Bloganuary #5: The future

Do you spend more time thinking about the future or the past? Why?

The future. That great unknown. That time where perhaps everything will go wrong maybe.

It’s that anxious kick in the gut – that frantic lizard voice in the back of my head which whispers but what if… all the time. I’m working on ignoring it. I find myself saying ‘it will all be fine’ a lot because sometimes if you can lie to yourself enough, your anxiety will calm down.

That’s the idea anyway.

Anxiety is technically lying to you as well, because it doesn’t know that everything will go wrong, it just assumes it will. It’s a ‘biggest liar’ match at the end of the day.

Unfortunately, sometimes anxiety isn’t lying. Like yesterday when I was travelling (I mentioned in my previous post that I wanted the journey to be ‘uneventful’). I am always a bumbling ball of anxiety when I travel and this time was no different. Here are some things that went wrong on our journey yesterday:

– Julie got stuck in a long queue before security because someone decided to bring multiple illegal knives across the border (don’t do that!)

– Julie was almost stopped from coming back into the UK because of technical issues with her passport. She was asked for her ID but guess who had it – me! (I wasn’t with her because British citizens have their own queue because Brexit is a continuing hellscape).

– We got to the Eurostar waiting room and a man sat across from us straight up passed out and collapsed on the floor. Panic ensued but a fantastic ex-firefighter was nearby and they handled the situation like a pro (no anxiety for them, clearly!).

– Our seats were in the wrong direction on the train (not a massive deal UNLESS your wife gets very travel sick when travelling in the wrong direction, which Julie does)

– A bug bit my neck in the Paris Metro (again not a big deal UNLESS you are afraid of bugs, which I am) and I got really twitchy about it.

– We arrived in London to find all trains had been cancelled to get back home.

All trains read ‘please enquire’ next to them instead of a time. Not a good sign.

Long story short, it wasn’t uneventful. It was eventful. Very eventful.

But we made it home. By 2:20am we were stumbling in our front door to our very cold flat. I guess Richard 1, Anxiety 0. Didn’t stop us from achieving what we needed to.

It won’t stop me being anxious about tomorrow though. Of course not.