The Long Journey Through Night, VI: When Fear Comes…

Panic’s a strange beast. It’s a terrible experience, a panic attack. Bad enough, that the thought that you’re about to have one can send you INTO one. Because you begin to fear the panic more than anything. That’s what happened to me. For the last several years, I fled every panic. It left my life tiny. Two years ago, I found if thoughts sent me into panic I could work my way back out through calm breathing. But that trick only worked if the thing causing me panic wasn’t continuing to sit in my face. So if I started to have a panic attack in a class or during a task, I still needed to flee to come out of it. The result was I hadn’t done anything intensive in a long, long time.

When April and May reintroduced me to my courage, I signed up for a few things: an activity club, a bike coop workshop, a cooking class. None of them monumental things. But I did it knowing that sooner or later, I’d have to address panic if I wanted to keep growing. More than once.

The Long Journey Through Night, V: April’s Coldest Snap

Everything fell into place when my car fell apart. I couldn’t tell you why. I’d been dreading it failing, along with a dread my computer would fail, my lease would fail, my body would fail. Mind you, I wasn’t doing anything about any of that—such is the way fear grips the heart.

And I’d been meaning to ditch the car anyway. But that’s a wonderful exercise in theory, when you’re considering it behind the wheel of your car.

So, when it failed, I shut down. And suddenly the crows and ravens around me were cast into sharp relief. And just as suddenly, my whole symbolic collection settled into a working system again. And the ravens called to me, “Fight! Fight!’ The way a coach would exhort his team to get back up and win the game they were trailing at the half. Fight! The way a father would tell he son to face his fear of trying something new. Fight! The way one must welcome every challenge life throws with aplomb and grace and zeal for the next challenge. Fight! You fight for what you hold dear, fight for your path, fight the sleep to wake up every morning, fight the fear to face your demons, fight your grief to create joy in the life of those you love and who love you.

Sometimes the crows cawing sounded like raucous laughter. Ungentle but not unkind. The sort of laughter a friend gives when you fall on your ass, as they help you back up and slap you on the back. Chiding, maybe. Filial. But always intended and attentive.

And so the car went but my will came back. Whenever that will would start to wane, I heard the call, “FIGHT! FIGHT!” and I’d find myself straightening up, shoulders back, head high and I’d suddenly find the bravery to walk into my fear, with avid anticipation and delight.

So I began to do just that.

Two nights into bouncing back from the car, the nightmare of holding shut a door came back to me. And this time, the two figures outside got in. For the first time in my life. Before I could see their faces I awoke, gripped with fear. But I sprang from bed in challenge. “Next time, I may yet try to keep you out, but sooner or later, I will master this fear and I will DARE you to come in then. I will be waiting and you will find the tables turned that night. If you want that day to come, then let’s have that dream again, right now. I’m waiting.” And I intend to stay ready.

The Long Journey Through Night, IV: The Masks of Goddess

I read a mountain of books on mythology. 20 plus years of such reading starts to push some of the symbolism out of the realm of the academic and into the circle of meaningful, personal life metaphors. You reach out your hand for an analogy to describe what’s happening to you and there at hand is a 2000+ year old Irish Goddess, as your own and immediate as that thing that happened to you one summer at camp that you still liken much of your adult life to. It’s a strange process.

I would put the symbol down, every time I pulled my hand back to find it there in my palm again. But it came more often through the middle of the last 8 years.

The Morrigan. An Irish Goddess of death, war and sex. The maligned half of the ancient great goddess of Ireland. When the Irish father God, the Dagda, married a good aspect of the goddess, it’s telling that he nevertheless had a yearly affair with the Morrigan as well. Her name means “The Great Queen” or the “The Spectral Queen”. But again, as I never talk about absolutes and I have no illusion that I’m talking about anything but my own personal metaphor, I’d probably say I have no relationship with THE Morrigan, but I’m finding a way to MY Morrigan.

Sex, death and war. But what I see when I read that trio is a personification of the blood pounding in my temples. Drive, passion, will, a refusal to surrender to hardship, dogged perseverance, a exultation in hardship because it’s a chance to fight on and grow, a love of grief because it gives one a chance to cultivate the bravery of letting yourself experience fear and knowing that the fear only makes you braver. She’s the feeling of life you get when you strive because you believe you have a right to and because you believe you have the power to. And because you realize life is in the striving.

The animal most associated with the Morrigan is the crow, or raven. And for years I’ve been seeing them. I mean, they’re everywhere, right? So we all do. But I’ve instantly noticed them, watched them—my ears are keyed to hear them first and foremost in a noisy cityscape or in the woods. My head cranes to look when they call, of its own. And I feel like they’re looking back.

