There comes a point where my fridge, uh, is empty and I haven't got any food and maybe I haven't been out for a day or two.
Somehow, I've got to get out of the mindset of anticipating what's going to happen walking down to the supermarket.
As I try and do that, I'm getting more and more anxious doing a run-through, through my head, of going out there and feeling, I just want to lie in bed or under the bed and not face this thing and it's like I'm hungry, so I've got to get to Sainsbury's, and the prospect of going to Sainsbury's seems as likely and as horrible as going to hell and I'm going from one hell to another and what's the point?
What happens is that I feel my chest tightening, and I feel that my breathing is getting shallower and shallower and as I get more anxious, I feel as if I'm kind of being strangled in a way. My heart beats louder and louder to the point where I think that if I go out, other people are actually going to hear my heart beat. As I walk, I feel my body is like jelly, and I'm not at all sure footed, I mean, I'm scared that I might fall over. I'm now a prisoner, who's moved out into a very hostile area and I don't know how long this is gonna take.
I'm overwhelmed, I mean to be surrounded by this cacophony of noise, and I'm now stuck behind someone and I'm trying to gauge 'how long is it gonna be before I get to the counter?' because I'm frozen with an anxiety. This is just a bloody nightmare.
Now, because I've been feeling these things for decades, I realise that there's a way through this because I was convinced that it would just kill me altogether, because the level of stress that I've been carrying around I thought would kind of give me a heart attack or something similar, and so far it hasn't.
It's rather like a fish wriggling on the end of a hook, so initially one might think, um, 'Mike's wriggling in this way and it makes no sense at all, he's doing a crazy dance', until you see the hook in my gullet then it starts making sense so I think a lot of us are wriggling - that's seen as a kind of illness without the vision of the hooks that we're bound by so it seems that our behaviour is very crazy - when seen in context, it isn't.