There's no one thing that sets it off,
well; other than it's usually over nothing important.
It'll be; being 2 minutes over on a parking ticket or,
my mind will have jumped 3 steps ahead and is fretting over the consequences of some terrible act that I'm never going to do,
but I'll start catastrophizing over it anyway,
on something which is never going to happen,
I'm never going to do it -
but so it starts
It's like that little voice in your head,
you know; your conscience,
only with me it's more like one of those sargent-majors,
the ones who shout orders at you,
and end every sentence with "you 'orrible lad you!"
And then my chest starts to tighten,
as if in a vice
a vice which someone is very slowly turning the screw,
slowly,
deliberately,
tighter and tighter.
Then there's the 'washing machine' stomach,
with an imbalanced load of bath towls,
that load that never spins smoothly,
churns with a clunk,
the load that causes your washing machine to walk across the kitchen floor.
Then my heart picks up on all this action and decides to pump more blood round me.
Forget the sound of horses hooves along a beach!
This is that disaster movie,
the one with the captain on the bridge of an ocean going liner,
fighting to keep his ship afloat
yelling down one of those 'speaking tubes',
"more power, more power!"
By this time my breath decides to join the party,
gets heavy and I'm starting to flush.
By now I'll have forgotten what it was that set me off in the first place!
But their it is!
My anxiety.
Not logical,
not a sensible reaction,
but there you have it,
anxiety is not a logical; sensible reaction.
