If you hadn’t noticed, I tend toward the rosy in my writing. Even my academic prose inevitably morphs into hagiography. Without fail, I fall into narratives of progress. I become Hegelian without really understanding Hegel. I don’t know why this is. Sometimes I think it’s because I’m a fundamentally poor thinker incapable of sustaining complex thought. Or maybe it’s just because I’m an optimist at heart. It's not a little galling.
In all the rosiness in this space, I don’t reveal as much as I should--or could--about my struggles with panic and anxiety. This is especially glaring because there’s too little support for people suffering with panic, even in a big city like Philadelphia. I know this because I’ve been seeking it out for nearly two years. I keep hoping to stumble upon an AA-like group for panic, a network of the afflicted who could gather together and prop one another up, who could together learn to be different people altogether.
Though I don’t have such a group, I do spend a lot of time trying to get better. Recently I was rereading Reid Wilson's Don’t Panic, a kind of user’s guide to the disorder. A couple years ago, I did cognitive behavior therapy at Wilson’s clinic in Durham, and for a while, I got much better. But the last three months have been very, very tough. On me. On J. On my family. On my friends. Part of having panic is feeling like no one is going to catch you when--not if--you fall.
One of Wilson’s suggestions is that you try to track where your mind goes just before you begin to panic. You try to identify a pattern, a set of thoughts that habitually trigger an attack. I’ve spent the last couple weeks trying to do this, trying to be conscious of the moments--seconds, really--just before everything begins to feel utterly terrifying. In the process of listening to those moments, I had a major breakthrough.
My panic is almost always proceeded by the sound of silence. And this ain’t no Simon and Garfunkel melodic silence (save, perhaps, for my own “restless dreams of walking alone”). It took me a long time to figure this out because I couldn’t seem to identify a common thread of thinking, and then I realized with a start that I couldn’t identify a common thread because there was no thinking at all. Panic was filling up my spaces of silence.
One of the least intuitive things about panic is that it has to be conquered head-on; the “I just need to relax” approach almost always fails. The “you just need to relax” approach that friends and family prescribe will always fail.
The “bring on the panic” (a kind of perverse mantra repeated in the moment of panic) is what works. Sitting and allowing--inviting, really--the panic to wash over you is what takes the wind out of its sails.
So in thinking about my own silences and their proclivity to turn toward panic, I feel a compulsion to sit with my silence. I bought a candle in a tall glass jar (it was the only unscented one in the grocery store on my block) and have sat on my floor each of the last three evenings, lit the candle, held a kentucky acorn in my nervous palm, and let the silence come. I invite it in. The first night, I lasted about three minutes before I needed to get up and move. Last night it was fifteen, and as I went to blow out the candle, I noticed a label on its side: “Seven Day Candle.”
It turns out that Seven Day Candles are ritual candles, used for hoodoo and voodoo, by Christians and Pagans, Greeks and magicians. It seems perfectly appropriate, then, that I’ve been casting a spell over myself, that I’ve been cleansing my ailing mind without really meaning to. I’m hopeful about this new approach, this getting comfortable with my silences.
One of my closest friends is coming this weekend, and I’m eager to share this process with her, to make it something about which I’m not ashamed. Panic wants to be hidden, but when you force it out into the open, it can’t really survive, at least not in that very moment.
See, damn it, I can't help but write about progress, once again. Surely it's a sign of feeblemindedness.
1 comment:
I have Don't Panic! :) And I like this notion of sitting with it... we talked about that a lot in the mindfulness class I took a few years back. It's so weird - I'm finding myself sitting silently doing nothing all the time now, and I almost have to call myself back into action. All I really want to do is lie down (or sit) and think of nothing. That is not normal for me. I know what you mean about not feeling in control when these panicky moments (weeks, months) strike... it sucks. I could feel one coming on a few weeks ago and I about had a heart attack as I saw that I might spiral down into a pit that I had been in many times before... all seemingly triggered by a chance event. You are right, though, the key is not resisting it, but just letting it wash over and then realizing (amazingly) that it passes. It is a state like other states, really, and you still have to get up and get out and function in the world. For me, panic stems from feeling out of control, which I'm not good at. The panic operates as a coping mechanism and fills my time, even as I know it isn't doing anything to fix the problem. It gives me a sense of work. Even though afterwards I have nothing to show for it, I'm wiped out and relieved (which on some level, mimics the results of work, of progress). But it's not real work, and it's actually keeping me (and others!) away from real work: that's what I always have to help myself (re)realize.
Sending much love your way. I'm thinking of you!
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