Worry and anxiety are not the same. Worry tends to be more temporary, more object-focused, more concrete, less diffuse than anxiety. Anxiety often has no object and transmutes itself into worry by finding objects to attach to, in order to justify its existence. This thing, this iterative, self-referencing battle with one’s own thoughts, this is the strange being that is anxiety. I didn’t used to have that, and now when I look back to that time in the pub, I can see that I’d reached a point at which anxiety had become so pervasive I couldn’t perceive it was even there.
