2001 – 5 years old – Members of the Conservative Party campaign for votes in our neighbourhood
From a very young age, my father tenaciously attempted to instill me in a belief that the Conservative Party was a force for evil. Many will consider this a tremendous parenting tactic, and it clearly must have had some effect, since I've never voted for them. I only have vague memories of this particular occurrence, but I'm fairly sure it must have been in the run up to the 2001 General Election. Me and my Mum were at home, and I think my Dad had just taken my younger brother to the garden centre. Dad came through the door, and ominously announced that the Tories were knocking on people's doors.
As a 5 year old, I wasn't really aware of the complex variety of ways a person, or group of people, could be considered 'bad.' I couldn't have told you a single reason why the Tories were to be feared. Actually, at that age, my political views had a distinctly libertarian bent, as I had the 1973 animated Disney version of 'Robin Hood' on VHS and associated the idea of taxation with that total fucking prick King John. And I think that was probably the issue; my entire concept of a bad person was based on the villains from children's TV shows and films, many of whom want to take over the world or at the very least do some sort of scumbag type thing to my heroes.
So, I heard that the Tories are in the general vicinity, I thought the Tories were basically villains from Disney movies who wanted to do... unspecified bad things (the worst kind of bad thing, I find, since it really lets the imagination wander), and let me tell you, I was not happy about this. The fact that my parents and younger brother seemed entirely calm about the situation gave me this sneaking feeling that I had misread the situation in some way, but I decided it would still be sensible to lie flat on the sofa so that I couldn't be seen through the window, and screw my eyes shut until everything had blown over.
The Tories finished a distant second to the Labour Party in the 2001 General Election, so on the whole you would have to say my strategy was wildly successful. It would be another 9 years before I had to confront the reality of a Conservative led government, but that was 2010 and I was just relieved Nick Griffin wasn't the Prime Minister.
2003 – 7 years old – The War in Iraq
OK, this one was brought on by a colossal overestimation of the military power of Iraq. I sort of assumed wars were only fought between nations of roughly equal sizes, rather than a ramshackle coalition of some of the world's most powerful countries haphazardly attempting to enact regime change in, well, Saddam Hussein's Iraq. I assumed that this was going to be World War 2 all over again, with the Iraqi Luftwaffe channeling all of its military might into flattening the unremarkable city of Worcester because I lived there. A cursory glance of the history books suggests it didn't quite turn out like that, although I'm far from convinced there's an equivalent Iraqi blogger writing a silly little mental health essay over how his concerns about the British invasion of his country were entirely unfounded. There's already a recurring theme in these; me assuming the traumas of those significantly less fortunate than me were all going to come my way, because I am the centre of the universe, and I have an anxiety disorder.
2006- 10 years old – BIRD FLU!
Put that one in all caps cos I think even now the words 'BIRD FLU' sound sufficiently sinister that only capital letters will suffice. Bird flu, however, was not one of my most iconic panics. At the time I had just got massively into professional wrestling, and the defining anxiety of 2006 for me was the prospect of JBL ending Rey Mysterio's World Heavyweight Championship reign. The potential arrival on the scene of a plague paled in comparison. Still, I remember a school exercise where we all had to write down something that worried us on a little piece of paper, and I definitely wrote bird flu, and meant it too. So I must have been at least somewhat troubled by its potential to fuck shit up. Happily, bird flu ended up going the way of Mysterio's World Heavyweight Championship run, in that it was ended by King Booker at the Great American Bash 2006.
2009 – 13 years old – The Large Hadron Collider
Hooooooooooo boy, the fun and games are all over now, friends. This is pure, unadulterated big boy shit. The Large Hadron Collider! You'll note that the title of this article indicates that it'll be about times I thought the world was going to end, but the first two would only have brought about the substantial spoiling of my cosy life in the U.K.,and even bird flu would have left survivors. If the Large Hadron Collider had indeed ended up spewing out a black hole, as was speculated at the time, it would have unquestionably led to the absolute obliteration of Planet Earth and quite a bit more besides.
I think this crisis marked a small shift in the nature of anxiety. Before, it had largely been based on massively misunderstanding the implications of things I was too young to comprehend. At 13 though, I knew full well that the world wasn't going to end because of the Large Hadron Collider. Nobody seriously thought it was going to, although my brother told me that someone in his class had been claiming that her Mum was pulling her out of school if a black hole did in fact rock up, threatening to suck us all into its innards. It was always an absolutely teeny tiny smaller than small minuscule possibility, which only ever got brought up because, come on, the idea of the most ambitious scientific experiment of all time going berzerk was just too delicious for people not to discuss ad nauseum.
