Panic and anxiety

Did I mention that this blog is more or less my psychological dumping ground? Or did you already figure that out, you’re so smart.

I used to do a lot more blogging about news and politics and things. I used to do a lot more thinking about those things, for that matter. Sometimes I feel like I’ve become an incredibly boring and self-involved person, as if I have an obligation to care about current events, and that not doing so makes me a bad person. But I know a few things: 1) I cared and blogged most about those things when I was desperately trying to avoid thinking about myself and my own life, 2) anybody in my life who has ever gone “OMG you don’t know what was on Salon.com today?” has turned out to be a complete freak, 3) Regardless of the above two facts, I have completely internalized the habit of storing up a basic knowledge of recent events to stave off deeper personal discussion and any possibility of ridicule for being uninformed.

I also know that 4) I used to be in college, with ideals and optimism and that 5) I can care about current events all I want, and there is nothing I can do about them, ever. The presidential election may as well be happening on Mars, politics and change and progressivism some kind of wild moon talk. I could care, but aside from some vague sort of karmic sense of energy going out into the universe, giving a shit about the outside world and its drama parties is about the least effective thing I could ever do.

Okay, okay. You got me. Long explanation boils down to: I am too fragile and broken to care about anything but myself. Sometimes I am all down on myself about this. But mostly I know I’m fixing my own house before I start breaking somebody else’s.

I think I’ve been having panic attacks again. That “I think” might sound kind of ridiculous, but I have generally been such a tense person my whole life that it’s hard for me to recognize when that tension has crossed the boundary into something unhealthy.

I used to have a lot of panic attacks. I mean, A LOT. Daily, twice daily, three times, since high school mostly, which meant I didn’t even know they were panic attacks. They had always been there, and I had no idea that other people didn’t experience the same things. That might sound ridiculous, too. But here’s how it went for me: Somebody would say, “You know that feeling you get in your tummy when you’re really nervous?” and I’d say, “yes!”, never realizing that the bad feeling they got in their tummy was nothing like the one I had in mine, the one that also caused my vision to tunnel and my breathing to stop because my throat swelled up. I thought, well, everybody talks about getting nervous sometimes, or their heart speeds up and they can’t see straight and things. I guess that’s normal, and I guess there must be something really wrong with me, that this very normal basic thing everybody feels is just unbelievably crippling to me.

So I learned, as a reflex, to hide it. Everybody gets bumps and bruises in life, and I didn’t want to be the whiny asshole who squealed like a pig every time somebody brushed against them too hard. Obviously I just couldn’t cope with the ordinary stresses in life, because I was so weak and broken inside. I somehow developed this way of going on auto-pilot, having part of my brain black out while yellow bands flashed in front of my eyes, and the other part of my brain propelled my feet across the street at appropriate moments and raised my hand and answered questions like is Garveyism masculinism, and is that inherently problematic, and laugh laugh laugh like a normal person no no don’t cry jesus LAUGH HARDER.

Occasionally, very occasionally, if I was completely alone, I might curl myself into a ball and say, okay, it’s okay, you can relax, and find myself horrified and completely surprised by the guttural, nonsensical animal sounds that would start pouring out of my mouth as I started shaking like an epileptic. So, I didn’t do that very often. Back in the days that I smoked pot, I’d sometimes cope by getting high as shit, though that never really worked at all. I had about a year of fun with pot, smoking it very occasionally, but pretty soon it became an additional source of major anxiety. There was all the problems in my life it became representative of and inextricably tied to — my abusive husband, who stole my money to buy it and did terrible things to me that he later blamed on being “too high”, my shitty friends who would refuse to engage in anything social if pot wasn’t involved, my house that smelled terribly, my lack of other hobbies or friends — but it also just had a nasty chemical effect on me, amplifying my paranoia and hypersensitivity and obsessive attention to interpersonal detail. Oh god the way that guy sniffed just now. It was full of loathing. He hates me. I’m so boring. But I can’t let him know I know that he thinks I’m boring. Quick, say something stupid and wiggle your tits and hate yourself because you are a feminist and you do this shit.

