My Mess Is a Bit of a Life: Adventures in Anxiety

by Georgia Pritchett

Good news I hated milk. One morning at nursery, the teacher told me I couldn’t play with the other children until I had drunk my milk. Sometimes everything goes right. I didn’t want to play with the other children AND I didn’t want to drink my milk. I sat inside on the floor the whole day. That was a good day.

Monsters under the bed I used to worry about the monsters under my bed a lot. Were they comfy enough? How could they sleep on a hard floor surrounded by crumbs and dust? Sometimes I slept under the bed so that they could have a turn on top.

Tooth Fairy I lost my first tooth biting into a toffee apple. I was alarmed but my mum tried to cheer me up by telling me about the Tooth Fairy. This was unwise. I was troubled by the concept of some weird old fairy breaking into my house while I was asleep and then taking body parts in exchange for money. It was the slippery slope. Where would it end? Was there an Ear Fairy? Was there a Toe Fairy? If I tucked my hand under my pillow while I was sleeping, would she take that? Sometimes at night, my head would end up under my pillow. And my head had teeth in it. Would she just take the whole thing? What was a fairy’s load-lifting capacity? And why did nobody have the answers to the really important questions?

The advantage of having a high-sugar diet is that you don’t feel anxious for a while. Though you do get tummy aches and blurred vision.

I did not like wearing shorts when I was little because I didn’t want people to know I had knees.

I used to think that when you went to the theatre, the loud boomy voice that told you to take your seats and also told you about ice cream was the Voice of God. I like the idea of the Almighty being concerned about refreshments.

Asking for it When I was ten, I bought a falconry glove at a jumble sale. It was far too big for me but I loved it. I wore it all day every day. I thought it made me look really cool. Like a king. Or a spy. Or Snoopy. It did not make me look cool. And it made picking up Jelly Tots very difficult indeed. Thank God large birds of prey did not start landing on my arm. That would have been terrifying, but the way I was dressed, I would have been asking for it.

Another way I knew I had grown up is that when I was at school, the teachers used to shout, ‘Pritchett! Wipe that smile off your face!’ and when I became an adult, strangers would pass me in the street and shout, ‘Try smiling!’

Apparently wanting to spend twenty-three hours a day wearing pyjamas is not a vocation.

At a party once, I decided to give flirting a go. I asked a man what he was doing afterwards. He said, ‘I’m going to go home, lift some weights, then I’ll probably throw up, then lift some more weights, have a protein drink, lift more weights and throw up again.’ ‘Why do you keep throwing up?’ I asked, horrified, backing away. ‘Because when you’re really pumping iron, you get such a rush of testosterone, it makes you throw up.’ It suddenly dawned on me that this might be flirting. I liked him, so I decided to flirt back. ‘Yeah, I’ll probably go home and do some needlepoint and then I’ll get such a rush of oestrogen, I’ll vomit over my cross-stitch.’ He left.

On Sunday, we were in the middle of lunch when the receptionist came and found us. You’re supposed to be kayaking! We had completely forgotten so we ambled over to reception, still chewing. Suddenly we were led to a van and told that Elvis would drive us to the kayaking place. Elvis drove for over an hour. We tried to convey that it wasn’t that important – he didn’t need to go to all that trouble to take us kayaking – but he said it was an honour. When we finally reached the destination, we made a hideous discovery. It was the West Indies inter-island kayaking championships and apparently we were representing Barbados. Their team had been two short, and now we had made up the numbers.

Birth is a beautiful thing. If your idea of beauty is a tractor pulling a combine harvester out of your vagina.

Weirdo Don’t tell her I said this, but The Moose is a fucking weirdo. She likes people. She talks to them. She’s hospitable. I mean, she literally invites people over, to the house, for extended periods of time. I know! What is the matter with her? To make matters worse, she talks to them about her feelings. What the actual fuck? Sometimes, I’m in the bathroom, holding a flannel to my nose, and I can hear her talking about her emotions. What a freak. I’ve explained to her, countless times, that feelings are like pickled eggs – best left unopened, no matter how drunk you are. Then what you do (and you may need a pen and paper for this) is you put the ‘pickled eggs’ in a box. And then you put them in a larger box. And then you put them in a lead-lined box. And then you bury it in some concrete beneath a volcano (can be metaphorical) and then you will be absolutely fine.

What was printed on the visa was probably the nicest thing anyone has ever said about me: ‘Alien with extraordinary ability’. If you’d told me that’s what I’d grow up to be when I was eleven, I’d have taken that.

The light I could see from the stars had been travelling for hundreds of years. The stars might even be dead now. I felt as if I was dead, but still somehow transmitting some long-out-of-date light into the world. And nobody had realised I was gone.