
“Just be yourself!” he called after me as I shut the door behind me.
Just be yourself, he had said. It sounded so simple. Just be yourself. Of course I would, but which self?