Gemma Correll has suffered from anxiety and depression disorders since childhood. At 16, she discovered a magical elixir that promised to make her feel better. In this extract from her new book, she shows how that promise was broken.
A Desperate Time in Oakland
In 2018, Correll was in her 30s and living in Oakland, California, having moved there from the UK in 2015. She had always struggled with anxiety and panic attacks, but she was doing fairly well until suddenly she wasn't. She started having back-to-back panic attacks, wandering the streets of Oakland and nearby Berkeley in a desperate attempt to shake them, without success.
Her life felt like an out-of-control fairground ride. Actually, it felt more like an entire theme park. She could see the rides in her head: attractions like the Emotional Rollercoaster, representing the rise and fall of a panic attack; the Depression Obstacle Course, a treacherous and challenging trail; and the House of No Fun, a confusing maze of dissociation and depersonalisation. Eventually, she saw the whole map: Anxietyland.
Familiar Rides, New Terror
Correll knew Anxietyland well. She had ridden on the Anxie-Tea Cups, on which she realised that drinking a nice cup of tea was not sufficient treatment for a clinical anxiety disorder. She had sat through the Magical Thinking Show, where she learned that she could not control the outcome of real-life events using the power of her own thoughts. She had been on all the rides multiple times, having suffered from anxiety and depression disorders since childhood. She thought that she knew the whole park like the back of her hand, but what was happening to her in 2018 was new and utterly terrifying. She found herself on a new ride: the Downward Spiral.
The Downward Spiral was a terrifying slide into the unknown. She had experienced panic attacks before, beginning at 14, and she already struggled with phobias, including agoraphobia, the fear of becoming trapped in a situation where escape might be difficult or help unavailable. She had avoided riding in lifts for years. But this was new. There was no clear trigger for the panic that enveloped her every waking moment in Oakland, and that made her feel even more out of control. She didn't know it then, but she was suffering from panic disorder, essentially panicking about panic. At the time, it felt like there was no way off the Downward Spiral.
The False Friend: Boozy
There was one friend she did turn to for help, though: Boozy. In 2002, she had been accepted to study English literature at Cambridge, which she was very excited about. But upon her arrival at Homerton College, she began to feel an unexpected and intense anxiety around attending classes and meeting new people, a fear that quickly escalated into an inability to leave her room. She spent two weeks in this confusing state of panic, in a world that shrunk to the size of a tiny dorm room, which she named the Incredible Shrinking Comfort Zone, racking up huge phone bills by calling her parents in tears, desperate to go home, but deeply ashamed of her inability to cope. She moved back home in a cloud of embarrassment and guilt.
After this aborted attempt to go to university, she found herself on a different path: heading to art school after spending a year on an art foundation course in her home town of Ipswich, Suffolk. Her decision to join the foundation course had been based, in part, on having nothing better to do, but she had found herself enjoying it. In particular, she liked the illustration classes, which had reawakened her interest in cartooning and animation, although she was unsure of her ability to turn those skills into a job. At the time, she was struggling with agoraphobia and found it difficult to leave the house, so she approached her second attempt at higher education with a certain amount of trepidation. Once again, she found comfort in her friend Boozy.
Finding a Way Out
Giving up alcohol didn't solve all of her problems, of course, but it was a good start. This is an extract from Anxietyland by Gemma Correll (Penguin, £25).
