Anticipate THIS

It started when I was about 5, that, looming sense of doom. Like in one instant everything you’ve ever loved could just be ripped away from you at any moment. I remember looking out the front window in my grans spare room, and seeing the rain pouring down and down. This was nothing new, I lived in one of the wettest countries in the world, but something about this particular shower stirred a most unusual creature to appear from within me- and it has never left since.

This creature told me that the rain would never stop and that my whole family would be swept away in an enormous and unending flood (I had probably just learned about Noah’s Ark in school). I’d never heard this voice before, and it scared me within an inch of my minuscule existence. My first panic attack ensued, and from it many, many more.

As I grew older this feeling stayed with me, and I began to liken myself to a fawn- a slender animal who is skittish and runs at any perceived sign of trouble, relentlessly looking over its shoulder for signs of danger. Every mood ring I had shone a deep black for “stressed”, “scared” and “tense”, with my stressed, scared and tense chubby cheeked face in the reflection. I was bracing for impact before I even knew what the word impact meant.

Whilst other teens were doing “am I gay?” quizzes online, I was googling the symptoms of schizophrenia (and obvs doing the gay quizzes too). I began to have a feeling that something was deeply and perishingly wrong with my circuitry- which (spoiler alert) ended up being a beautiful concoction of OCD, autism and just an overall nervous disposition.

This creature is what is known as anticipatory anxiety, and is often co-concurrent with autism, due to autistic people’s general intolerance for the unknown. The future is unknown, and therefore terrifying and immobilising. Knowing this helps to ease off the shame and panic that I feel when this creature comes to visit me, much like the tiger who came to tea except with far less manners. But, sometimes a thought slips through the cracks, and suddenly I’m 5 years old again wishing that I was safe and sound on Noah’s big fancy Ark.

I guess the point I’m trying to make with writing this is that you are not alone if you have these feelings too. It’s cheesy and overdone, but it’s true, really. Naming the creature helps to tame it a little bit, and writing about it is certainly making it feel sheepish and, well, childish.

A lot of people said to me before my autism diagnosis that there was no point in getting diagnosed because I wasn’t a kid anymore, so why start changing things now? And I think well, because my whole life I was scared, and now I am less scared because I have a little more information, and a name with which to tame my creature, even if it’s just for a little while. And that brings me a great deal of peace.

Be gentle to yourself tonight, friend.

Sonnet 🛌☕️🪡