Metropolitan madness moment

Two facts, then.

Fact the first. It’s not exactly a secret — and it may even be fairly obvi­ous from recent entries here — that the past two weeks or so have gradu­ally seen my stress levels accel­er­ate to silly heights, not helped by com­pletely fucked-up sleep pat­terns. (And yes, I know what you’re think­ing — but I’m talk­ing about more stress and more fucked-up sleep pat­terns than I usu­ally experience).

Fact the second. Occa­sion­ally — not too often, but fre­quently enough to war­rant a passing com­ment here — I exper­i­ence mild panic attacks. Let’s not make these too sig­ni­fic­ant — they pass quickly, and gen­er­ally leave me with a clearer head after­wards. (At this point, if any­one wants to waggle an accus­ing fin­ger at me and claim that panic attacks are the sign of a weak will or a mind low in stam­ina, then go right ahead. I won’t be listen­ing, because I’ve heard it all before. I know my mind, and you don’t).

There is an unsur­pris­ing equa­tion here. It’s the stress that often leads to the panic attack. Of course it does. No shit, Sherlock.

Today, as I slowly emerged from the tur­moil of the past couple of weeks, I had to go into the centre of Lon­don for a meet­ing. I didn’t mind. In fact, I looked for­ward to it — a warm, sunny day and the chance to get out of the office. All was going well until it was time to head back out to west Lon­don. As I walked up towards Hol­born tube sta­tion, the sheer noise and insane bustle of Lon­don closed in on me. Cars beep­ing, bus brakes screech­ing, people shout­ing into mobile phones, tour­ists crowding the pave­ment at out­door cafes, blinded by the sun. Sounds. Lights. Smells. Action. Too much action. Con­fu­sion. Des­pite the crowded streets, I rushed to the tube sta­tion as fast as I could. Thank­fully, there was a train on the plat­form as I arrived, and it was rel­at­ively empty. It felt like a refuge of calm and secur­ity (and it’s not often that such a claim can be made about a tube carriage).

Dur­ing the 20 minute jour­ney, all I could think of were the vari­ous coun­tryside loc­a­tions that I’ve known and treas­ured through­out my life, many of them from my first eight­een years grow­ing up in the sup­posed rural idyll of deep­est Somer­set. I didn’t neces­sar­ily want to rush back there; no, I think I just wanted to close my eyes and escape into an oasis of tran­quil­ity in my head.

I’m pain­fully aware of how syr­upy that sounds — but, hey, I’m just being honest.

Whether this was a full-blown panic attack or not, I’m not quite sure. By the time I arrived at my des­tin­a­tion I felt fine. I think it was just one of those moments — a hor­rible, dis­or­i­ent­at­ing, con­fus­ing, stressed, sick­en­ing, mad­den­ing, met­ro­pol­itan moment. And it’s passed now.

Relax.