2024 began with the kind anxiety that kept me awake for a week. It went like this: all day I was sleepy, keeping busy by tidying the flat or searching for jobs on my computer or writing to do lists or scrolling mindlessly on the apps. At night that sleepiness became something else, a hard exhaustion that refused to yield to real rest. Against my will and better judgement I lay still in my bed and ran through all of the things I was worrying about. Money, the planet, health (my own and other people’s), AI, filing and paying my taxes, where I’m going to live when the lease runs out, the cat, my parents’ cats, my parents, everyone else’s parents, everyone’s else’s parent’s cats.
(A friend of mine has never felt a moment of real anxiety in her life, and we’re fairground curiosities to one another, me with my tales of infant terror about climate change, abduction, orphanages and dragonflies, her with her soft and undisturbed inner landscape. Freakish creations who love one another nonetheless.)
On some of these sleepless nights I’ve been able to get up and fill the time by reading or writing or sitting at my small dining table and working on an 1000-piece jigsaw puzzle of an illustrated plant shop. When the insomnia is at its most unbearable- usually 4AM to 5AM, when it’s a bit too early to give in and get up but far too late to get a proper sleep before work- I imagine myself working in a shop like the one in my puzzle. The balmy quiet, the smell of wet earth, the things I’d need to know to keep so many things alive.
I don’t really have any ambition to be a small business owner, but I do want to grow things. Not just keep them alive, which is what I’ve managed so far with my few low-maintenance indoor plants, but actually grow them into bigger, greener, mightier things. I want my own place with a garden, some tomatoes on a vine, a chilli plant on the kitchen sill. When I remember I have to leave London in a few months this is the thing that keeps me sane, the idea that wherever I end up will be mine and mine alone, and that even if it’s a shit-hole I can make it a shit-hole of my own, a shit-hole full of green and growing plants that I name and care for and know intimately.
My anxiety often chimes in at this point in my daydreaming, tells me this isn’t an option, tells me that life can only ever be this size, that I will crash and burn, that there will be no chilli plant, no little flat by the sea, no garden, no chance, no hope. When the insomnia is especially bad, when it’s 3AM or the afternoon after a totally sleepless night, it takes an extra effort to talk back to that voice. Still, I do. I must. Anxiety isn’t unkindness, I’ve learned, and that voice has only ever wanted me to be safe. We are in cahoots in this way, the anxiety and I. She says no, I say yes. She says you won’t, I say I will. She says hold fast, I say grow taller. She is the primitive, I am the now. We are attempting to meet in the middle.
Last July I went to France to review a luxury treehouse hotel. I slept soundly in a cabin four metres above ground, ignored the alerts about my overdraft, the rejections from editors, the emails from accounts departments saying they would pay me, probably, maybe, but definitely not yet. Breakfast was delivered every morning at 8AM in a basket attached to a pulley-system. I sat on the balcony with the spoils of my delivery— fruit, yoghurt, cheese, still-warm bread- and listened to the birdsong, the trees making room for one another. During the day I read, walked, swam, cycled through the forest, got lost and never worried about it. On the second day I went in search of the cinq chênes that I was told about on my arrival, five huge dead oak trees, preserved here in a forest clearing, sunk fatally at the centre of dark pond. I sat and looked at them in silence for far longer than I expected to. In the evenings I eat course after course of freshly caught fish, meat from local farms, vegetables and fruits that had been grown a few feet from the dinner table. I imagined a life where I get to do these things, not as a break from reality but as a part of the daily doings and undoings. Vegetables from the garden, herbs from the sill, wheels turning beneath me.
As I was leaving the hotel the manager handed me a tiny oak tree sapling in a brown paper bag. I was so careful with it, resting it on my lap as I took two trains from France to central London, and a further three back to my flat in Lewisham. The morning after I got home I took the sapling outside to our scrubby little flowerbed, clueless but hopeful, and buried it in the shallow soil there. I imagined it growing monstrously large, buckling the ground, snaking underneath the boundaries of each garden and toppling every fence in its path. A week after I planted it a fox dug it up, dragged it away and left a chicken bone in its place.
Last night the wind was so violent against the flat that it sounded like someone was trying to hammer down the door and when I woke up I saw that all of next door’s plant pots had been felled. On the internet I read that planes due to land in the UK have been re-routed all across Europe. A flight bound for Dublin landed instead in Paris, another from London to Cornwall ended up in Malaga. The last time there was a storm in London I was walking home from the station counting the prone Lime bikes and wheelie bins (12 and 14) when I came upon a crowd gathered to look at a huge fallen tree. The stump was jagged and white in the broken earth, splinters the size of skis. On its way down the tree had smashed a hole into a roof and broken a high window before crushing the back half of a red car parked in a driveway. There are so many things you can’t plan for.
My sleeping has improved a little in the last few days, even with the bad weather. I’m getting more daylight, more fresh air. I’m taking a new antidepressant that makes me feel like I’m going to puke 15 minutes after taking it, but seems to be helping with the anxiety and obsessive thinking. After a difficult few months, something is growing in me again, a self-trust, a sense of myself as more than spikes in adrenaline and cortisol. I still dream about finding a miraculous suitcase of money, of a book deal that would pay more than one month’s rent, of a remote treehouse where I can sleep like the dead. I still wake in the night and count my anxieties like loose change, still imagine the plant shop and its humid safety, still wonder whether I have done at least some of the right things at the right time, whether this time will add up to something better or will be better off forgotten. I pick these worries up, but then later I set them down. There is too much else to do, too much of myself to tend, too much to plant, too much to plan for.
My anxiety has long and ancient roots. My hope does, too.
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