The Shapeless Unease: A Year of Not Sleeping

by Samantha Harvey

Yet a word is just a collection of letters attached to an idea. The idea doesn’t have to be attached to anything in the world. You can be

To write fiction you have to engage in organised fraud, the laundering of experience into the offshore haven of words.

Our little fraudster had a thousand more words than she had experiences; she was compelled to lie. Believe nothing she says. A word can be a little piece of inheritance. It can be spent without ever having been earned.

There is acre upon acre of night, and whole eras come and go, and there isn’t another soul to be found on the journey through to morning.

If you are being trashed by the machinations of a heedless world, disguise yourself as a bin bag; if you’re being savaged by wolves, disguise yourself as a wolf. It’s a way of hiding in plain sight.

He’s not sitting there because he wants to collect money. He’s sitting there because a man’s got to be somewhere, because he can’t be nowhere.

you want the world to be simple, fair and free of all difficulty, but the world isn’t that way and the sooner you recognise that I can’t immunise you to your own life – the sooner you grow up – the better.

They want her to wave the magic wand, and it isn’t only that she has no wand but that there’s no magic in medicine and never

Half of her time is spent not on diagnosing and treating primary illnesses, but on treating all the illnesses caused by side effects of the drugs she’s prescribed. She has become a doctor of side effects, treated with more drugs that create more side effects.

they’ve got used to the sad prestige of being unwell. They want her to both acknowledge how magnificently, uniquely unwell they are and to reassure them that despite this they won’t have undue pain and won’t die.

Time kicks, kicks, kicks its way in with the tip of a toe. Time is the thing that breaks apart life from death, eases apart their embrace. Time, not life, is what we live. Time, not life, is what runs out. Time pushes death over there,

Time is the breeding ground of fear and despair.

If finality makes something holy then every moment is holy, because every moment could be the last. That’s a thought we spend too cheaply. Live each day as if it’s your last, we think, and then we don’t. Everything is holy. It’s only when we die that the holiness is called up. But it was always holy, all along.

Then the thought: stop thinking. You are always thinking. Then the thought: that was a thought, the thought to stop thinking. Then the thought: that was a thought, the thought that it was a thought to stop thinking. Then the reprimand: stop thinking.

Fear is a response to a threat, anxiety a response to a perceived threat – the difference between preparing to escape a saber-tooth tiger that is here and now in front of you (because it’s always saber-tooth tigers in the examples) and preparing to escape the idea of a saber-tooth tiger in case one appears around the next bend. While fear will quickly resolve – you will run away, fight it or be

Fear ends when the threat is gone, while anxiety, operating in a hall of mirrors, self-perpetuates. As a friend once said to me: there is no grace for the imagination. You cannot be saved from an assailant that doesn’t exist.

My friend has God. Whatever vanishes for her is held in the permanence that is Him. All of her steep, giddy drops have a landing place: Him. All of her belly-turning leaps are met with His open arms. All of her ecstatic soaring enjoys the safety of His tether. All the stale and eventless stretches

of her life open into the wild drama of His love. My friend, standing here next to me, has all this, crowding her blood and bones in this moment, inflating her heart.

God is there with you on the tip of the snake’s tongue, on the cold of the slope, through the pain of illness, through the anguish of dilemma. He delivers a blossoming of being in life and after death – a process of becoming ever more gloriously yourself. A process of becoming ever-more, she said.

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.