It never fails

Every time I get to a point where I’m thinking, yeah, I’m pretty on top of things, I’m doing good, even when bad things happen I handle them with aplomb and total health and fortune — every time this happens, I end up having panic attacks, out of fucking nowhere. I have a few theories:

1. I’m afraid of doing well and am subconsciously knocking myself down a peg. I don’t think this is the case. I mean, I guess you never really know what your subconscious is doing, but it seems all too simple a scapegoat — some part of me over which I have no control or understanding just makes me do these things! I may as well blame demons. Also, I’m really pleased by the idea of doing well. Being happy doesn’t freak me out. There was a time where I believed being happy didn’t exist as a real concept, but it was never something I glumly refused to want.

2. I am not in fact doing well. I am, in fact, a total goddamn wreck. I always have been. I always will be. I don’t really consider this a real possibility, either, though it’s a thought loop that persistently reappears like some Uzumaki curse (we love bad spirals! we want bad spirals! we are bad spirals!), or a bad ex leaving messages on my phone. “Oh, hey, it’s me. Just, uh, just wanted to see if maybe you, uh, maybe you wanted to give it another go? I know I made you miserable and all, but, um, well, maybe this time would be different? It’s just, I was thinking about dysfunctional relationships the other day and, well… I really started to miss you. I just haven’t found anybody else to really have a mental breakdown with. Call me? Let’s freak out!”

3. Every time I begin to have the conscious and pervasive thought that, “I am doing so well, my life is so totally on track,” this is, in fact, a defense mechanism to keep me from dealing with whatever is actually causing me some intolerable inner turmoil. Because when I am doing well, when everything is so totally on track, I don’t walk around thinking about it. So when I do find myself constantly saying, “Everything is going so well. So wonderfully. I’m on top of it. I’ve never been so on top of everything in my life. I am so healthy. So full of health,” I should prepare myself for the onslaught of unexamined emotional knots. Which, it ought not surprise me, comes out in one massive attention-getting wave, like a goddamn panic attack.

My dad was not exactly a fountain of wisdom, but every now and again he left me with some surprisingly good gems. Once, he told me how you can tell who is actually a recovering addict vs. who is due for a relapse. Someone in recovery, he said, talks about a lot of different things. Somebody due for a relapse talks about how recovered they are, because that’s the only way they can spend their time obsessively thinking about the drug they’re addicted to without somebody calling them on it. To wit, the guy who says, “I can see how my issues with my mother really played into my feelings of inadequacy, which I felt like alcohol solved,” is a guy who is thinking about his life as a whole. The guy who says, “I quit drinking! Did you know I quit drinking! Everything has been different since I quit drinking! I had that last drink, and now I see everything differently, including drinking!” is a guy who is thinking about a drink.

I thought of my dad during an incident with Mr. Flint, near the end of our marriage. We had moved in with Flint’s parents, in anticipation of some enormous medical bills Flint had racked up by refusing to get insurance. Our marriage was on the rocks, and anybody could see it, though he pretended not to — despite my having told him I was in love with another man, and wasn’t sure if I could stay happy with him anymore. He was unemployed, and I was working part time as a soda jerk. He had just started attending Marijuana Anonymous, after a lot of heavy pressure from me, and I was reading a lot of Al-Anon books to try and do my part. As soon as he started doing MA, after the first meeting, even, Flint went around crowing about his good health, how he’d finally put his head together. How great it was to be sober. How he had realized how much of a fuck-up he’d been and now he was better. Oh, and also, now he was better enough to tell me everything I had ever fucked-up in our marriage, and how I was an addict, too, and I really needed to go to his meetings with him. Note to people in abusive relationships: a 12-step program will not make your abusive boyfriend better. It just gives him new words to abuse you with, like “enabler” and “co-dependent” and “denial” and “addict.”

Anyway, all this was obviously taking a toll on Flint’s parents, though they wouldn’t say so, because they never said anything, and I pretty much had the feeling that was the overbearing silent #1 rule of his father: we don’t talk about the bad things or the bad things will be real, and we will have to deal with them. Flint’s mother was the one who would break first, and cry about something, or rant about something, and then it would be, oh, Flint’s mom, she’s so emotional. So one day, Flint’s little brother had gotten into an accident with Flint’s parents’ car. Fixable, but expensive. Flint’s mom was moping around the house, just in a depressive glaze, and Flint and I offered to take her out for coffee. She told us how everything in her life just seemed to go wrong, in little or big ways, and she just wasn’t sure how much she could take.

“But hey!” Flint said. “I’m doing better!”

Well, yes, she said, and that’s great, but the thing was, it just seemed like everything was coming down on her, and she never knew what would happen next, and she was just so exhausted from dealing and–

“But hey!” Flint said. “I’m doing better!”

There were a thousand little silent comments floating between Flint’s mother and me. Things like, then why is our fucking marriage falling apart, and then why are you living in my goddamn basement, or why don’t you have a job, or why are you 90 pounds when wet, or why are you generally such a goddamn pain in the ass that I don’t even introduce you anymore when my friends come over.

“I’m better now, Mom,” he kept saying, smiling and oblivious. “I’m all better.”

/Flint uzumaki

It occurred to me today that, for me, health and strength are really inverse. When I feel very strong, I am usually unhealthy — I need that strength to grit my teeth through a panic attack, pretend I’m happy, pretend everything is okay. When I feel very healthy, I feel very weak and vulnerable, because when I am at my healthiest, I am letting myself feel my emotions without making any attempt to squelch them, and I am setting very clear boundaries with others and myself about the things I cannot handle right now because I am not strong enough. When I’m healthy, I am admitting that things hurt me, that I am hurt, that life is difficult. When I’m unhealthy, “Hey, I’m doing better!”

So when I find myself spending my day ruminating on how very strong I am, I ought to immediately ask myself, “Strong enough for what?” Because obviously, there is something I need to be strong enough to bear.

Some things have happened that I can deal with, but none of these things have definitive solutions. They’re all things I need to wait out, can’t control, or don’t understand. Usually that kind of stuff is okay with me. That’s something I’ve worked on a lot, dealing with the unresolved. But almost all the unresolved situations in my life currently involve dysfunctional or potentially dysfunctional relationships, and perhaps I find that kind of uncertainty intolerable. It creates a sort of constant panic and fear in me — what’s going to happen? Will it be traumatic? Will it change my life? Am I going to end up with another totally fucked-up story that nobody will ever believe? Because goddammit, my whole life is that story, and I don’t need another. Instead of recognizing that this is causing me to panic, I’ve gone the “But I’m better!” route and assumed I can and should deal with this head-on. I haven’t really allowed myself room to just feel all fucked-up about it, which I think is an okay way to feel about an all fucked-up thing. And, too, moving into a house with roommates has limited the spaces I have where I can be alone and not have even the most minimal of conversations with another human being. Because sometimes, I think, I need that.