Family Romance

by John Lanchester

  It was too much for me. (This is a terrible thing to admit, but even describing this moment brings a wave of anxiety.) The crucial factor was that I was already desperately out of breath and on the point of hyperventilating from exertion. With no warning, I found myself in the grip of a full-scale, ten-out-of-ten panic. My heart was going at a rate that I knew, just knew, was impossibly fast. I couldn’t breathe, let alone see straight or think straight. It felt as if my mind broke. I wasn’t just going to die; I had disintegrated. There was nothing to hold on to. I didn’t want to sit down, because I feared that the exertion of getting up again, on top of the effort my heart was already putting into its three thousand beats per minute, would kill me. But in order to go back down the hill – which I knew with absolute, chemical certainty was the only way I would survive – I would have to go along the path, now visible at the top of the scree slope we’d just climbed; and the initial stages of the path were not down but up.

  Well, I did it – though not without being basically dragged by my girlfriend. It was a few minutes before my heart started to slow down; and then, as we began to descend, we bumped into a party of fell walkers going up the hill. They were delighted with the freak weather. ‘You can come here for twenty years and not get a day like this,’ one of them said, beaming. Well, I thought, thanks. But actually I felt better just by having met other people, even if they were (I thought at the time) insane. We weren’t alone in the world, which is what it had felt like for a moment at the top of that slope, cut off by cloud. No doubt it was this very thought, just below the surface, that triggered the panic.

  I had panicked before, or so I thought. But those other experiences were nothing like this. They had been frightening and unpleasant; this felt like a glimpse of genuine psychic disintegration. It would not be true, quite, to say that I was never the same again. But it would be a little bit true. I did not immediately give myself over to panic on a daily basis, and I did not immediately, there and then, become agoraphobic. The very next day, cold and clear, we walked from the B&B a good few miles over the hills and down into Grasmere to visit Wordsworth’s cottage, and then back, and I was fine all the way – just the fact that we were most of the time in eyesight of places where people lived was enough to make me feel anchored, safe. So I did not succumb to the phobia immediately, by no means. When we returned to London and I went back to work I was fine – there was no lurking sense of imminent ambush by fear. The specific circumstances of that first huge panic attack were a help. How often would I have walked several miles and then up a mountain? How often would I be cut off from the sight of other people by cloud cover? If being able to see people, or places where people lived, or buildings in general, was going to relieve the fear, then how much of a problem was it going to be in London? My attitude was, maybe I’ll put mountain-walking holidays on hold for a bit, but otherwise I’ll be fine. The trouble was, though, that I had re-learned to panic. I had learnt that getting out of breath plus feeling anxious could bring on – to use my girlfriend’s term – a ‘wobbly’. I could inflict on myself a truly horrible thing, a ‘near death experience’, in the words of one psychiatrist; and I could do it any time, anywhere, without notice. I had learned how to panic.

  The phobia really moved in to stay later that same year. In May, I took three months’ leave from work to try to write my first book. This was The Debt to Pleasure, the same one for which I’d had the idea about five years earlier. The idea was a fairly complete one, and so now all I had to do was the ton of work involved in actually writing it. My attitude was that I would one day wake up in the morning and find that I had written it. I discovered, to my disappointment, that it didn’t work that way. To write the book, I would have to write the book. How unfair was that? Still, my girlfriend had a job in Barrow-in-Furness, one of the most remote towns in England, on the Cumbrian coast. If I took unpaid leave from the LRB I could go there for three months and make a start on my novel. The World Cup was on at the time, so I would have something to keep myself entertained. My girlfriend went on a reconnoitring expedition and rented a cottage for us in a village called Bardsea, just outside the small town of Ulverston. (Birthplace of Stan Laurel, trivia fans.) There was a Tibetan Buddhist monastery just down the road. The cottage was within a short walk of the huge expanse of Morecambe Bay, whose big, calm sky and flat mud stretches were entirely deceptive: it’s a lethal expanse of water, where the rapidly moving tides, shifting currents, quickly descending fogs, and sinking sand regularly kill people. You could look at it but you couldn’t walk on it. Levels of pollution were so high that there was hardly any bird life.

  Trouble, though – the start of what I think of as my main encounter with the phobia – began on the way up. My girlfriend had to go and see someone outside Woodstock – a puppet expert or a make-up guru, I forget which. She dropped me in the town for a wander and a bookshop visit and gave me directions to the house, about a mile away across country. I pottered about happily enough and then set out to meet her. It was a sunny day, warm for an English May, and I was walking down a country lane with a sudden feeling of happiness and freedom. I thought, ‘I’ve left work, I can go anywhere and be anything I like. I’m free.’ Kierkegaard said that anxiety is freedom. In other words, if you feel anxious that’s because you are out from under the shadow of certainty – and the price, or corollary, of that is anxiety. This may not be true always and everywhere, but it was true for me that day. Almost at the exact moment I had the thought, ‘I’m free’, I felt a wave of fear. It was unspecific and all the more frightening for that; I couldn’t have said what I was frightened of, just that I was frightened – purely terrified. I had to hide, but didn’t know how or where, since I was trudging down a country lane with a field on each side. I was too far from Woodstock to turn back, or so I felt, and even if I did turn back I had no way of getting in touch with my girlfriend, so would have to set out again on foot anyway. I tried to hide behind a clump of trees on one side of the road – somehow I thought that if I could get out of the light, out of all that sense of exposure, the terror would ease. I saw a car coming and leapt out from behind a tree to try and hitch a lift – a lift to anywhere, since anywhere would feel safer than here. The driver, a woman on her own, did not stop. I’m not surprised: I must have looked a sight, a pale young man bursting out of a tiny copse with staring, frightened eyes and his thumb imploringly in the air.