I think, mostly, pot just gave me an awesome excuse for my panic attacks. The same way Mr. Flint would have sex with another woman while I sat in the bathtub crying, or tell me I could really stand to lose some weight and stop talking so much and I thought I was so smart but he knew what I was really like, and later say, “Sorry, I was high!” as if that somehow made any fucking sense at all, I would smoke up and feel as if I was about to have a heart attack, black out, jump off our balcony, obviously, I was just high. Not miserable, not depressed, not suicidal, just high and talking shit. I mean, I know what kind of wacked-out denial that sounds like, but it’s a massive feedback loop, because really, being depressed and suicidal and miserable fucks up your ability to think clearly to begin with — add never being sober on top of that, and it’s nigh impossible to find your way back to the logic train. It’s not that you can’t think clearly because you’re high and crazy — obviously, you can’t think clearly at all until you get high, because that’s when you come up with the answers that make the least sense and have the least emotional impact on your muddied and novocained brain.

An example:

A guy I knew in college could not get over the only girlfriend he’d ever had, back in high school. Talked about her all the goddamn time. Analyzed and re-analyzed the way she looked at him at the high school dance, what her friends had said, the curling of her cute little nose. OH MY GOD MAN we’d all say. SHUT THE FUCK UP ABOUT YOUR EX GIRLFRIEND it was like SIX YEARS AGO. Once I pulled him aside because he had stopped speaking coherently. Words came out of his mouth, but they no longer made sense. Not in a metaphorical way. In utter seriousness, he could just no longer communicate like normal humans. It was all hand-waving and anxious teeth-sucking and aaaaaahhbiaidlakdn as if what he said made sense.

I pulled him aside and said, So, you have a drug problem. You are smoking a lot of opium and a lot of pot and Wild Turkey Tuesday has become Wild Turkey Monday and Wednesday and Thursday and Friday and Saturday and Sunday is when you “drink socially.” You can’t think clearly and are depressed because your brain is all fucked up on drugs.

No, no, he said. I can only think clearly when I’m drunk. That’s when it doesn’t hurt to think about Ephermal Ex-Girlfriend, so that’s when I get my best thinking about her done.

Did you think, guy, says I, that ex-girlfriend is not the problem. That she is just when the cracks in your life opened up.

Exactly, he says.

What? I say.

Hysterical coke crying. Other boys file into room. Call him a pussy ass bitch. He stops crying and goes outside to ride his bike around the house in the rain because he is not a pussy, he is tough and has snorted a lot of coke. Boys say, why is he always crying. I say, did you guys notice that he cries the most when his friends insult him. Aw, we’re drunk, they say. He knows what it’s like.

Anyway. Off the track. My panic attacks used to be a lot worse, is what I mean to say, and I used to come up with a lot more wild and convoluted reasons why I had them, because I was deep into the shit and I was also fucked-up on drugs. But old habits die hard, and I realize now that at about the same time of day, every day, I am starting to panic wildly. It can happen at other times of day, too, but it is definitely happening at the same time of day, every day, at work. I only notice attacks happening once I’m well into them, because I still have a habit of letting it creep up on me, of engaging in avoidance behavior, until I am so overwhelmed that I can only sit gripping the edge of my desk. And then, I think, what’s wrong? Of course, by this point, everything’s wrong, because I can’t think clearly about anything. Whatever the original problem was, if there was one, is now lost in a teeming sea of everything in my world that I want to have control of and don’t.

Which I didn’t realize until I wrote that. I have been sitting here trying to find the link between all the thoughts punching at my brain — anxious thoughts of friends in bad ways, angry and frightened thoughts/flashbacks of Mr. Flint, of my father, paranoia about how my future doesn’t have a life plan attached to it anymore, thoughts of things that happened yeeeeeeeears ago, and what I could have and should have said that would have changed everything and made it all better. These are all things I can’t control, and the more freaked out and helpless I feel, the more I feel like I should have control over those things, that there’s something wrong with me that I don’t, and that I need to work harder/be harder because I’m obviously completely weak.

I tried doing something I learned in a psych book I picked up along the way, some form of cognitive behavioral therapy. They’re called ABC sheets, and they go something like this:

1. First, get yourself all depressed and fucked up about something.

2. Next, go back and try to remember what triggered it. Don’t think too far back, we’re talking, what happened today to fuck you up. No good using cop-outs: well, I’ve always been depressed. Did you feel this way this morning? No? Well, what happened between now and then?

