Hi Friends,
I took a bit of a running jump into Substack and then fizzled, I’m only just feeling that creative spark again and there’s a pretty good reason for that.
May I invite you to read about: The Scariest Monday Morning…
I normally wake from my peaceful slumber somewhere between 6:30am-7am each morning. I do some grounding breath work, think through the day ahead, spring out of bed, do 10 minutes of yoga and drink a piping hot green tea with mint snipped from my garden.
Ok. Ideal Me does that. Real Me fumbles for the alarm, groans, grapples for my phone in the half-light and then scrolls through people’s rose-tinted Instagram before switching to see the world burn on The Guardian. Then I realise I’ve left myself 15 minutes to get ready, scrape my hair up and burn my mouth on some sugary tea.
But this Monday morning was different. It’s a morning I want to forget. This Monday morning draws anxiety out of me like a leech.
It was the dusky hours between 4-5am, although in winter that looks… black… black… navy blue… grey, so one can never be sure where dusk and day fold into one another.
A noise startles me awake. I can’t be sure if it’s a dream that’s disturbs me. The curtains in my bedroom are thin and white. A bright light from an adjacent estate floodlights my room through the night. I’m on the ground floor. That’s important to note.
As I turn to the window in an attempt to tell the time without blinding myself with my phone, I see something that invokes a terror so palpable my heart stops mid-beat. I’ve been in some dicey situations. But this...
What I see is a grotesque puppet show. A satanic Punch and Judy. A Hitchcock where you can’t hit ‘stop’.
The shadowy outline of a man is at my kitchen door. He’s walking about in my back yard. There’s no way to access my garden unless you jump a wall. There’s no mistake here. I can hear him rattling the handle of the kitchen door. Is it locked? I locked it. I’m sure I did... Now he’s right outside my bedroom window, no more than 6ft from where I lie rigid in my bed.
I blink. I haven’t breathed in minutes.
I have an active imagination and I’m a champion catastrophiser but this needs no bolstering. I am frozen, suffocated with panic. Frigid with fear. I slowly reach for my phone, plugged into the charger on the floor. Sometimes I try to sleep with it in the other room. I’m thankful I didn’t on this terrifying Monday morning. What do you do in a situation like this? You call the police. Put your light on. Perhaps bang on the window. Arm yourself if you’re brave.
I send streams of consciousness to someone I hope will help. I haven’t worked out how. They are still asleep. I watch the shadow demon try the door again. Then he turns, and stares straight into my bedroom window. All I see is the vacant, Chiaroscuro of a man.
You know what I do? I call 101. 101 is a non-emergency line. I wait. 3 minutes pass… then 4. Still on hold. I hang up, then call 999, apologetically whispering down the phone. Within 7 minutes they are here. Three cops in my ground floor flat. By then, the shadow shit has jumped the wall.
In itself, the whole thing lasted little over 30 minutes. But those 30 minutes tornadoed my week. My anxiety hit the roof. Any bump, sound or shadow had me gasping. Panic attacks set in.
I had a chat with some brilliant friends, family and my therapist, and was grateful to know a wonderful soul who not only security-proofed my flat, but was the kindest on-call paranoia-support. Thank you.
I realise how lucky I am to be blessed with incredible people. And, of course I’m lucky that Crackhead McGee didn’t get in. My therapist gave me a technique about turning panic into anger: “HOW DARE YOU VIOLATE MY SPACE, YOU PRICK?!” That helped a lot. Moving from fearful to outraged wasn’t the easiest shift but it opened my eyes to the power of justified anger.
So we have a choice - we can allow incidents like this to rock us to the point of collapse. We can allow ourselves to be defeated by one lone crackhead, chancing his luck. Or, we can allow ourselves to breathe… We can allow ourselves to feel the floor. We can allow our shoulders to drop, to tell ourselves we’re safe, we’re ok. We can allow gratitude that it’s not us, not-so-stealthily beating the streets at dawn, desperate for money. It may take time but we can even allow space for compassion. Who was the man at the window, working the nightshift, frantically searching for something to sell to get his fix? What’s his story? Everyone has a story. How did he end up there?
We don’t need an experience like this to know we’re loved. We’re ok. Brighter days are coming.
All in all, the last few days have been a bit of a write-off so I’m doing just that: writing them off. That’s not to say I can just wipe it from my memory but, with thanks to a new double Chubb, patient friends, family and meditation, I’m no longer as jumpy as a kitten that’s snorted 15 lines of catnip.
If you’ve felt a bit shaky recently, I’ve been smashing this gif to the point of light-headedness:
I’ve just started this book, too Solve for Happy by Mo Gawdat, Former Chief Business Officer at Google [X].
Or here’s a great podcast with him speaking about the formula for happiness.
I’m starting an exciting Substack project from Jan 2021 but before then there will be a 2020 Year in Review post with a sexy downloadable spreadsheet. We all love a spreadsheet.
Peace out and keep breathing x