  The feeling passed, as it does – though at the time, of course, you never remember that. I managed to walk to the house, meet my girlfriend, and head off for Cumbria. This time, though, the phobia was not paying a casual visit. In retrospect it seems all too clear that the anxiety was linked to the fact I was making my first concerted attempt to write fiction. I felt free, or at some level I had decided that I was free; I was going to write. The immediate cost of this was a crushing, oppressive anxiety that focused not on the question of writing – I had no nerves about that that I was aware of: I felt that either I’d be able to do it or I wouldn’t – but on the question of panic.

  This was when panic became institutionalised in my life. I was scared of panicking, and knew all too well that I could panic. By extension, I was scared of the kind of places where I might panic – the kind of places where I would begin to feel anxious, and where the anxiety would then spiral into panic because I was in a place or situation that I couldn’t escape. Wide-open spaces were, and to this day still are, the worst trigger for the anxiety. The rational component of this is that if I’m in the middle of a wide-open space and begin to feel trapped in it, it’s by definition difficult to get out of, because – duh! – it’s wide and open. As for what the irrational component is – i.e. the trigger behind the rational trigger – I don’t know. But I would find it far, far easier to walk five miles down narrow urban streets than five hundred yards across any kind of open plain. In fact, I don’t think I could do that except under duress, or in the company of someone I trusted. Some confined spaces are OK, others not so, and at diffe
rent times. Large enclosed spaces were and are difficult – things like big museums, galleries, or convention centres. The key factor here is the distance from an exit: if there’s one within easy distance, I’m usually OK. It’s worse if I’m tired and very much worse if I have a hangover.

  In Bardsea, the panic settled down and turned into a phobia. The house had no phone and was at the end of a lane about four hundred yards from the village proper. About half-way to the village there was a phone box, which was the first place I felt safe when I went out, and then in the village itself there was a pub, where I was safe also. Getting to the pub was quite a drama: some days I could do it – I’d go there for lunch – some days I couldn’t. I couldn’t drive – which, I see in retrospect, was a big part of the problem – but I could cycle, at least when I wasn’t feeling too phobic. I could ride into Ulverston every now and then to do the shopping, but the ride back was much more difficult, because it was uphill, and would trigger my spiral from breathlessness to anxiety to panic. I began to dread it and then to avoid it. This was the second time I sought help. After a month or so I went to see a GP in Ulverston, who prescribed beta-blockers. At the library I checked a drug dictionary and found that beta-blockers are contra-indicated for asthmatics, so I couldn’t take the pills I’d been given. I went back to the doctor, who said, in effect, oops, but not to worry because the danger was probably exaggerated. A couple of weeks later I had a visit at home from a very nice psychiatric social worker who gave me a questionnaire. He told me that when he and a colleague did workshops for people with agoraphobia, his colleague always said that ‘no one has ever died from a panic attack’. He himself didn’t feel you could say that since you couldn’t really know if it was absolutely true, but he hoped I would find it a reassuring thought.

  I spent the days waiting for the start of the World Cup and trying to write my book. It wasn’t going well: I was finding it almost physically impossible to sit still and concentrate. I did fragments of work here and there, made the occasional note or two, but neither the book nor I was going anywhere, and we both knew it. I ran out of money and split up with my girlfriend, though I continued to stay in the cottage out of a sense that going anywhere else would feel too much like a defeat – not about the relationship, which had already been defeated, but in relation to my unwritten, unwritable book and my hopes for it. The World Cup came and went. I watched it entirely on my own. At the end of the three months I went back to London with about five pages of notes for my book and a full-blown case of agoraphobia.

  Once I was back in London, back in work, and back in a routine, the symptoms eased. I was always aware of the possibility of panic, and was always calculating where I was in relation to a possible attack. I was like a spy or a gangster, calculating lines of escape and places of safety. I was never alone: the anxiety was a constant companion. But the encounters with the fear were avoidable, and I could get around the city without encountering many of the blank or trapping spaces I most feared, so I reached a kind of accommodation with the phobia. As a result, over the next year or so it got steadily worse.

  At this point, if I were reading this book I would probably wonder about the question of courage. I’ve often wondered about it myself, before, during and after encounters with my own fear. Would it be a lot simpler if I were just braver? If I simply advanced towards the anxiety whenever I felt it? Is the problem that I am just not brave enough? That I am, in fact, a cowardy custard?

