I have anxiety and it's bloody terrible

I have anxiety and it's bloody terrible.

It's not the worst you can imagine - the kind that stops people from leaving their homes, or even their beds - but at its worst, it is pretty close.

I remember it first, although I didn't recognise it, when I was a little kid, about the age a little kid starts school. I couldn't sleep.

I would lie on my back blinking tears into darkness, imagining the worst that a little child can, thoughts that circled with a relentlessness that is a kind of violence.

I didn't know this was strange, but I that knew I was.

I was often tired, from early on. The exhaustion is the worst: and not just the kind that comes from sleeplessness, but the kind that comes from a body wired all of the time with an animal sort of fear that lives in your chest and your stomach and your throat.

I grew older, from little kid to big kid, high school student to university student, and the things I could not articulate followed me. I struggled to learn, but whatever innate ability I had was enough to save me from the ranks of the remedial, and so no one stopped to ask. I attracted little attention and desired even less.

There was an almost desperate self-consciousness about me. I could be so absent-minded sometimes, my brain so strung out it would not string together thoughts or words, and there were times people would laugh at me. I would hide it if I could, or laugh along when I couldn't. Even better, I would sometimes pre-empt the laughter, make myself the punchline of my own joke.

I was forty before I knew it is not normal to be unable to breathe. I explained to the doctor how I couldn't figure it out: no history of asthma - hell, I could run up and down hills - but sitting quietly in a chair, or lying in bed, my lungs would not expand, like they were being held in a vice. In the windowless consultation room, the doctor was gentle in his explanation.

You see, I had made my life small - so small it seemed that I could barely be seen, not even by myself. I liked it that way.

I had been so afraid that everyone who looked at me could see that something inside me was broken. I believed that broken things deserve to be discarded.

That was chapter one. Now let me tell you about chapter two. It has all the elements of a good story. The protagonist goes on a journey, learns and grows. She looks back and she can see where she was wrong, and see where she was strong. Overcoming adversity, she feels success.

Sometime after that day in the consultation room, after the torrent of feelings and reflections that followed it, I came to understand - with a mix of shame, of loss and grief, and a sense of liberation - that the thing I thought was personality was not. Shyness and shame and silence: these were not my identity, but my fear.

That's a hard thing to admit, but the moment you do, the game changes.

I understood that I would not allow myself to be diminished by anyone, including me.

And so I challenged my anxiety to a showdown. Full swaggering pistols at dawn bullsh*t. It was on like Donkey Kong.

People have inspiring words, deep philosophies that sustain them through life's challenges. My approach was simply “f*** it”. And it served me well. I realised that if I'm going to spend my life scared shitless anyway, I might as well generate a few stories to tell at my wake.

Since that time, my life has been a catalogue of the purely batsh*t. The more it scared me, the more I embraced it. And I embraced it whether I was good, bad, or indifferent at it. I got up and spoke impromptu at a marae. I recorded myself singing and put it online. I did a fitness camp with people twenty years younger than me, and twenty kilos lighter.

I danced for the first time with the unalloyed joy of someone who was told she wasn't good enough, and who realised that 'good enough' is not an aspiration but a shackle.

But doing these things, that was not my success. The success is much smaller, and yet so much bigger.

Mundane, really. I was at an event with a couple of hundred people, most of them more important than me. A very important person was presiding. I've been at many such events before. Always, the floor is opened to questions; and always, it is the self-possessed who ask them. I have always wanted to be one of those people; always wanted to be querying and bold, unafraid. Sometimes I have come close, my hands within reach of the microphone before I dropped them to my sides. Mostly I have not.

I breathed. I asked the question. I took the microphone, and I asked it. I looked up as I did. My voice did not shake, and nor did my hands. The words did not tumble or jumble. I spoke, and I was heard.

It wasn't that I had overcome my anxiety. For a moment, it wasn't there at all.

If you are reading this, if you've made it to the end of chapter two, then maybe you are like me. Maybe you're trying to make it through the crap and darkness and the light; the black comedy and pain of carrying the thing that we carry.

You are the one who got out of bed and left the house today - or if you didn't, you saved your strength so that tomorrow will be better.

Do me a favour. Go back to the beginning, and read chapter one again.

This time, look at the protagonist not as a struggler, vulnerable or sad. Imagine them on the face of a mountain. They do not have oxygen or ropes, only wits and will and the white-knuckle drive to survive that is the counterpart of their animal fear. As the wind howls they cling to the face of the rock, summoning strength from every corner of mind and body. But they do not just cling. With something inside of them that no one who has not been on the mountainside has known, somehow, slowly, they ascend.

That protagonist isn't just me. It's you.