You are made of everyone who survived this before you

Nobody talks about this at dinner parties, and there is a good reason for that.

The soil beneath your feet contains, at various depths, the decomposed remains of medieval plague victims, Roman soldiers, Viking settlers, a significant number of wool traders, and at least one person historians cannot account for and have stopped trying to. When a carrot grows in that soil and someone eats it, a calculable molecular fraction of all of them enters that person. This is not poetry. It is decomposition, soil mineralisation, root uptake and basic biochemistry. And it means something specific for anyone who has sat up at 3am with the absolute certainty that everything is about to go wrong: that person is not starting from nothing.

The part that is actually true

Here is the science, plainly, because the whole point is that it is not a metaphor.

When a living thing dies and is buried, it does not disappear. Bacteria and fungi break it down, and the carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus and minerals it was made of are released into the soil. Soil scientists call this mineralisation. Plants take those minerals up through their roots. Animals eat the plants. People eat both. The nitrogen in the protein of the bread you ate this morning has been through this cycle more times than anyone can count, and some measurable share of it has been part of a person before.

Bradford has been continuously lived in since at least the Saxons. Every field, allotment and churchyard in the West Riding has been holding people for a thousand years and quietly turning them into cabbages. Nobody finds this comfortable. It is also not in dispute.

So when the 3am voice says you are on your own with this, the soil has an answer, and it is not a soothing one. It is a chemical one. You are, in the most precise sense available to us, made of people who felt what you are feeling and lived through it. The Roman soldier who lay awake before a battle. The wool trader who could not make the numbers work. The mother in 1349 who watched the neighbours' house go quiet. Every one of them was certain, at some point, that they were starting from nothing. Every one of them was wrong, and you are made of them.

Why a fact helps where a feeling does not

Anxiety is very good at arguing with comfort. Tell an anxious person "it will be fine" and the anxious mind, which is fast and clever and awake, produces six reasons it will not be. Comfort is an opinion, and opinions can be out-argued at 3am.

A fact is harder to argue with. Not you will probably be all right, which is a guess, but you are physically made of people who survived this, which is a measurement. It does not promise an outcome. It does not say the business will not fail or the diagnosis will be good. It says something smaller and stranger and more durable: whatever happens next, you are not the first, you are not alone, and the evidence is in your own cells.

Not as comfort. As fact.

Where this comes from

This is the opening argument of a novel I have spent the last while writing. It is called Be Anxious For Nothing, and it is about an angel named Bernard who is sent to thirteen people whose lives have quietly organised themselves around fear. He is given a jar and an instruction to drain the anxiety out of them, and he is not, on balance, very good at the job. He turns up unannounced with the good biscuits, sits down at the kitchen table, and agrees out loud with the thing each person is most afraid of. Then he asks the question nobody else asks. Not will it happen, but what happens after.

The soil is his favourite subject. He brings it up at the worst possible moments. The narrator apologises for it in the introduction. It is, I think, the truest thing in the book.

The novel is out on 4 February 2027, the week before Lent, because the argument it makes about disaster not being the end of anyone's story is the Easter argument. The first chapter is free now, as a PDF you can read on your phone: read chapter one, free.

If you are awake at 3am tonight

Three small, practical things, none of which is "calm down".

• Write the verse, not the worry. Copying scripture out by hand slows a racing mind in a way reading does not. Our 30-day Scripture Writing Plan for Anxiety gives you one verse a night on peace, worry and fear.
• Ask Bernard's question. Not "what if it happens" but "and then what". Follow the thread past the catastrophe to the morning after it. There is always a morning after it, and it is usually less dramatic than the night before.
• Remember what you are made of. Literally. Have a look at your hands. That is a thousand years of people who got through the night.

If this landed with you, it will land with someone you know who is awake right now. Send it to them. And if you would like the free chapter and the occasional honest note from a small faith-led family studio in Bradford, the free things we make are all in one place: giddymoose.com/collections/free-resources.

"Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus." — Philippians 4:6–7