A test
I’ve made progress with my thoughts. the first half of 2025, like many of the years of this decade, came with challenges. Mental health challenges. Nothing too severe, but the unwelcome and too-frequent presence of anxiety had to be dealt with.
Think big: climate, war, the notion of death. New parenthood fatigue and overwhelm with a badly-managed buffet of creative endeavours left me vulnerable.
I’ve studied cognitive patterns, talked to burnout coaches, anxiety specialists, those who’ve suffered more than I have, and read books. It’s all helped – theory helping me to practice a greater degree of curation of my thoughts, and my responses to them.
Then think small. An unexpected assault in the form of a spoiled wrestling match. How pathetic, but how real! School days in the late 1990s were minefields for this. The internet was not yet here, so those of us who could not afford Sky TV and those who were not allowed to stay up late to watch the U.S. broadcast of a big show would spend the day creeping around, covering ears in a futile effort to save the outcome of matches that were built on months-long storylines until we got home to watch the recording in purity.
Today it’s so much harder. Any online activity is fraught with risk, and I hit play on what I think is the NotSam Wrestling Summerslam night one review podcast, only to hear him reel off the result of the main event of night 2 before I can scramble for the pause button.
Rage I seldom feel bubbles, spits, then roars up and out of my face like a volcano eruption. I mean, I genuinely release a primal scream with my head back on my shoulders, followed by a torrent of expletives. Then self-loathing, before I realise how fortunate I am to sit this atop my list of grievances.
I know it’s all circumstantial – that idea that there’s always someone worse off is true – but we also live our own story, and the small pleasures count too. So I begin to chastise myself for allowing the flow of a productive morning to be interrupted by something so trivial.
But the magic is butchered. And tonight I’ll watch to see ‘how it happens.’ Not ‘what happens.’
As pathetic as this is, I begin to step aside from my thoughts and watch them, neutralise them. A tactic psychologists and experts will help you learn in order to manage an unruly toddler of a mind. Slowly they calm, and it’s not so bad. Disappointing, not bad.
Clearly there is work to be done, but I stop short of marching from the garden studio into the house to tell my wife of this trauma. There’s maturity in that, even if my fellow-wrestling fan brother does get the thick end of it over WhatsApp.