And yet, I couldn't shake this vague sense of unease about the whole thing. I remember sitting in Maths class, with my teacher projecting the BBC News website onto the whiteboard and occasionally refreshing the page for updates. It felt to me like there was a very tangible possibility that something would happen. The world didn't feel right, and it only slowly went back to normal once the day concluded without a fucking black hole rudely interrupting things. As the years went by, this vague sense of unease would only intensify, and instead of the end of the world triggering it, it would be 'most social situations.'
2012 – 17 years old – The world ending in 2012 for reasons never adequately explained
This is the most difficult bit of this blog to write, for a variety of reasons. It was easy to make jokes about all the previous anxieties because they were symptoms of being a child, and ergo an idiot. But by the time the 2012 apocalyptic prophecies started circulating, I was 17 years old, more than old enough to know better. Personally, if a 17 year old had come up to me in 2012 and said they were genuinely frightened that the world would end on December 21st, I would have thought they were colossally dumb or clinically insane, which raises the troubling possibility that I was also colossally dumb or clinically insane.
I also find it hard to articulate the precise nature of this particular anxiety. I started worrying about the end of the world like 18 months before it was due to happen. I remember lying awake at night, at a time when I had perfectly ordinary anxieties to occupy myself with like passing my GCSEs, and instead fretting about exactly how it would feel as December 21st 2012 drew closer – would I be able to function with the shadow of the apocalypse looming over me? Would the stress of it give me a mental breakdown? When would I stop being able to cope? Would I just implode with panic on January 1st 2012, or would I be able to keep going till the end of the year/existence itself?
While my mental health did indeed fray quite considerably over the ensuing 18 months, the 2012 phenomenon was not the main trigger for it. I continued to behave as outwardly normally as I was capable of behaving, even while increasing amounts of my mental energy were devoted to worrying about a bizarre array of odd things (which I plan on detailing in truly punishing, self absorbed detail in later blogs). I passed all my GCSEs and started my A-Levels. I occasionally went to house parties where I would get drunk and behaved in the sort of tedious way 17 year old boys do. Most days, I didn't think about the end of the world, and of course, really, deep down, I knew it wasn't happening. The idea was obviously ridiculous. There is still absolutely no good reason why the idea of the world ending in 2012 became a bona fide pop cultural phenomenon, beyond that the idea of an impending apocalypse is very sexy. I certainly thought so!
Yet on the sporadic occasions the idea did grip me, it gripped me hard. It cost me sleep, it made me properly distressed. I struggled to concentrate on much else, stumbling through any other tasks I was trying to accomplish. This is why I said I find it hard to articulate how this anxiety affected me – most of the time it didn't, I always knew it was ridiculous, but any time it crossed my mind it freaked me out, and some days it would get stuck there and I would just obsess over it, even though I would have still been pretty contemptuous of anyone else feeling the way I was. I didn't even have any specific ideas as to how the world would end, it's not like my mind was filled with vivid vision of biblical apocalypses or interplanetary collisions or devastating, spontaneous earthquakes, or any of the other lurid suggestions mad conspiracy theorists had to offer. It was just a vague sense of dread that sometimes would become all consuming.
I have absolutely no recollection of how I felt or what I was doing on December 21st 2012. I suspect, like a lot of my anxieties, it had just got lost in the shuffle, and something newer and grander was taking up my time. In fact, over the next few years I'd get so caught up in my own personal melodramas that I had precious little time for appreciating the massive variety of ways of noticing the world could end at any given moment. Until, of course...
2020 – 24 years old – You can probably guess
Recently there's been this thing called the Coronavirus? I don't know about you but I think it's terrible and we'll definitely be cancelling it once the free trial's over. Over the last couple of months I've been on sweet, sweet Sertraline, and thus am actually coping with the most serious global crisis of my lifetime reasonably well Still, I was inevitably going to become one of those people detecting phantom tickles in my throat and Googling whether or not your lungs are important, so it seems a waste not to at least mention it. I think it makes for a nice conclusion to this blog, unless an even greater crisis appears the moment I post it. Stay tuned!
