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.
