The chocolate box of life

One of my favourite sayings goes like this: 'In the chocolate box of life, not every day is a marzipan fancy'. Of course you may not like marzipan as much as I do, if at all, but I could eat it, as they say, 'until the cows come home'. Nevertheless the saying can be applied to all of our lives and mental health doesn't have to be your toffee hard centre (you know the one that always wraps itself around the inner recesses of your mouth before coming away with one of your biggest dental fillings attached) for it to be apposite.

I have become conscious that I now seem to blog only on marzipan fancy or toffee hard centre days. I accept it's a good thing to share more positive reportage and cathartic for the writer to share the worst and darkest of experiences but most days, for most people, most of the time, are neither marzipan fancies or toffee hard centres - perhaps, to pursue the analogy a little further, most days are like a caramel or coffee cream, acceptable enough but not at the top or bottom of the favourites list.

My life is little different but it often feels very different. I have realised I am not suffering from depression (although like everyone I have my 'down in the dumps' days) but anxiety. Yesterday I read a surprising statistic - although approximately 25% of the population suffer some form of mental health issue, only 5% of people struggle with anxiety. Not only is anxiety a lonely experience (mainly because other people seem to wonder ‘what have you got to be anxious about’) it often feels that whilst every chocolate in the box looks tasty and inviting, underneath the attractive exterior, every offering has a hard centre that will remove your fillings painfully, one at a time.

Because my anxieties centre (almost exclusively) on financial matters (either my own situation or the future situation for my sons) there are so many triggers, so many chocolates in the box to select and discover the painful hard centre. It may be a sign advertising the price of fuel on a garage forecourt or a dramatic headline in a newspaper - although recent experience has taught me that even the so called 'quality' papers are writing headlines to sell papers that seem to bear little relationship to the article itself; the anxiety generated by this is hugely problematic for me.

None of the things I have been anxious about have actually come to pass or if they have I have dealt with them far more easily than I anticipated. Despite this I am still caught in the middle of an absolute conviction that all my anxieties are true or abut to come true; as though I am stood over my metaphorical box of chocolates looking at the marzipan fancies knowing, yes knowing, that it only looks like a marzipan fancy whilst inside awaits a hard and painful centre.

This is the reality of anxiety for me on a daily basis. I wish it were different. I have been especially anxious lately about my sons and their future prospects. They are intelligent, articulate, polite, well turned out, motivated and are becoming increasingly well educated at well known and respected educational institutions. They have wide interests and abilities in non-academic disciplines making them attractive to future employers. This particular chocolate box has been mostly filled with marzipan fancies with the odd hard centre (like student loans - just as it is for all students) thrown in because that is what life is like. Despite the assurance of someone very close to me that my sons 'will make liars of those anxieties' (and yes, I’d happily take that), to me, this vicarious chocolate box is deceiving me as efficiently as my own - it's full of hard centres.

The sad thing is when you think you only have hard centres to choose from you would rather elect not to choose one at all. This significantly impairs the quality of daily life and is of considerable sadness to me.

Nevertheless, I still refuse to feel sorry for myself and I am continuing to work on those things that help me try to see that there are more marzipan fancies than I care to believe. Not only that, God willing, there will continue to be.

The fear of choking on a 'hard centre' continues to be real and intrusive - 'anxiety' has its roots in the Latin verb angere meaning 'to choke'. For those of you reading this and wondering what is all the fuss about anxiety( 'just have a word with yourself' or 'get a grip', both of which have been said to me by various people on a regular basis), I leave you with some words that might help illuminate the understanding and increase the acceptance a little more. They are not my words but those of Mignon McLaughlin (how ironic that her surname contains the verb 'laugh') the American journalist and author who died in 1983.

Love looks forward,

hate looks back, 

anxiety has eyes all over its head.