Joy, Guilt, Anger, Love by Giovanni Frazzetto

to ring. I had spent a long day in the lab crushing dozens of mouse brains to obtain a few precious milligrams of purified protein, and I had just gone to bed. Exhausted, I picked up after four rings. At the other end was Robert, an old university friend.
    ‘Have you heard?’ he asked.
    ‘About what?’
    ‘The world economy is going down the drain.’
    ‘And you called to tell me that?’ I yawned.
    ‘It’s truly bad this time, believe me.’
    It was a cold, dark night in December. Worldwide, stockmarkets slumped, while the number of jobs shed continued to rise. It had been one of the worst days for the economy that year, and I had spent it isolated in a biochemistry room.
    Now awake, I jumped to my desk to check the news on my laptop.
    ‘You don’t seem to understand.’ I could hear the tension in his voice.
    ‘Are you worried?’
    ‘Worried? I’m terrified. I can’t even sleep.’
    Scanning the headlines, I could see that things were bad. And, yes, I knew Robert had just started working for a major investment bank in the city, one of those financial giants which only one year before had seemed entirely immune to any economic downturn. Things were still going well for him, but he made it sound as if he were barely a few weeks away from being a beggar at the tube station.
    ‘I could always earn money busking,’ he said, ‘or try once and for all to become a rock star.’
    ‘Robert, I’m really tired,’ was all that I managed to say.
    ‘Come on, you work in a neuroscience lab, aren’t you supposed to know what to do in these circumstances?’ Robert insisted.
    ‘Fix the economic crisis? You’re the banker.’
    ‘No, help me cope with anxiety,’ Robert replied.
    Promising to visit Robert the next day, I ended the conversation, switched off the lights and fell back into bed. But sleep eluded me. Oddly, obscure figures and indices of the economic crisis continued to occupy my mind, like the thought of maths homework left unfinished or a nagging irresolvable equation. My eyes stayed wide open and even though I had a good job and no savings to speak of in danger of evaporating in a cloud of smoke, I found myself worried about the incumbent recession. From there, thoughts roamed freely and became galling concerns. One worry was creating another, for in a matter of minutes I found myself worrying about almost everything. I heard my heart accelerate, my head and chest felt heavy, my throat closed and the following thoughts and questions began to ramble in my mind in disorderly succession:
    – Had I switched off the centrifuge properly?
    – A rare chronic disease was what kept causing those terrible headaches in the morning.
    – Was the front door locked?
    – I should not have read that Facebook post.
    – What if my university ran out of research funds?
    – I was never going to finish the experiments for my next paper in time, so my competitors were sure to scoop me.
    – My neighbour hadn’t greeted me that morning. Had the party at the weekend been too loud?
    – A new red spot on my left arm was the beginning of cancer.
    – I still have to buy all my Christmas presents and I won’t make it in time.
    – The boiler would undoubtedly break down again next week.
    – I might never be in a position to buy my own property.
    – No pension for me in this lifetime.
    – What if I had a bike accident tomorrow?
    – Was a new terror attack looming in the distance?
    The list could easily go on. Everything seemed to be accelerating towards a catastrophic end.
    If examined carefully, some of those worries sound ridiculous, or unnecessary to say the least, don’t they? Yet, alone in the darkness of my bedroom, I didn’t seem to have much control over them.
    Eventually, my worries became something else. Spinning in a vortex of confusion, I began to feel directionless, pondering my whole existence. Just over the threshold of thirty, single, overworked, on the verge of making a leap in my career, I began to worry