Panic and Memory

The other morning, and twenty years ago

Content note: this essay contains discussion of pregnancy loss and mental illness.

I had a panic attack the other morning. This isn’t especially out of the ordinary for me, though I am happy to say it is no longer the norm in my day-to-day, week-to-week or even month-to-month life.

I suppose if I counted up all the panic attacks I’ve had since I was about eight years old, they’d number somewhere in the hundreds. It’s been 36 years since I was eight. There have been years when panic attacks dominated my life, and years when they hardly showed up at all. I don’t think I’ve gone even a single year without having one, though, and maybe I even had them when I was younger than eight.

They happen for different reasons. The grocery store was a recent recurring trigger for me, the resurgence of an old fixation, but I’ve mostly worked through that little flare-up. Here’s a free link to a recent animated piece from the New York Times Magazine where I got to get into the grocery store thing more, with artist Nata Metlukh at the helm.

It’s funny how there are some folks who get caught up in thinking a trigger is the issue. “Oh, you’re afraid of XYZ Simple Thing? Why? That’s so weird and weak.” Sometimes the “folks” who get caught up in mocking a trigger are in fact those of us who have the damn panic attacks, and we make nasty fun of ourselves for being human.

It’s never actually about XYZ Simple Thing, not really. The thing it’s really about is typically too complex and nuanced to get into with some random stranger, which is why writing and speaking about one’s own mental illness on the Internet is always a gamble, and why I don’t typically read the comments (unless they’re on my own newsletter.)

Nor do I only write or speak about that stuff. It just comes up so often in my life that as somebody who writes memoir and humor, it would almost be disingenuous to not mention it. It’s part of why I was attracted to the bizarre idea of writing a biography of Abraham Lincoln. His own suffering with “melancholia” and “hypochrondria” (contemporary euphemisms for a variety of mental maladies, but mostly for deep depression) is so well-documented and so relatable to so many of us. I’m not only focusing on that, but it was a major part of his life, so it would actually take more effort for me to ignore it.

Why did I have a panic attack the other morning? I’ve been thinking about that. There are a few things going on: I’m moving into a new home soon – and I guess I could just stop there, right? Moving is stressful for just about everybody, even when you’ve got lots of help and even professional movers.

But there’s more than the disruption of my location. I’m juggling different event planning gigs at work, where I do some copywriting and some copyediting and some consulting and also a bunch of project management for photo and video shoots.

Plus, I’m writing that book, and trying to get other freelance gigs I dig, and…see, a lot of these stressors are great things, things I wanted, things I’ve chosen. That’s why it can feel confusing to describe them as stressors.

Take my upcoming trip, for example. I’m traveling soon, and for an agoraphobic person like myself, any kind of travel can bring on a bit of anxiety – even when it’s for exciting reasons (a wedding of two dudes I like a lot, plus a performance by Beyoncé Giselle Knowles-Carter in a state I love very much.)

And I haven’t been feeling so good in my body lately, about the way I look and move in the world. I guess that means some critical voices have been pretty loud – not the useful kind that call me in when I’ve fucked up and help me see a way to make repair, but the nasty kind that sound like some of my family members obsessing over appearance.

I think what turns a regular old pile of anxieties into a full-on panic attack is often some kind of accelerant. I’d blame it on the rocket fuel-strength cold brewed espresso I had the other morning, but I have that nearly every morning. The espresso on this day, though, kicked my premenstrual cramps into high gear of the sort that leaves one curled up in a ball and weeping, and that sudden onslaught of pain is what really got my panic attack on its feet and dancing.

And this is where I come to the real heart of it. When my cramps get that fucking bad, which they do a few times a year, and when I know we’re in the ballpark of the worst physical pain I’ve ever felt in my little life…well, we do a little time-traveling.

The worst physical pain I’ve ever felt in my life was a pregnancy loss I experienced twenty years ago. I didn’t know I was pregnant, and it came on all of a sudden while I sat in class in graduate school. I was studying to be a high school English teacher. I’ve written about it elsewhere, and I won’t go into too much detail here. But it’s important for me to explain that while I didn’t know it was a miscarriage at first, I did know it hurt worse than anything else I’d ever felt. And that terrified me.

I could write more about what happened next, as if to prove to you that it really was very bad, but I don’t want to, and I’m just going to trust that you’ll believe me. I remember what the yellow fluorescent lights looked like when I lay on the bathroom floor in that academic building, is what I will say. That seems like something I should tell you. I don’t know why.

That was a long time ago. I don’t think about it very often. But my body remembers how it felt, and what it was like to be in such agony, and like I said, anytime I get remotely close to that old feeling – well, my logical mind takes a vacation.

And that’s when I sink into nausea, drowning in fear, with the rapid heartbeat and the disoriented vision and the all of the everything. If you have panic attacks, you know what it’s like. And if you don’t, I sometimes say it’s like when you’re really sick with the stomach flu, when you feel so awful you just wish you’d throw up already so you could start to feel even a little bit better, but it just isn’t happening yet, and you’re starting to freak out, because even though you logically know you’ve got the stomach flu and this too shall pass, part of you insanely, wildly believes it will always feel like this forever and ever.

It's kind of like that, but more so.

The panic attack I had the other morning was actually kind of special, because my mouth really did start watering like it does before you throw up, and that doesn’t happen much when I have a panic attack. I can’t recall it ever happening before! Look at that – after 36 years of panic attacks, my system can still surprise me and run an update without me even realizing it. I got to experience a new feature.

Things got under control. I took the pills I take when I need them. I said the prayers I say when I need them. I did the breathwork I do when I need it. It’s different from my daily meditation practice, and I don’t only deploy it during a panic attack, but breathwork is an incredible tool to help interrupt the fight, flight, freeze or fawn cycle.

I rescheduled some tasks to take some things off my plate, and I was fortunate to get to do so. And as for the reason beneath the trigger – well, it didn’t even occur to me until I sat down this evening to write to you about the panic attack I had the other morning.

I chose to never have biological children, and have never wanted to be pregnant, so I cannot honestly tell you that the pain I felt the other morning was the re-emergence of some decades-old grief. Instead, I’ll say it was the ghost of fear, of not knowing back in that dusty bathroom why my body hurt so bad, or what had snapped within me like a fragile, slim piece of glass, something sparkling in so muted a fashion that I didn’t even notice it until it broke.

Perhaps I’ve been too hasty in my assertion.

Perhaps my body mourns in ways my mind does not.

The other morning, it was just a bad bout of cramps, and a bad bout of panic. Within about an hour, the whole thing was over. But I have carried it with me like a strange unnamed knot all week, and now, in writing to you, I have named it and begun, perhaps, to unwind it.

Thank you for being here.

***

The day after that panic attack, I was still a little woozy but feeling a lot better. And I remembered it was the day the good people at the National Mental Health Corps had said they would be sharing a video I’d filmed for them a couple weeks prior in honor of National Mental Health Awareness Week.

The universe is - sometimes harshly, sometimes gently - hilarious.

I watched the video and thought, “Fuck, I’m glad I didn’t try to come off like somebody who has all her shit together.”

So here it is. It’s short and gets right to the point. I am very fortunate and would like to pay that forward in what ways I can, even if I can only do a little compared to what I’d like to do. I hope you’ll support the National Mental Health Corps, too.

Love,

Sara

988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline (staffed in part by National Mental Health Corps workers)

The Trevor Project

National Alliance on Mental Illness