The Shapeless Unease: A Year of Not Sleeping

by Samantha Harvey

To write fiction you have to engage in organised fraud,

There’s terror when a basic animal need isn’t met. At first you fear death, then a worse thing happens – you fear life.

Being afraid of the saber-tooth tiger is what makes the tiger keep coming back – not seem to come back, but in fact come back. It is no use to say ‘don’t be afraid’. There is a tiger in your bedroom, you ought to be afraid. But it’s not a tiger you can ever overcome by freezing, fighting or running from, so all your mechanisms for dealing with a real threat fail, giving rise to more fear, which keeps the tiger coming back.

anxiety as that moment when you tip back in a chair and think you’re going to fall. That moment, but all the time.

I can’t understand the advice so often given: no point worrying about things that are out of your control. Of course there’s a point in worrying about these things. They are exactly the things to worry about; worrying about the things that are in your control is less practical since, instead of worrying, you could be doing something about them.