The Saltmarsh Survival Guide for Unruly Minds

It began with walking a little more slowly. Running without music turned up in my ears, jolting with each footfall and closing out the sounds of rush hour. On the mornings I was motivated enough to step outside, that is. Winter mornings in Portsmouth, to me in those early days, smelled like the cold had been manufactured. Like the indoor ice rink I used to go to to escape the heat of Brisbane’s summertime. Everything around me was industrial. The steady march of commuting cars along the Eastern Road, the deliberate tread of students towards their college and dog walkers dutifully exercising their pets, stooping to tidy up after them. It was all purposeful, and yet purposefully numb. Automatic. The well-rehearsed banality of urban life was alarmingly unconscious to me. Unselfconscious of its jarring exudations, the smells, sounds, and noises. Yet also, somehow, so highly tuned in to its own treacherous conditions, thanks to the ubiquity of the pandemic. At the time, this condition was manifesting itself in successive indeterminate lockdowns. In this landscape I imagined myself to be an oddity. Too lucid for modern life’s surreal demands. A creature diagnosed as anxious, with a heightened sensibility such that in situations beyond my control I’m often unreasonably wound up and emotional.

Spending every day for months largely in the same room in the company of the same person can be frustrating and sometimes scary. Least of all if you’ve been blessed with an anxious predisposition which seems to heighten sensory input. In times of…