Offer Accepted, with a sprinkle of anxiety and dread.

We’re sat in the awkward in-between of “offer accepted” and “exchange date pending” of our dream house. I’m being hurled with well-meaning “fingers crossed for you”s, and “good lucks” which I didn’t even realise were necessary until recently, but have begun to fill me with dread.

What do you mean this could all fall apart any minute? What do you mean we would still have to pay the solicitors an extortionate amount of money? What do you mean our dream could simply just be a dream, and we’d have to start again from the beginning?

When everybody in the (small, almost non-existent chain) agreed a four week exchange, I had faith. I believed. I was confident. “See, it doesn’t have to be this hard if you’re super organised like us!”. But when I told people in my life, you could see their eyebrows raise at my naivety. I could hear the subtle suck-in of their breath of the journey I was yet to embark on. The rollercoaster that meant on Friday the estate agent would convince me we’d be exchanging next week, and on Tuesday the Solicitor would say it would be at least another month.

We’ve already decided that we’re going to paint the walls Ammonite. And put the chicken coop behind the greenhouse. There’s a list of medicinal plants we’re going to grow in the conservatory, and the black glass foam dispensers I’ve scrupulously researched are sat in my Amazon basket. I told us we should wait. Not get our hopes up. Try and think about something else. But we let the dream in. And now a potential loss feels almost unbearable.

How are we doing this? Sitting in this waiting? Pausing our Rightmove notifications because we don’t want to jinx it but also peeping every now and then just in case?

In circumstances like these I’d usually seek faith and fate to get me through. I’d trust in what will be will be and what is for me won’t go past me and you are only given the challenges the universe knows you can handle.

But my self esteem has been particularly low lately (thanks Louisa), and instead of faith I have a crippling sense of “you don’t deserve this anyway”.

On deep diving into why I feel such pressure on the house process coming to fruition sooner rather than later, I realised that the true reason was because I’m desperately afraid that someone will pull this all away from me. No warning. No notice. No justice.

And it’s in moments like these when decades of therapy feels like a total waste. That I’ve actually not made any progress with my trauma history. That it does still dictate my life. It highlights just how abnormally I see the world when every step I take is laced with fear.

For so many years this has been an invisible burden I have carried along with me. I have painted this beautifully elaborate mask that looks incredibly put together on the outside. I have studied, deeply, how to behave normally. What is morally and socially appropriate. What will keep me safe. But in the end, as life has felt safer, the cyclone inside my soul is beginning to leak its tendrils out and become real. Visible. Loud.

I notice it now. The way things affect me and why. I can answer dead straight why I’m reacting the way that I am in an almost disturbing fashion. ‘Oh, I’m worried about making a mistake because when I was a child I was taught that mistakes ended up with me being beaten and now my body thinks that will happen every time even though I logically know that it won’t. *Gasp*. Hehe!’

So I sit here in what should be a normal, slightly-frustrating-fiddly-admin-but-generally-exciting season of my life.

And all I feel is fear.