  The answer, I think, is: maybe. I am in fact something of a physical coward – thanks, again, to that over-active imagination, and a too-great ability to imagine pain and injury. That can’t help, in relation to something that is about fear. But on the other hand, I have fought hard against the fear, and have staged many, many head-on battles with it. These battles often, or usually, aren’t externally visible, and can look to the external world like a man walking around the corner to buy a newspaper. In my head, though, it’s a direct encounter with my deepest fear, a pure and harrowing drama, one in which I’m facing down the thing I most dread. I’m well aware that this is ridiculous and, in both the teenage and the non-teenage senses of the word, sad. But there it is, and I’ve done it many, many times. In the year in question, after I got back to London, I would have these battles several times a day. I would think: if I can go downstairs from the office and walk to the coffee shop the long way around, down the featureless city block where I get anxious, and manage it without stopping or slowing or turning back, I will have won, and that little victory will make me a little more confident, and next time I go up against the fear I will be a little more confident still, and I will win a bigger victory, and then a bigger still, and finally the phobia will have no choice but to leave me alone, and then I will have won, and I’ll be free, and the whole process will have begun right here, right now, because this is where it stops. This is what I would think, and this is what I would do, over and over again, and it didn’t work. The victories never mounted up to anything decisive. It never went anywhere. I have come to feel, in fact, that by staging these battles with the fear I was helping to institutionalise it as part of my personality, part of my typical day.

  When you have a phobia like this, it profoundly feels as if it is clinging to you – so that it is logical to think that you can fight it off, kill it off, beat it into submission. What is very difficult to accept is that, in reality, you are clinging to it. You are clinging to it. Realising that, and then working out what to do about it, is hard.

  One thing that made me realise I needed to go to plan B – which in practice meant: get some help – was an experience I had one day while sitting and watching a video. It was James Cameron’s craptastic underwater epic The Abyss and I may be the only person in the world who has felt he had an important realisation while watching it. Anyway – there’s a scene where water is flooding into the heroes’ sub (actually there are about a dozen scenes like that, but bear with me) and everybody is rushing around frenetically trying to save the day. The heroes fight the onrushing tide of water, and struggle to close a valve or a door or something, and they are desperately worried, right on the edge, they look terrified, and it’s not clear whether they’re going to make it, and they look even more terrified, and I was watching them be brave and look terrified and do heroic things and I thought – but I feel like that every day. I’m just as frightened as that when the lift isn’t working and I have to walk up the stairs to work, or I come to a city block with no doors or shelter or place to hide, or when the train stops in a tunnel. I go through fear like that every day. And thinking that, I felt, first, a wave of sadness for the misery I was inflicting on myself, and second, a realisation that I had to do something about this – I needed to get help.

  Another factor made me feel I needed to act. This was that I had met and fallen in love with my future wife. If I had been, in general, miserable, then maybe I wouldn’t have felt the need to address the phobia and its consequences. In a landscape of general miserableness, the phobia wouldn’t have stood out. But I was, in large parts of my life, happy, as happy as I had ever been, and that made me want to actually live my life, and not spend so much of it cowering. When you are frightened you are not really living; life is washing over you, and you are not really inhabiting it. That’s how I felt. Because I now liked my life, I wanted to live it.

  So for the third time I found myself going to a GP, telling him my troubles, and getting a referral. My GP in those days was an amiable Italian doctor in Bloomsbury. He had the air of a man who disapproved of mental weakness, but despite that he wrote a letter, handed it to me, and told me to take it up the road to the psychology department of University College Hospital, about half a mile away. It felt odd trudging up the street with that letter, but I did, saw a senior therapist, got a referral, and began a course of psychotherapy which lasted for years.

  I am not, and would never claim to be, a poster boy for psychotherapy. It is not a panacea. But it has helped me in pretty much every aspect of my
life. Listening to Desert Island Discs once, I heard Nicholas Mosley say something similar to Sue Lawley, who replied that people often said that but never gave specifics, so would he please enumerate the actual ways in which he had been helped? In that spirit I would say the things psychotherapy has helped me with have to do with feeling my feelings as and when I’m supposed to feel them, rather than mediated into mysterious mood swings or (worse) emerging in the form of panic. It helped me face painful feelings related to loss and abandonment; it helped me make sense of myself; it helped me deal with the illness and death of people I loved; and it helped me to write. It did that by helping me spend more time in my own head without panicking. It helped me sit still, which is something you have to learn to do if you’re going to write books.

  It also helped me realise something that, for me, feels important. I have come to think that the two dominant models of the human personality are both false. One of them, the principal one in the West, sees the self as an edifice, a stable and enduring structure, like a building. In this version our personalities are not necessarily small or simple; they can have many different aspects; they have places from which one can take a different perspective; they have nooks and warrens, secret places, internal courtyards, harems, vaunting minarets, dungeons, unexpected phantoms, Bluebeard’s chambers; they can be open-plan (knocked through) or closed and souk-like – but essentially, for all their complexity, they are fixed and stable. We may find new things about ourselves over time, but that’s like finding a room behind a door you’d never noticed in a ramshackle mansion. We are what we are: our self is us, and our self is here for keeps. In this version of things, my fears would just be part of who I am, fixed, an internal compartment of my permanent self.