Tracy Calder in Cupoty Newsletter: The carpet smelt of cigarettes, stale beer and Shake and Vac (it was the nineties after all), but we didn’t care. Every few months my best friend, Karen, and I would head along the seafront and queue up outside Brighton Centre for first dibs at the Record Fair.
Neither of us had a record player – I was using my dad’s with a pair of headphones so large they slid down my cheeks and played music through my jaw – but it didn’t matter. We were here for the chase.
Karen was after an obscure B-side (probably something by The KLF or Pearl Jam) and I was after Queen’s hopelessly slushy Love of My Life (featuring Brian May on the harp).
We both knew success was unlikely; we’d read enough Record Collector magazines to keep our expectations low. But one day, in a tatty box under a trestle table, I saw Queen’s distinctive logo and my heart began to race. Could this be it? Slowly, I eased the record out of the box and read the title: Love of My Life. I’d struck gold.
It seemed odd at the time, but my first reaction was to put it back; somewhere deep in my heart I knew that the discovery marked the end of something special. The days of eating vinegar-soaked chips on the seafront and crawling under trestle tables were over.
‘Neither of us had a record player – I was using my dad’s with a pair of headphones so large they slid down my cheeks and played music through my jaw’
It turned out I was right. Soon after the Queen discovery Karen and I stopped going to the Record Fair. It felt kind of pointless. The goal had been reached; the thrill of the chase was over.
Karen moved on to collecting plastic bags (to this day, neither of us know why) and I embarked on a mission to secure a green Blue Peter badge (to this day, even I don’t know why).
While the record finding mission was over, the sense of loss lingered. The Germans have a phrase for the sense of panic many of us feel when a goal is within our reach: Torschlusspanik (roughly translated as ‘gate-shut panic’).
I experienced the full force of this when I finished university in the late nineties. For three years I had a blinkered ambition to achieve a first-class degree so that I could break into the magazine industry and do who knows what.
When the course was over, and I got my degree, I found myself paralysed by fear. For weeks I sat in my room wondering where this cloak of anxiety had come from and how on earth I was going to get rid of it.
‘The Germans have a phrase for the sense of panic many of us feel when a goal is within our reach: Torschlusspanik’
Of course, now I recognise this feeling as Torschlusspanik and, over the years, I’ve found many examples of athletes, artists, explorers and writers who have experienced a similar thing.
Michael Cunningham, author of The Hours, admits to feeling strangely depressed after winning a Pulitzer Prize. David Bayles and Ted Orland, authors of Art & Fear, tell the story of a friend who spent decades trying to secure a one-man show at a major museum. Having realised his ambition, he never produced a serious piece of art again.
Erling Kagge, the first person to reach the North Pole, the South Pole and the peak of Everest, describes how at the age of 15 he cycled 90 miles to visit a girl he was in love with. Standing outside her house, stretching his aching calves, he suddenly felt the urge to go home.
‘Now that I was within sight of my objective, I lost the desire to go any further,’ he recalls. ‘I didn’t dare to experience the next chapter.’ While it’s tempting to envy people on the verge of success, it’s surprising how often achievement leads to despondency.
‘Over the years, I’ve found many examples of athletes, artists, explorers and writers who have experienced “gate-shut panic”’
So, what can we do to protect ourselves from gate-shut panic? How can we force ourselves over the finish line and then keep going once a goal has been reached? Well, the anxiety I experienced after university taught me many things, perhaps the most important being that one goal is never enough.
Many self-help, productivity and business books encourage us to single-task, select one goal and then become laser focused until it’s achieved. But, in my experience, this isn’t always a healthy or sustainable way to work.
Kagge is a fine example of a multi-dreamer, which definitely isn’t the same as a multitasker. When he’s on the ice, highly focused on placing one foot in front of the other, he still manages to pull back and allow new goals and dreams to enter his headspace.
It’s a lesson that he learnt the hard way, as he explains in his book, The Philosophy of an Explorer. Having reached the South Pole, Kagge felt like he was standing at the end of a rainbow with no dreams left. At this point, he decided he needed to shift his mindset.
‘Kagge is a great example of a multi-dreamer, which isn’t the same as a multitasker’
Personally, I’ve found the best way to deal with Torschlusspanik is to pause in the middle of a project and ask myself, ‘And then what?’ Your book might be written, but what are you going to do while you wait to hear from your agent?
You might be on course to ascend a mountain, secure a major exhibition or win a gold medal, but you always need to be ready to answer the question, ‘And then what?’ There are too many things to learn, marvel at and share to freeze at the summit. It’s imperative that you keep moving.
In 2008 my boyfriend (now husband) and I found a great way to avoid gate-shut panic – we came up with an impossible dream! According to Ordnance Survey (the national mapping agency for Great Britain), there are more than 7,700 offshore islands in Great Britain, and we wanted to explore them all.
So far, we have visited nearly 500 volcanic plugs, scrappy saltmarshes and rocky islets, but the likelihood of meeting our goal is pretty slim. But, of course, it doesn’t matter. We might never stand atop guano-splattered Rockall or race the tidal channels to Eynhallow, but when we plan an island trip and we find ourselves asking, ‘And then what?’ there are more than 7,000 exciting answers. We don’t experience gate-shut panic, because so many gates are ahead of us, standing wide open.
