Postcard from your anxious friend

I'm in Quebec!

Not geographically accurate

I’m writing this not from my balcony, or my sofa, or a bustling London cafe, but from a beautiful library in a former church in the old, picturesque part of Quebec City. Which is wild, quite frankly.

I’m here because a few months ago I heard about a writing residency I was technically eligible for. It would involve travelling to Quebec for a month to live and write in an apartment in a place called the Maison de la Littérature. It sounded like a dream, so I decided to apply — because why not? — and wrote the best application letter I possibly could.

Like most writers, I’m well used to rejection. My Submittable account is a sad sight, just a very long list consisting overwhelmingly of the word ‘declined’ next to stories and essays I’ve poured my heart and soul into. So I didn’t hold out much hope of being successful, and when I saw an email with the word ‘residency’ in the subject line, I thought: ah, here’s my rejection letter.

But it wasn’t a rejection! It said: ‘I am very pleased to confirm that our partners have selected you for the residency in Quebec.’ I was astonished.

Once the initial screaming delight was over and I’d had a chance to get used to the idea, I started feeling a little stressed. First about quitting my job, which was something I’d been gearing up to for a while, residency or no residency, but which, with the residency on the horizon, suddenly came to seem both more viable and more urgent. (Making this transition has actually been sort of huge for me and probably deserves a Substack essay in and of itself, but that will be for another time.)

Then the health anxiety kicked in. This tends to be how my anxiety presents itself and it often rears its ugly head during big life changes. I hallucinated all manner of symptoms. I was terrified of finding a sinister lump or rash or mole that might scupper my plans to start a freelance career, or prevent me from going to Quebec, or that would require investigation but which — due to an underfunded NHS with overworked staff and huge waiting lists — would still be unresolved by the time I came to leave.

In the periods between health anxiety crises I fretted about booking my flights within budget, then about getting the necessary travel authorisations, then about the precise words I should use to describe my situation to Canadian immigration officials. I took my passport with me on my walking trip to the South Downs (I needed ID to check into my hostel) and it got a little damp in a downpour even though it was buried deep in my bag, so I fretted about the fact that the edges of the pages were no longer ruler-straight and spent a good while googling the difference between ‘wear and tear’ and ‘water damage’. It went back to normal again after a stint beneath some heavy books, but still I fretted that the electronic bit inside would no longer function and I wouldn’t be allowed to board my flight.

In the week preceding my departure anxiety was a fairly constant companion, waking me up in the morning and following me around for most of the day. But by now I had been anxious about such a smorgasbord of different things that it was starting to become clear that the anxiety was just a feeling, independent of the outside world — that it did not pertain to anything genuinely worrying, but was just trying to give itself legitimacy by attaching itself like a limpet to anything concrete it could find. I caught myself examining my passport for phantom water damage in the exact same way I might examine my arm for a phantom melanoma, and realised: anxiety is the driving force behind this situation, not a by-product of it.

Recognising this didn’t make it go away, but it did transform it from a harbinger of potential catastrophe into an unpleasant sensation that I would have to just have to put up with for a while. I started thinking of it as squid ink, billowing across my abdomen beneath the surface of my skin. A very anxious day was actually just a very inky day, a little pulse of anxiety a little puff of ink. Sometimes I paid attention to my breathing and imagined the ink diluting slightly with each breath.

Then it was time to leave, and even though I had planned an unnecessarily complex journey with stops in New York and Montreal, absolutely none of the things I had worried about came to pass. I was reminded of a recent Substack note in which the author

Susan Cain

shared a graphic quantifying the amount of suffering that worry causes. If you worry and the bad thing happens, you’ve suffered twice. If it happens and you haven’t worried about it, you’ve only suffered once. If you worry and the bad thing doesn’t happen, you’ve also suffered once. But if you don’t worry about it and everything goes smoothly, you haven’t suffered at all. In none of these scenarios does worry add anything of value.

Last night’s sunset from my living room

When I got to Quebec City and was shown my apartment, which is very spacious, and has several desks in it, and a secret door leading into a public library, I simply couldn’t believe it was all for me. I felt like there must have been some mistake. I couldn’t afford this place if it was on Airbnb. Didn’t they know I’m really just a nobody, not a real writer at all? I’ve only written one book, and it didn’t sell very well, and there’s no guarantee I can write another one. I didn’t even get a two-book deal.

That was at the root of my anxiety all along, I suspect — the inability to believe that I was really, genuinely going to Quebec City to do a writing residency. That I truly deserved to go, and that nothing would intervene to prevent it happening. But it hasn’t, and I do, and I am. I’m here. And I’m writing.

It’s beautiful here. I’m practising my French. Swimming pools are free, and there are not one but two libraries in former churches (which is funny because I wrote an essay about the similarities between churches and libraries a few months ago), and in each of them there is a public jigsaw puzzle to which anyone who feels so inclined can contribute. All of these things warm my heart.

Unless I’m seized by inspiration, I’m going to permit myself some time off from Substack while I’m here so that I can fully immerse myself in the writing I came here to do (my second novel). My Substack summer break, as it were. I’ll see you on the other side.