3. That event is the Activating Event. Write it down. (Or meditate on it real hard)

4. What did you do next? What did you think? That’s your Behavior. Write/meditate.

5. And then what happened? How did you feel after? That’s your Consequence.

A (activating event)
B (behavior)
C (Consequence)

ABC Sheets.

The idea is that our reaction to events has more to do with our emotions than anything else. Example:

Activating Event: You see a friend of yours walking down the street, and wave to them, and they don’t wave back.

Behavior: You think they must hate you. You must have done something wrong and they don’t want to tell you because they’re too nice. But you know perfectly well what it was, don’t you? You’ve always known you were wrong and that everybody good in your life would leave you, because that’s what you deserve.

Consequence: Punch drink cry.

As opposed to:

Behavior: They must not have seen me. They have seemed busy lately, I bet they’re distracted. I’ll call them later and see what’s up.

Consequence: A sammitch would be pretty good right now. Fuck yeah.

This method doesn’t work for me on my depression. That’s not a thing that comes and goes like a punch to the belly. Rather, it’s a constant horizon, something that always seems to be waiting for me to ride off into it, thinking I’m being some kind of lonesome cowboy instead of some Into the Wild retard (I should maybe mention that I really think Jon Krakauer’s a hack). But this does seem to work on my anxiety, sometimes, when I can calm down long enough to focus. What I learned today:

Activating Event: I start having panic attacks around lunch.

Behavior: I don’t want to eat because I think I’m fat and I’d rather be working and drinking too much coffee and working and working and working and being very manic.

Consequence: I have never been manic, it is just not who I am. Not eating makes me feel shitty, and makes me hungrier, and makes me eat more, which makes me feel fatter, which makes me feel depressed, which is the opposite of manic, which makes me more depressed. I begin to think about everything I have ever done wrong, or not well enough, everything I could somehow magically solve if I could just learn how to control myself perfectly. Panic. Anxiety. Not Good Enough. Also, Fat and Ugly and essentially Unlovable and Seriously how can Anybody Stand Me.

All of this begins with some sort of meta-ABC sheet that goes something like this:

Activating Event: Painful memories

Behavior: Well that’s over now and why don’t you just get the fuck over it and nobody wants to deal with you being all fucked-up all the time, least of all you.

Consequence: I should lose some weight so it takes people longer to realize that I am ugly on the inside. Also I should only make witty and charming comments from now on. And I should regulate my face better so nobody knows when I’m sad. And really, when you think about it, what was so bad about self-injury? You sure worked harder back then and didn’t think about being fucked-up all the time.

I dunno, all this stuff sounds really worrisome and fucked-up. It is. But I don’t think I’ve ever been able to talk about it so clearly, or recognize it, even if I haven’t been able to take that extra step of making it Not Happen. And I have been trying a new thing:

Activating Event: Painful memories. Fucked-up thoughts. Panic. Anxiety. Self-hatred.

Behavior: Let it out let it out let it out

Consequence: Begin to write a manic, terrified, hysterical journal entry about how I can’t start my life over, these wounds will never close, I’ll never be healed and normal and I destroyed my life so much that now that things are good I can’t even raise my head. Stop. Think. Turn self into 50 year old woman who stayed married to a lesser version of Mr. Flint. What would it be like to start over then, instead of 24? At a place where those feelings of being unable to jump-start your life, of time wasted, lives wasted would be more salient? More relevant? Write story. Think, well, maybe I’m not fucked up. Maybe I’m just an artist. That’s like a whole secret club of fucked-up that’s okay to be. At least I am not the guy who just paints pictures of the letter “I” all day.

I’m going through a spell right now. I don’t think I’ve felt this vulnerable since my divorce. It’s inhibiting my ability to connect with others, and be present. Back then, my therapist told me that I had never in my life given myself the luxury of not forcing myself to connect with others, of not being present and available for anything and anybody, and that it was okay and good and right for me to spend time curled up on the floor having a crisis. That felt like such decadence at the time, but I managed to do it, and I liked it a lot, too. When I cut off all my hair drunk to the gills, and put weird shit all over my walls, I felt like I was embracing the crazy, like crazy could be an identity that was my own instead of something somebody else gave me. I could be crazy girl like romantic comedy crazy girl, and not crazy girl like worthless and ugly and fat in a straitjacket. Somewhere along the way I forgot how to do that, and just started getting paranoid that other people were looking at me and I was looking ugly.

Panic attack subsided. Back to work, then.