The other kind of list, part 3 (Writing)

Anxiety's an odd thing. You build yourself up, worrying into a frenzy, about a specific topic (don't even get me started on the worrying in general business), and there's this feeling of...confusion? disappointment? when that which you worried about becomes a non-issue. Then, at least for me, there's the guilt. I was sure, I was convinced, absolutely convinced, that he was dying. That we would be sitting in the non-descript room at the hospital's clinic, learning how long he had left, the lengths that modern medicine would go to, to buy him that time. And now they were saying things like 'resection', 'laproscopy', 'successful'. When you've been anxious, or depressed, or swinging between the two for a long time, there are some emotions you've just stopped feeling. It's like colour-blindness, in that you know that other people are experiencing the world a particular way, but, you just ...aren't. There's red and green and people try to explain them to you but of course, what they say refers to things you can't recognise anyway, so it's not even lack of understanding, you understand the words just fine, but the experience to which they refer isn't actually present in your life. Relief was like that for me. I knew other people experience relief at hearing the news we heard, even my own mum cried, and she'd never exactly warmed to him in the past. But for me, nothing. I still can't properly remember the last time i felt something close to what other people call relief. "when's the surgery?" was the phrase i blurted out. It was booked for six weeks away. Six more weeks then. I was sure he'd not wake up.