Managing anxiety in a world that refuses to end.
Lately whenever I try to decide the appropriate level of anxiety to have about the state of the world, it doesn’t matter how firmly I tap the dial, the needle just points to the word YES.
I’m not a beginner at this, either. I’ve been disproportionately anxious for longer than I can remember. When I was three my godparents took me to London Zoo for the day. I’d only recently completed potty training, but refused every bathroom I was offered once we left their house. My godmother rang my mum (presumably from a payphone, since this was the early nineties) to see if there was a special code word or a trick she could use to get me to piss. But it turned out I just did not want to experience a public toilet for the first time, and stubbornly held off until we got back home.
This fear of the unknown continued throughout my school years - I’d permit myself one wee at lunchtime, but only in my favoured cubicle. And it wasn’t just toilets I dreaded. New people, new places, changes to routine, change in general... anything that I considered unpredictable or uncertain - which turned out to be almost everything - triggered a swell of apprehension in my stomach that made my feet unsteady and my mind fizz with static. Look at any picture of me as a child; I will have a hyphen-shaped mouth, and look like I’m both haunted and deeply embarrassed about it.
The author, aged 5, harrowed.
I can use public toilets as an adult, but I still worry more than is healthy or reasonable. The way this anxiety tends to manifest now is in what I call The Prepper Mindset. I prepare - overprepare - for mundane tasks. I rehearse conversations I might never have in my head. I check bus times over and over again, and arrive everywhere uncomfortably early. If I’m going to a new café or shop I look it up on Google Maps first, so I can get a good look at the entrance and clearly visualise myself walking through the doors. Because when I don’t do this (and even sometimes when I do) I bottle it and speed past, cursing myself for being so weird. I don’t just make shopping lists. I once made a 4-tab excel spreadsheet that could generate a shopping list based on the recipes I selected in my weekly, colour-coded meal planner, and then automatically sort them according to the layout of my local supermarket. What I’m saying is, I’m autistic.
I find it helpful to label the ‘prepper mindset’ aspect of my autism, because giving it a name makes it easier to notice. Anxiety is such a constant for me that it can bubble away just below the surface, yet I have no awareness of how bad it is or how close I am to losing my shit. Realising that I’m overpreparing, (fixating on getting my hair to sit right for a casual gathering, or asking the host an annoying number of questions about what to expect) is often my first clue that I’m nervous about something. Sometimes it’s also a sign that my anxiety is reaching a limit, and that I urgently need to take steps to calm myself down if I want to avert disaster.
Calling it the prepper mindset is also a way to rein it in. Comparing myself to those doomsday guys over in America, with pantries full of canned chicken and caches of bullets buried in the desert, lets me gently poke fun at myself. I know that overpreparing is a coping mechanism. It’s one of the strategies I’ve developed to allow me to function in a world that’s often intolerably opaque and therefore unpredictable to my flavour of brain. But I also know there’s a fine line between allowing yourself to prepare for hypothetical scenarios, and worrying so much about a relatively unlikely eventuality that you can’t enjoy the present. Most of my overpreparation only affects me - I’m not making my family give up their weekends to practice ‘bugging out’ to an off-grid bunker, I’m just taking months to start a blog because I want to get ‘organised’ first. But I suspect that the camo Dads and I share some underlying psychology, and I don’t ever want my coping mechanisms to make mine or my loved ones' lives miserable.
Burt Gummer, cult hero of Tremors, who balances a healthy interest in survivalism with a loving marriage.
Working out when a strategy has stopped serving you, and has started controlling you, can be hard. It’s especially hard if you’re autistic and struggle with interoception (recognising bodily signals like thirst, pain, or anger). I know plenty of neurodivergent people who, due to an unfortunate confluence of factors, have had ordinarily fulfilling, regulating activities (like a video game, a TV series, or a particularly engrossing creative project) turn into traps that make them skip eating and sleeping. I don’t think that always means abandoning an activity altogether, especially if it’s usually beneficial. But when I’m in the over-preparation zone, invoking an example as extreme as doomsday preppers helps me to jolt myself out of my own head, and remind me to check in with how I’m actually feeling.
And it’s not entirely derogatory. I understand where the doomsday preppers are coming from. I love zombie films, and most (post)-apocalyptic fiction. I, too, am entranced by the premise of a single, seismic event that uproots everything and leaves survivors scrabbling around in the rubble. In a scenario like that the root of my anxiety - uncertainty - is eliminated. The complete upending of civilisation vaporises comparatively frivolous anxieties like how to phrase that email. The only worries that matter are concrete and immediate - where to run, what to eat, how to survive. There are no longer a thousand looming question marks; just one, giant exclamation mark that everyone is unanimously focused on.
Me doom-posting aesthetic apocalypses back in 2018.
I first came across doomsday preppers via the NatGeo show, around 2017. The concept of a ‘go bag’ (a kit with 2-3 days worth of supplies, ready to grab if an emergency forces you to leave your home at short notice) resurfaced a memory from when I was about 8. A small backpack of pilfered sweets and spare pyjamas, stashed in the bottom of my wardrobe. Things to sustain my brother and I in case everything we owned was lost in a house fire, like the one vividly described by a fire fighter visiting our school. The subjects of Doomsday Preppers were paranoid, distrustful, and steeped in extreme individualism (and likely nationalism). But I could relate to the basic desire to keep one’s loved ones safe. …until the third ep, where a guy shot his own thumb off in front of his kids, and my empathy turned into giddy, horrified laughter. I had peered at the worst possible version of myself, and confirmed that I did not want to be her.