Irene doesn’t reply to my 8 AM text. I’m freaking out about a date, or work, or maybe even celebrity gossip we both laugh at. She’s probably fast asleep – it’s 3 AM in New Jersey – but far from that responsible and logical conclusion, what ping pongs around my head is fear. She must be angry with me. Or worse, annoyed.
My anxiety relishes this. It toys with my body and brain, propagandising: I must be the most annoying person in existence. I know that everyone experiences this to some extent, whether it’s a passing thought or, like in my case, a lifelong belief. I worry I’m annoying when I talk, when I text, when I call, when I say hi and bye and most unfortunately, when I seek any reasonable human connection. No matter the conversation, I always wonder if the audience of my non-stop prattling glazes over in boredom. My mind trails away mid-speech, as if the thoughts in my brain are entirely separate from the words that continue to crawl out of my mouth at a rate unknown to mankind. Are people counting down the seconds until they can politely smile and say, “god, look at the time, I’ve gotta go”? How often has someone sat across from me wishing they could scream, “for the love of god, shut the fuck up!”? Calculating that might be pointless. I’m twenty-seven in November; I began gnawing my parents' ears off as a toddler in both English and my long-lost Somali. That’s twenty-five years of talking, at least.
A few weeks ago, I stayed up all night, a habit I’ve tried to avoid since my teenage era of sleep-deprived psychosis. This time, my insomnia was down to an ill-fated experiment with ADHD meds during Katy B’s performance in Phonox rather than poor sleep hygiene. For some, ADHD medication replicates the feeling of Speed, for others, it empties your mind, or even is an experience combining a little of both. I felt the effects of the second. Amongst a sea of intoxicated, sweaty bodies falling in and out of sync to a hazy mix of Jungle, DnB, UKG, Bassline and Speed Garage, my mind emptied. For the first time in my life, there was no running script pouring around my mind. Talking about this experience with several friends, I was surprised to find the consensus was that most people just focus on the music and nothing else. I secretly wondered if there was something wrong with me. Why couldn’t I stay in the moment?
That Friday night, I was hyper-focused on the music—feeling the bass pumping into my chest, thrilled by the mixes from DJs I’d never seen live before. I didn’t think about whether the guy circling me thought I was attractive. I didn’t wonder if I looked silly, lost to the melody of Lights On or Katy B on a Mission, reloaded by the woman herself for a third time. I’ve never experienced freedom like it. Just as this realisation hit, I was cornered in the smoking area by a posh twat, his drunken eyes shifting in and out of reality, as he waxed poetic about my hair—“your Afro is so cool”—demanding to know when I’d last cut it. C'est la vie.
Spurred on by growing understanding of mental health conditions like depression and anxiety, and the optimisation of self-care, Therapy Speak has become common parlance. We live in an age where the language of anxiety is everywhere; it might as well be marketing jargon rather than an actual disorder with debilitating consequences. I was diagnosed with General Anxiety Disorder as a teenager. Not just run of the mill, my stomach feels a bit off because of the extra shot of espresso this morning, anxiety, but the I fear I might die at any moment variety. In my second year of university, I had a complete breakdown, becoming a shut-in, avoiding my lectures and any semblance of a social life. It got to a point where I couldn’t walk past the pub next to my house because I was convinced that fellow students would exit said pub just to mock me. When walking alone, I took the shortcut through a nearby cemetery, even in the dead of winter. I saw a therapist for weeks of CBT, who suggested that I needed to shift my feelings away from my anxiety by realising the things I was afraid of were not going to happen. People weren’t going to make fun of me: these scenarios were imaginary, and that was the sole cause of the fear boiling up in my body. I tried explaining as best as I could that it wasn’t all in my mind—I brought up the bullying I experienced as a child and the overwhelming sexual harassment of my teenage years. She disagreed, and I felt embarrassed—clearly, I was too broken for even a therapist. The CBT homework must have been too advanced for me, and I was doomed to be an anxious wreck forever.
I am not the same woman—I frequent clubs, parties and DJ sets, I speak on panels for the BFI, and I showcase my work at book clubs and literary readings. It’s taken me years to gain any control over my anxiety, and what looks like control to me would look like hell to most. I check my door three or four times before I leave my house to make sure I’ve locked it. I arrive everywhere ten to fifteen minutes early, so I never keep anyone waiting. I pre-check any and all routes I take so I know every possible way I can get home, lest my phone breaks or my charger gets lost. To me, progress is the fact that I’m able to leave my house at all. Credit is not due to any therapists, but rather to the noise-cancelling headphones I purchased in 2022. If you ever run into me, brace for a shocked scream as you tap my shoulder, because I’m blasting dance music. Jersey, Baile Funk, Bassline, Ghettotech—I can’t hear anything else. It’s a distraction, not a fix, but it helps, even for the cost of extra ear damage.
