It starts in my feet.

That sick feeling; a warm again cold again sensation creeping up my body into the mind. It sits for a moment on my shoulders, tightening the sinews and brushing the minute hairs with its soft, warm breath.

Anxiety has been a bedfellow of mine for years. I go through the day, with my usual companions: Responsibility, Politeness, things to do places to be, and come dusk when the ‘important’ work has been done I lay weary head to pillow, pull the sheets up, leaving one foot dangling off the edge of the mattress into the void of dark. That which as a child I would not have dared, lest the cousin of Anxiety - Fear - crept up in the night and nibbled all of my toes off. I lay down sighing, expecting respite, only to find myself laying next to a corpse. Toes curling, blood gurgling beneath the surface rushing away from my face, now cold and damp. My bedfellow.

It isn’t constant, but when it does arrive the hour is often late, and dark. The age old liminal space between conscious and unconscious, spirit and living. That time which ancient cave dwellers feared most, the time without the great Father, the fire in the sky, with nothing but the cold, unkind gaze of the sister moon. It must be an ancient fear, a vestigial remnant of emotion shared by all of us, passed down from father to son, mother to daughter, like a shadow inheritance into a time when fear of the dark is less appropriate. Or is it?

What is there to fear in the dark except darkness itself — that oblivion waiting just beyond the precipice, with nothing but a strong breeze needed to tip us into the void.

That vertiginous gaze beyond the pale, a Nietzschean abyss staring back.

My anxiety, I’ve discovered, has always been about the sense of control — I suspect that is true for many people.

Living in a world of “What If”, I live all the catastrophic events before they happen, without them ever happening, mind you. Nostradamus scared me as a pre-teen. Writhing in bed, feverish, saying “I don’t want to die, I don’t want to die”. What if he was right? What if it's happening, now, tonight, as I lay here sweating and turning with nowhere to run for safety?

The Anxiety forces me to confront the unpleasant scenarios that are birthed in my mind, they very rarely come true — but the mind doesn’t really know, and we can never be sure can we.

After all, what if?