The Long Journey Through Night, I: Shadow Boxing

When I was a child, panic was my constant companion. It was a living thing. By day, it had its hands around my neck. Every breath was a labor and I lapsed into silence because all my words could not find their way through the narrow constrict of my throat. At night, panic was a black silhouette hovering over my face, its hand pressed against my mouth, til the breath in my lungs turned to poison and I scrambled the long hours of darkness for air.

I ran from panic. I had no other solution, no one I felt I could confide in. When a person panicked me, I cut them from my life—without malice but without choice. When a project panicked me, I shut down. School became failure, loneliness soared, family vanished from my view. The more I was cajoled to say what was wrong, the more caged I felt, and the more I shut the doors, tightly. My most profound, constant nightmares were of doors that would not lock properly, as unseen assailants would throw themselves bodily against them as I tried to hold the doors closed with all my will and muscle.

My teens, I found a way through panic with defiance. A shrewd, mocking defiance that manifested in a persona I came to call the “Fuck You Man”. I acted oddly to defy people’s conceptions of me. I was positive everyone misunderstood and hated me—why not make them do so as an act of will, instead of waiting for them to do it for me? I wore stupid clothes, I walked stupidly, I spelled my name stupidly. And the panic subsided, as did the anxiety and depression that were part of it.