coronanxiety

I usually enjoy a portmanteau, but I didn’t enjoy dredging up coronanxiety. It’s been a rough old time hasn’t it mates?

In lockdown I find myself staying up later, sleeping in later. I love my girlfriend, who doubles as an excellent housemate, but I crave time alone. I can satisfy that craving for solitude when she’s asleep. I can fill the space of the lounge in the comforting darkness later at night. Just me and the telly and my phone and my beer and my crippling self-doubts and worries.

But I need that space. The thoughts start to pour out. If they could take a liquid form, it’d be a mess. A maelstrom of colours all mixed up, battling for primacy in the distressed labyrinth of my psyche. A worry diluting a thought, a thought seeping away. A fear filling up the room as if from an unending tap, the faucet broken, completely unable to stem the tide.

Anxiety. Crippling, chronic, and very occasionally a kind of weird, masochistic light relief from this awful milieu, characterised by a lack of thought and excitement. Complicated, basically. In lockdown I have spoken to friends who have confessed their un-wellness to me and unwittingly described anxiety as comprehensively as any textbook. New cases are up, old cases are intensifying.

And for me, new things are happening. My condition, oft underlying and typically generalised or social anxiety based, has morphed. Or, like the scientists fear about Covid-19, it has mutated. I’ve developed a level of health anxiety which, some days, is quite debilitating. It’s not hypochondria as such, because I’m led to believe that one of the key elements of hypochondria is an inability to accept a healthy diagnosis, and I haven’t had been told I’m well.

Maybe my issue is more obsessive compulsive. Maybe even psychosomatic. Strangely, it is not even a fear of Covid-19. One day I was convinced I had a serious heart condition because I could feel my pulse in different parts of my body, especially my head. On another, a headache so acute and localised had me googling brain tumours (cyberchondria!). Chronic toothache, occasionally exceptionally painful, feeds what I hope are completely unfounded fears of oral cancer, or jaw bone degeneration. I can’t shake it like I usually can, cos I can’t get out. I’m trapped with my thoughts, in my thoughts.

When the health fears dissipate, they are replaced indiscriminately with concerns about those whom I like and love. Will x be okay? Is y coping in his situation? Does z have enough money? At a time when I am in a incredibly lucky situation, it is very difficult not to feel extremely guilty. The virus doesn’t discriminate at a molecular level, but the data tells us that it does in society. Poorer people get it more, people from BAME communities get it more. And so more of those people die. What the fuck do I have to complain or worry about?

And yet I know, deep down, that I need to care for myself too, because no one else can. I am trying. Effortful meditation. Exercise. Cutting back on alcohol. I’m calmer for having done this, too. Writing is a release, especially writing so candid and brave.

I live by the river. Not in Richmond or Greenwich but further out near the Thames estuary. Close to the clockwork orange concrete jungle of Thamesmead. I enjoy the bustle of the Thames this far east, home to plenty of boats of industry.

Most nights around 11 my thoughts are blissfully interrupted by a big barge announcing its arrival, or passing, or something, with an elongated blast of its horn. There’s something comforting about that warning. A warning which has become more a greeting. I look forward to it. A reminder that, as Noah And The Whale put it, life goes on.

Night folks, and please take it easy.