Dealing with anxiety when you absolutely categorically don't have it (except you do)

Featuring: Vulnerability Porn, the lie of Zero F**ks, and a shopping edit recycled from yesterday's post which I took down, because of the anxiety I don't have

Yesterday, I published a SubStack about this thing I’d done to help take the edge off the anxiety I feel with an increasing ferocity. An hour and a half after posting, I took that article down, because (hello, irony) it being up, was making me feel anxious.

What it detailed isn't entirely - well: legal.

I really loved that post. It was a bit of me, not in the Love Island sense; in the, that’s as close as I get to really writing myself down, sense.

As a replacement post: I thought I’d tell you about the anxiety which warranted the not-legal action, which was probably what I should have done in the first place. Although: I’m wary about that too. Wary about straying into the territory of what I call ‘Vulnerability Porn’. Vulnerability Porn is when women (it’s always women) offer up their mental health wobbles to the wider world. Their sadnesses, their failures, their greatest fears; the war wounds of their toxic relationships, the legacy of their emotional falterings, the experience of their breaking down. Cos we’re under pressure to do this, aren’t we? In the name of likability (the actual curse of womanhood), and relatability, and, everyone thinking we’re So Brave To Share… But if we don’t? We are assumed to be cold, hard bitches.

I suspect I have been often assumed to be a cold, hard bitch.