La noche oscura del alma
On long dark nights of the soul
On May 1st, I am running the Milton Keynes Marathon to raise money for the charity Melanoma Focus. Please sponsor me at this link, and thanks again to those who already have.
I wrote this piece during a bad spell of anxiety last year. It is the third in a series of pieces about mental health; for the others, on suicide and depression, please check here and here.
A few years ago in the city of Fez, I was awoken in the night by sudden and terrifying music. There was a cacophonous droning of what sounded like a hurdy gurdy or maybe bagpipes and a drum, coming closer and then fading away; not being able to see, my guess was that a funeral cortege was making its way through the streets of the medina.
Disoriented, I came to sit in the small living room listening and found myself thinking, ‘You have died. You have died and what you are hearing now is a funeral marking this. You are now somewhere other than life.’
It happens often now – waking up in the night, I am briefly convinced that I am already dead, in those crucial seconds just after waking of not knowing where I am. Sometimes in those moments I believe that I am in other rooms from my life, such as my Berlin flat where I lived in the early 2010s.
Sometimes, I have to sit at the edge of the bed or go to the sofa and quietly regain my breath in the moonlight. I have been to the doctor about it several times, and in late 2018 even spent a night in hospital undergoing a sleep study. I never got any feedback, though I did sleep well.
Unfortunately, I have yet to find a doctor able to tell me that I will not one day die, imminent existential oblivion being my chief fear in the grand scheme of things. I lie awake and worry. I worry about what lies ahead – from now on, all I have to look forward to in my body is a condition of managed decline; I will get older every year, losing vast swathes of loved ones along my way before, finally, myself.
I never felt this level of fear when I was younger – and why should I have, I had so much life to come.
But many of my coping mechanisms for the travails of youth weren’t really designed to suit a 40-year old man. Now I look to the future with a sense of troubled concern; although I doubt that my personal outlook is quite as frightening as I imagine, I’ve also lost the sense that even the full realization of my dreams will be enough to appease my regrettably human condition. That is, I guess, maturity.
A good friend of mine tells the aches and pains I experience are almost all to do with my not having reproduced, and that as soon as I have a kid, I will have something bigger to worry about than my own problems. My existential anxieties will disappear because my life will become centred on someone else’s life. There’s real wisdom in that, and I have no doubt I would enjoy being a father; unlike many prospective parents, I have worked teaching small children for years, and I really enjoy the work too.
Yet my friend is also wrong in a big picture sense, for even if they’re lucky a kid will end up in the same existential position as me – not that I can predict exactly how they’d feel about it. Solving your problems with a kid also means creating those and additional problems for the kid who, soon enough, will be 40 too and staring down the long slide to obsolescence.
Here religious belief faith presents itself as a potential solution. Of course it defuses this existential terror somewhat if you believe there’s eternal reward waiting for you after this life, that there’s more to come for you than just bodily degeneration. That this life is just an interval before something else and better.
Despite my warm sympathies to religion, I’ve never quite got myself to a position of believing, and while we can lament the decline of faith, I think it has occurred in part because religions have been based on claims which are just not true, or at least not true ‘in a way verifiable by modern scientific knowledge’. If people hadn’t wanted religion to decline, they shouldn’t have based it on disprovable propositions - and yes, I appreciate it has always been a matter of faith. It’s just now a matter of more faith.
To the extent that I have an answer to the questions that trouble me they involve being kind and loving to others due to our time on earth being brief and transient, not as a means to receive my existential pocket money.
Sometimes people ask me what I’m anxious about. After all, they say, if there’s nothing after death, you won’t be aware of it. That, I guess.
Ironically, the night always used to be a site of great joy for me; it was when things really got going. Five o’clock was just beginning of the day! But now after mornings full of busy and industrious work and afternoons of contemplation and digestion, the night has become a place of terror and endurance. Also my spouse goes to bed too early. At such points all I can do is console myself; a late movie, a calming book, or often, just quiet contemplation and even prayer. Or the odd frenzied 12.45AM wank.
Rich people with worries, and according to calculations I am amongst the 10% of richest people in the world, are often told to look at their comparative privilege and realize how much harder others have it elsewhere.
To which I’d reply: Given that my life has seen objectively high living standards, and that I have been sheltered by a welfare state in two countries across four decades, what does it say that I’m still so very anxious?
It might suggest that life itself can always be a terrifying thing, no matter the relative ease of our circumstances.
You could even argue that when our material worries are lessened spiritual ones face us more sternly – by which logic the harsh winter we we just underwent offered as much purpose as immiseration. For the record, I don’t believe this; I believe we should all have the opportunity to contemplate our lives, and that there’s nothing inherently character-building or noble about living only to survive.
Perhaps my sense of fear is just deepening, like everything else does as we move through life. If anxiety becomes more intense, it follows that joy does too. Indeed, there is a sense in the interactions I have with my family that they are supercharged with beauty due to their imminent expiry date, that they have a beautiful and tender sense of impermanence. It’s also very hard.
Maybe anyone who loves life too much ends up like this, haunted by the fear of losing it – by this logic loving life is, like everything else, best done in moderation. A brief affectionate kiss towards life before turning away from it to face the other side of the bed.
What’s certain is that a love of life instills within us no greater acceptance of loss. Why should it? It doesn’t follow from ‘I’m really glad I bought this house’ to ‘I’m just as happy to lose it’, even as the house itself begins to fall apart.
Though I should remind myself more that it was the work of forty years to find and live in the right house at all.
James -- Your reflective pieces are so warm and moving. I don't know whether to be admiring or jealous. Probably both.
I love the idea that having kids is a cure for anxiety. Good luck with that one!