A panic attack in Walberswick

Or how I entered into a new level of hell this week

A few weeks back I was made redundant. I would say that I have gone through the typical sort of process that happens when you go through a redundancy:

Shock

Anger

Shock again

Fear

More fear

Blame

Back for some more anger

Then planning how to make everyone pay and leave my mark upon the Earth in a meaningful way despite being very tired.

The planning etc. phase hasn’t started because the kids have been on Easter holiday so the last few days were spent in a rainy and grey Suffolk, trying to ‘have fun’ and not let on that my inner life was crumbling. It was instead going to arcades on the sea front, eating chips, saying cheery things like ‘Oh this is fun! (and yes of course it is a privilege to go away in the UK let’s not forget that fact).

With children there is a need to pretend that things are okay. This can be good as it stops you from crying all day, with a fag hanging out of your mouth and then lying face down in a skip full of dirt and old floorboards. It’s not so great in that the tension has to go somewhere. For me it meant a great deal of anxiety. It was all in my body. If the body holds the score then it was holding it all.

I became fixated on checking my phone for work. I am doing a bit of freelancing but also looking for permanent roles, and so I kept checking every 2 minutes, sometimes every minute to see if anyone had reached out. If any fresh leads had come in since the last 2 minutes that I’d checked. On the beach we saw a dead seal and instead of walking away from it, I went right up to the poor creature and stared into its eyes. I thought about whether it had experienced anxiety or not. I experienced a bit of respite from my own feelings imagining the feelings of this animal. Then I saw that it might be a sign, a negative sign about my future so I crossed myself and walked away. My girls cried. I tried to rally them by telling them that all animals die at some point and at least it looked as if it had been quick.

I wanted to shake them and say.

I have bills to pay girls! I am the main earner. I can’t just go off and meditate for a few months until I get a new idea on the what the fuck to do next. I am not like this seal who can lay down and give up on life. I am tired. Possibly also have been through the menopause (I can’t remember my last period) and with that menopause comes a fast track to anxiety.

And this was basically what I was doing with my phone. I was doing this whilst I was walking around Walberswick.

Now Walberswick is well known as a place where rich people hang out. It’s the home of red corduroy trousers and men called Rupert or Tarquin. It is Barbour jackets and big old Land Rovers with whippets in the back. People are loaded. They are old money. They are lords and ladies and they still carry change in their pockets to throw at people if they come to close. This is where the high earners like to get to know the rural life. They like to see a peasant and maybe not shoot it or come back and shoot it later when nobody is looking. They let their children run riot around the pubs of Walberswick and call them darlings.

I sat on a bench and checked LinkedIn, checked my messages, checked my messages again and then went round and round and round thinking about the future and how there was nothing I could do in this moment to help myself.

‘It’s wonderful here isn’t it,’ a woman sitting nearby said.

She was watching her children play on the swing and slide in the square. My kids were also playing. This woman had a posh accent. I tried not to judge as I like to give people space to reveal who they really are. Some people might even think I’m posh the first time I open my mouth.

‘It is really quite darling,’ I found myself saying (a phrase I have never uttered before).

Internally my guts were churning. They had been churning all day long. They were on a spin cycle where basically my stomach, intestines and some other bits that I can’t readily identify were turning in on themselves and rotating around so it felt like I was hanging upside from the underside of a helicopter. I had vertigo from the idea that the future was not mapped out, that I wasn’t sure what was going to happen next, that I didn’t have a job, that perhaps I would never have a job.

‘We have never visited this place before and it’s so lovely. The houses are all so different,’ the woman said.

Her girls were all named after flowers- Daisy, Lily, Rose.

‘I know. It’s just so lovely,’ I said, amazed that I could speak in a posh voice whilst suffering with a full blown anxiety attack.

I resisted the urge to ask whether her husband was a banker. I saw that she was wearing one of those coats that you get given in private school that says ‘Jolly Hockey School of 2007’. I wanted her to wrap me up in that coat, give me a hot chocolate and maybe £3 million pounds of her trust fund so I could stop worrying.

‘The lunch times are challenging because they’re so expensive,’ she said and I thought about whether she meant pub food (in Walberswick you won’t get change from £80 for a lunch of chips and two lonely pieces of fish in batter).

‘Yes so expensive,’ I said mirroring what she said, and feeling like I wanted to tell her about my redundancy and how I was worrying and checking my phone all the time and didn’t know what my next move might be.

‘So expensive,’ she said smiling.

Was this a test?

‘Anyway hope you have a lovely holiday,’ I said standing up as my youngest had managed to get her boot stuck in a pool of mud and was screaming for me to lift her up.

‘Wonderful you too,’ she said.

I thought how true it is that we never know what’s happening with other people and we spend our lives talking about the basic stuff like how the sun is shining and how the weather might get better, or how there are moths that have eaten our jumpers or how a sandwich costs 8 quid, and instead we want to scream HELP ME! But we don’t. Because we are British. And we like to keep that veneer of respectability even when we are hanging upside down from a helicopter.

I feel better today. I am also thinking what fresh hell was going on inside this woman whilst we sat side by side. If she is reading this I hope she will find some relief in knowing what was really going on.

‘Let me buy you a hot chocolate and give you 3 million quid,’ she might say.

Or.

‘Let me offer you a shoulder and rest your head for a few minutes.’

Or.

‘Plant your feet into the ground and imagine the life force of the earth pumping up through the soles of your feet and chasing those feelings away.’

Or maybe.

‘My husband is a hedge fund manager. He’s a fuckwit and I hate him. It’s okay.’