I call it my studio. My wife calls it my therapy room. And in essence, we are both right. It is the place where, through music, I escape the all-consuming anxiety which has plagued my life for the past 25 years.
I have been diagnosed with depression and anxiety, and the anxiety rises and falls like the tide: only not as regular. The latest anxiety hit has come with news that the Labour Government (which I voted for) plans to make Personal Independence Payment (PIP) more difficult to claim.
The butterflies rage in my stomach and the uninvited sweats dampen my brow at the prospect of another anxiety-ridden bid to prove my illness to faceless bureaucrats or health professionals who have no mental health training.
A storm of anxiety
I do wonder if these politicians know how hard it is to apply for PIP already. More than 80 questions, many of which require a narrative response detailing in detail how your disability affects you. I had to hand the job of filling the form in to my wife years ago when it literally induced panic attacks as I tried to do it myself.
Getting news of the reforms at the same time as the Housing Association we rent from is replacing the roof and re-rendering our houses on our estate is a perfect storm of anxiety.
It is impossible to escape. I ditched Twitter (now known as X) because of the horrendous attacks on me by people using all the usual cliched insults like “scrounger”, “deadbeat” or skiver”. Bluesky, the social space I escaped to, is more gentle, but the news is just as pervasive.
Catastrophising
The effect of my depressive illness (on top of the anxiety’s butterflies, sweats and shakes) is a strange progressive lack of concentration which can, and has, made me a danger to myself and others.
My therapists have explained it as “racing” thoughts, where everything spirals down to a perceived catastrophe. There may not be any impending disaster, but my brain tells me constantly that there is.
And all this “catastrophising” fills my brain to bursting point. There is no room left.
I start a task for example, placing some toast under the grill for a meal. Then I need the toilet so go there knowing I’ll be back before the toast is done. While toileting, the race begins.
I must check that an email has arrived, or I must change my shirt, or remember to call my son. My brain excludes everything else but the last thought and I set about doing the thing that is filling my mind in that moment.
I forget about the toast.
I use the grill scenario because it happened too frequently for comfort, sometimes setting the cooker alight. I am now unable to cook anything for fear of burning the house down with my wife and I in it.
The inability to concentrate on more than one thing at once may sound trivial, but it is a huge hinderance to living a normal life.
But the irony is that the very same symptom can and, for me, does provide the escape from the anxiety.
Making music
That happens when I make music, and my studio (actually the smallest bedroom in our “council” house ) becomes my therapy room.
Once the headphones go on, and I start to concentrate on playing something, or singing something, or mixing audio tracks, or editing audio, the anxiety is banished. There is (as my last psychotherapist told me) no room for the illness because I am concentrating so deeply on something else.
It has taken me three days of sporadic efforts to write this piece, a mere 500 words which, when I was a Fleet Street reporter, I would have bashed off in less than 30 minutes.
I hope that someone, somewhere perhaps reads this and knows that, in difficult times when the butterflies won’t stay still and the sweats keep coming, that they are not alone. There are millions of people sweating on how the PIP reforms will affect their lives, and most of them will be fearing the worst.
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