If I’m certain of anything about myself it’s this: I am a fucking nightmare. Anxiety means I am constantly examining every detail to see what might be right and wrong with my life. No – scratch that – every detail of what might be wrong. What’s right gets dumped on the ‘finished’ pile, and rarely given more time than a cursory ‘hooray’ before it’s time to move onto the next thing. Leaving my brain free to focus on unpaid bills, people I may have offended, and a mountain of relationship insecurity on the side.

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This blog post – part 2 in a series of… hmm… I’m not sure how many yet – talks about some mental health stuff, including Dark Thoughts and general misery. If that’s likely to disturb you please don’t read on. 

When you’re mad, you’re allowed to say the word ‘mad’ – at least in your own head. You’re allowed to tell yourself: ‘don’t think like that, it’s mad. That’s what got you here in the first place.’ When you’re mad, you’re taught to examine your thoughts carefully – writing them down if necessary – so you can pick over the alien carcass of insanity that your brain has spat out. Pulling the meat (‘I’m worried I can’t have sex’) from the bones that you’re meant to identify and discard (‘If I can’t have sex I may as well die’).

I am being medicated into compliance. 

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Here’s fun: SSRIs. Also referred to as ‘anti-depressants’, although sometimes used for things on top of/combined with depression. I’ve talked a bit before about my anxiety – specifically the way in which anxiety affects how I fuck. It’s a massive pain in the arse, and it’s not exactly the kind of thing I can easily dismiss by choosing not to care about it.

Still. I’m here, and I’m not too bad most of the time, so I’m lucky.

But I’m also on pills, and I fucking hate them with every fibre of my being.

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This post has everything to do with anxiety and nothing to do with sex. Except, of course, for the fact that both sex and anxiety are woven so tightly into the fabric of my life that they touch on everything I do. Except for that.

A while ago, someone sent me a link to this old article on stress and anxiety, and it made me stressed. But the good kind of stressed: annoyance that prompts me to write a long blog post about something. That kind of stress I like. It’s a refreshing break from the other kind of stress I have, which is a constant low-level hum of worry that I have done or said something howlingly awful, which at some point will be revealed to me via the medium of a friend or colleague telling me to get fucked.

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I panic about everything, regardless of whether it’s actually worth panicking about. Good friends, acquaintances and even my own Mum: all these people are in the dark about the terror I have when I hit ‘send’ on an email to them and then immediately imagine everything collapsing around me, when they interpret a casual joke as a genuine insult. Don’t get me started on the times I have to assert myself or the things that actually matter…

Because of my permanent ‘red alert’ anxiety levels, when this week’s guest blogger got in touch with an idea about getting nervous before a BDSM scene, I leapt on it.

January Chopin is here to give you a gorgeously personal, amazingly hot, tinglingly nervewracking account of a BDSM scene. And I think a lot of people will see themselves in it…

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