Failure to Love

It’s hard now to remember that first week. Everything went downhill so fast and so suddenly. I never really had a chance to get my bearings. 

Anxiety is difficult to describe, but it reminds me of when you first learn to drive and you have to join a motorway. I didn’t learn to drive until I was in my early-20s. Being a Londoner I never had much use for it, but when I went to university ‘oop north’ it seemed like everyone had four wheels. I wasted time and money on the odd lesson here and there before finally knuckling down to an intensive course. Once you’ve passed your test you can finally on the motorway, and my first motorway driving was a baptism of fire: 100 miles towards my sister’s wedding with a car crammed with dresses, shoes and favours. It was terrifying. 

Everything about the experience of joining the motorway is counterintuitive. You are approaching a dangerous hazard (the motorway itself), filled with cars going 60-80 mph. You have a short tun-up to the carriageway during which, as you approach others hurtling past, you have to speed up. As lumbering lorries bear down on you and thunder onwards you have to be looking in about five different directions, have to judge the judge the size and speed of your car and others, have to continue accelerating beyond the point of comfort, and in one deft manoeuvre have to slot into ongoing traffic, usually between two lorries so that you have minimal vision and can only hear the growling of their huge engines and the roar of over-sized tyres. 

For about two years the only way I could do it was by loudly singing the Superman theme tune. Foot on the accelerator, cars whoosing past me, tiny car-length target space ahead – a space moving at 70 mph and subject to the unpredictable driving of tired and angry motorists – I would break into song at full-lung, full-speed, full-scream. And of course, once you’re on there is no let up. Now you have to continue speeding up, change lanes, avoid lorries overtaking one another deal with angry white men driving up your bum, avoid sudden lane-changers, watch out for road signs and adjusted speed limits, roadworks, obstructions, sudden slowing, traffic jams, long journeys of fraying nerves and tired eyes that don’t blink enough. 

This is how it felt that first week. Hurtling towards a hazard, unable to stop, the only way forward – acceleration, looking in every direction at once, mentally scrolling though your packing, wondering if you’ve forgotten something, trying to remember the route. Total, 80 mph immersion in a fast-moving stream that never stops. This is Anxiety. And before you know it, you’re whizzing past every exit junction, trying desperately to get off, but unable to change lanes. Paralysed by sheer panic and going 100 mph just to show how confident you are. And inside, one long scream. 

* * *

Ted the White Dog followed me everywhere. Of course he did, he was only a puppy. Frightened and away from his litter for the first time, he skipped and slid around my feet as we paced the four walls of my flat. We couldn’t go out – he’d not had his final jabs yet. We had no garden – only a tiny balcony lined with puppy pads laid in an attempt to toilet-train him in a flat. Too sleep-deprived to work, or read, or function, we would plat half-heartedly, both sizing each other up over a cuddly toy. If I went to the toilet with the door closed he yelped and whined and cried. If I put him in his playpen he yelped and whined and cried. At night in his crate he yelped and whined and cried. And so did I. 

I had read so many books and absorbed so much advice about puppies that I had unwittingly built a barrier between us. Show the puppy who’s boss. Don’t let it sleep in your bedroom. Do not let it win any games. Feed it only after you have eaten. Do not let it on the furniture. Get it used to the crate. Leave it for increasing periods so that it gets used to being alone. Meanwhile in my own head I had laden the experience with so many expectations. As a perennial singleton with a love of children I had unconsciously convinced myself that this was a test for single-parenthood. If I could do this, I could raised a child alone. I could be alone and happy. I wouldn’t feel lonely or isolated for the rest of my life. I would be loved. I would be whole. But the Anxiety cut me off from love, even though it was what I craved. I was flailing. I was failing. I would be alone forever. I would always be sad and lonely and unloved. I would die alone and not even be eaten by cats because apparently pet-ownership was too much for me. What a loser. What a failure. What a waste of space. Can’t even handle one tiny, white puppy. 

I desperately wish I could have that time back. All I needed to do was to scoop that puppy up into my arms and love him with all of my might. That soft fur, those brown eyes. I should have just put my face into his puppy fuzz and kissed him and hugged him and loved him. I should have let him curl into my beck and drifted off to sleep with him on the sofa. I should have put his bed in my room and lain where he could see me, and smell me, and hear me. I should have woven my fingers around the bars so he could lick them, and know I was near. If I had that time again I would never stop snuggling him, or smelling him, or kissing him. But I was too busy driving at 100 mph towards a smash I didn’t know was coming. I was hurtling towards doom with no way off. 

As it was I tried desperately to love him. I played fetch and tug-of-war and peek-a-boo. I filled a  plastic bottle with treats and rolled it up and down the hallway. I started to teach him to sit (at 10 weeks! What an eegit), and then got frustrated when he didn’t. I wanted everything perfect and done all at once. Now. Yesterday. I was in a hurry to get to my new perfect life. Racing towards it blindly and dragging the poor up along with me. I put him in the laundry tub and took and picture in an attempt to find him cute. At my parents’ house I propped his front paws onto the handlebars of a scooter in an attempt to be whimsical. I posted jolly, happy pictures on Facebook. I sat in the dark and cried while he watched me.

Every night he escaped from his crate and pooed all over the flat. The sharp tang of faeces and urine would wake me from half-slumber. He wasn’t fooled by the fake ‘grass’ on the balcony and refused to wee there. He hid behind my desk, watching e with reproachful eyes. Three days in I confessed to my mum that I might have made a mistake. Five days in I had a total panic attack one evening and couldn’t breathe. Seven days in and his bag was packed and I was a wreck. 

That’s when my parents saved us. 

* * *

Writing this is hard. It feels like shame. It tastes like failure. I can’t even express how much I adore Ted the White Dog now. I cup his face in my hands and kiss his nose. I put my face in his fur and take deep breathes of his musky scent. I sleep with him curled against my legs or back. When I can’t sleep, I drag him into a cuddle and match  my breathing to his own, feeling his deep snores resonate in my chest. I have a t-shirt that says: ‘If my dog isn’t invited, I’m not going’. And I mean it. 

But Anxiety and Depression numb you to good feelings, and worry over negative feelings insistently. Hot thoughts circle around your brain like a dizzy teacup ride. Its long, spiny fingers creepy into your chest and squeeze until you can’t breathe, can’t move, can’t think. Everything acquires a greasy film of grey. Your limbs move through thick, viscous oil. Your emotions shut down as a defence mechanism, hunkering into the tiny safe space at your core. They want to escape the Bad, but in the process they block out the Good. You don’t feel. You don’t taste. You don’t think or move or love. You just be. Be until it passes. Terrified that it never will.