My mother also had anxiety. For the longest time, I thought she was just a bit kooky in the best way an older woman can be. She was a health nut, an avid believer in the evil eye, fiercely protective of me and my brothers, all of which I attributed to the difficulties of her youth: losing her own mother to cancer, becoming a carer to her younger siblings and escaping a civil war, all before the age of thirty. Her fear of the world made sense to me. She worried about other people, not letting me and my brothers walk alone from school for years. She worried about me, in particular, being taken advantage of and feared the way I would be treated as a young veiled Muslim girl in a country that was growing more Islamophobic as the years passed, eventually suggesting a move to Saudi Arabia. I sensed this anxiety from a young age. My own anxiety manifested in quietness, in complete contrast to my two younger brothers, who took up so much of my parents' attention due to their hyperactivity. I was a good child, often sitting in the corner with my nose in a book. My anxiety centred within myself. With no words to express how I felt, I turned to Jacqueline Wilson, Rick Riordan, those weird anthropomorphic Warrior cat books, and Darren Shan. The stories of Wilson were especially poignant, as her protagonists were around my age. I hadn’t been left home alone (Illustrated Mum), or experienced abusive parents (Lola Rose), adoption (Tracy Beaker), or breakups (Girls series), but I recognised myself in their sense of profound loneliness in a way I hadn’t before.
What would my life have been like as a Wilson protagonist? Maybe it would be the story of an isolated young girl, finding it hard to make friends in a country that was hellbent on racism despite all religious rulings against it. Maybe it would be about my malleability, camouflaging myself to my surroundings, ensuring I had friends even at the expense of my personal identity. I realised being as available as possible to people worked in my favour. Within five minutes of knowing me, a total stranger would be aware of the intricacies of my life and my deepest, darkest secrets. Betrayal wasn’t something that even crossed my mind, because surely being honest would prove my value as a friend. Unfortunately, as she always was, my mother’s warnings about jumping the gun invariably came true. I imagined her weariness of strangers, in particular, as some unresolved trauma she was passing onto me. Unlike her, I wasn’t going to be fearful of friendship or love. I was friendly, open, accepting and all too naive with no fear of how that naivety could harm me.
She always warned me about getting too close to friends in particular. But my mother had seven sisters, and I have none. My brothers and I, as much as I love them, couldn’t be more different if we tried. I had always imagined that maybe if I had a sister, in the same way my twin brothers have each other, that I’d have a friend built in. Someone I didn’t need to work hard to impress. She’d laugh at my jokes, include me in conversations and take my inherited kookiness as a positive instead of a negative. My wonderful therapist, who perhaps appears too often in my writing, told me that I was too hard on myself. We discussed my anxiety surrounding social media and the idea of how I’m perceived. In all honesty, I struggle to see myself as someone worth supporting. I don’t understand why my writing gets compliments or how people find me enjoyable to listen to. Surely, I sound like an idiot. I’m well aware that the way I view myself is slightly sad, if not pathetic. I should be more forgiving, as it’s clear that the unrelenting standards I set for myself are tearing me apart. I’ve felt the grip of my harshness far more than anybody else in my life—the self-imposed guidelines on how to conduct myself and who to allow into my world.
Sometimes it feels like my running commentary wants me dead but doesn’t have the balls to see it through.
I talk a lot, but only because I think a lot. I think a lot because I worry a lot and so on and so forth. Very chicken or the egg: is it the worry or the thought? Does the worry come from an ache deep within my bones, or does that ache of feeling unwanted come from the thoughts that plague me as I walk across the busy intersection towards my local station? These thoughts carry themselves above the sound of the screeching underground, which in turn dampens the ear-bleeding volume of my playlists. It is never-ending, but as an adult with actual responsibilities, the thoughts need to go somewhere else. I have rent and bills; I need to figure out how to afford a fridge that doesn’t leak. So how do I do it? I wonder how my mum managed, dealing with anxiety whilst raising three children between two countries she knew would prefer her to be elsewhere. How did she cope without her mother, an ocean away from most of her sisters and her friends? I’m child-free and single, only directly responsible for myself. It should be easier the older I get, but it feels like more weight is being piled on top of me, pushing me down into an inescapable sinkhole. I still can’t tell if I’m really that annoying, but I’m sure there are people out there who would jump at the chance to confirm, “Yes, Haaniyah is annoying, and mean and a bitch and and and and and.” Maybe I am annoying, maybe I am mean, and maybe I’m a bitch.
Is that a crime?
** Addendum on the 13th of August, 2025:
An unspoken theme throughout this piece is neurodivergence, which I chose not to name due to my lack of any formal diagnosis and not wanting to be part of the aforementioned ‘therapy speak’ problem. However, I received an official ADHD diagnosis today, and frankly, I feel bittersweet. I had always known it was there. In the way you know you're sick when you have the beginnings of a prickly throat or a mild cough, but as a Black woman, the battle to have your neurodivergence taken seriously has long been tiring.
I'm elated that adjustments and medication will now be available to me, and processing all that my younger selves throughout primary, secondary and university struggled with. There’s so much of the way I approach life that’s now evidently due to my ADHD that makes me feel like a hindrance to the people around me. I try my best to remind myself that they have chosen to be in my life for all the good and bad and neutral in between. I hope I become kinder to myself, that I can look back at this in my thirties, forties and beyond with a wise grin on my face and a heart full of compassion at how much more convoluted my anxiety and overthinking of it all made my twenties.
Anywho, ADHD diagnosis at almost twenty-seven, crazy!
Massive thank you to my editor,
, for turning my flowery language into something that makes sense.
Incredibly vulnerable and eloquent! I deeply relate to music being a salve for anxiety.
beautiful and authentic musings of anxiety and ADHD and their ways of spiraling. i’m wondering now if noise canceling headphones might help me maintain focus 💗