The Long Journey Through Night, III: The Masks of God

I cannot speak of what the absolute is. So I can’t speak of faith or my beliefs in any concrete way. I would describe myself as a devout, militant agnostic. I reside powerfully in the sublime realization that I do not know, that I cannot know.

So I have no concept of what THE Divine looks like. But I know what my life’s narrative feels like to me. So, at times, I gain a feeling of what MY Divine might look like. In that moment of time, at that place.

For much of my adult life, when I closed my eyes and saw the Universe as I felt it must be when it looked upon me, I saw a circle of my ancestors, arrayed around me. Like a council where I had the talking stick, or a dance jam where they were all gathered to cheer me on. My grandparents were arrayed behind me, their hands on my shoulders, offering strength.

That image formed slowly over time; pieces fell into place as years progressed.

When I hit the rough patch of my 30s, the image stopped working. A circle around me, as I stood in place. There was no movement anywhere. The circle hemmed me in. And I have no idea what my ancestors all look like. So mostly it was a featureless circle of silhouettes. Silhouettes not unlike the silhouette of panic I awoke to at night, when I startled from nightmares as a child. And my grandparents in my mind’s eye offered encouragement, but no drive or direction or strength. So, they were really nothing like my grandparents in the world, but such is the limitation of a child’s perspective, which is the only one I really ever had of them.

As it stopped feeling right, I let my image of the divine go. And another one swooped in on me. It had been materializing for years. But it was still a shock when it arrived.

The Long Journey Through Night, II: 20 Years Before My Past

As I reached adulthood, I realized how much I’d done in my teens to keep people at arm’s length, how temporary a solution it all was. I dismantled the outward trappings of the persona and tried to find my way to social connection again.

I did. I found dance. I danced with thousands of strangers. I found friends. Lots of them. Around the world. Friends found me high paying prestige work. I was connected, I was successful. I finally felt like an adult. But the panic was coming back, slowly. And there was no longer a persona to hold it at bay.

A panic attack hit me my 30th year. A month later, another followed. Then two weeks after that, a third. Six months later, I was having around three a day, every day. My thoughts turned dark. I left work and sought help.

But all the help offered no way out. Every time I sought to stretch again, regain something I’d felt I lost, panic would return, ever more powerful than the last time. I retreated time and again, but all that does is make life smaller each time I fall back. My life became one room. And the nightmares of holding doors closed returned.

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.

The Zen of Loss

I was talking with my friend A about hedonism today and it occurred to me that I tend to attract two kinds of folks in my life: bohemians (many of whom are hedonists) and hippies (many of whom live ascetically).

For much of my life I believed that hedonism was the opposite of asceticism. But our talk reminded me of a personal epiphany I had a year or more ago, that hedonism isn't actually the opposite of asceticism at all. I think deep asceticism is actually the heart of hedonism.

An ascetic seems to give up all the fluff of life. All the meat, all the neat stuff. But it dawned on me that one doesn't do that because that stuff's not great. But because the greatness of that stuff is intrinsic to everything. If you get a buzz from fine clothing, when you're poor, you're nothing. If your buzz comes from sex, then when you're alone, you're bereft. If your buzz comes from food, real hunger is the end of the world. But if you strip away every distraction, and look hard enough til you can experience that buzz from BREATHING, then there is nothing in life that is anything but bliss. An ascetic's so far into hedonism, they don't need the stuff anymore. Everything bestows that joy.

I bring this up because it's core to what's going on with me right now. I've said to many that I'm feeling much better lately. A lot of folks probably don't even know what was so bad in the first place, so in a nutshell here's what's been bad: a lifetime of PTSD, depression and social anxiety that spiraled into full blown chronic panic attacks for the last 7 years. And this last year I was so shut down I barely functioned at all.

So, when I say I'm feeling much, MUCH better, I mean that. I feel FUNCTIONAL. I cannot stress how much of a rush that is when you've felt inert every day for a year or more. I'm still scared, I'm still shy, I still struggle with sleep. But there's no similarity between functional depression and nonfuctional depression. It hurts terribly when it's moderate depression. But when it's so bad you can't do anything, it makes that moderate depression look like a half-hour cartoon special about Strawberry Shortcake singing about how berry, berry wonderful everything is. Moderate, severe; no relation. I feel better than both of those.

What happened to bring that about? That brings me back to the musing on asceticism. I got a flat tire three weeks ago. I'm poor--I could manage a tire, probably. With difficulty. It's money that should go elsewhere. But another thing will soon break on my old car and there's no way I could afford to fix anything more than a tire. I'd been meaning to get rid of the car for ages now. I can't afford a car. But the idea of getting rid of a car, while you're driving it to the store in the snow, is too scary to think about for long. I've been living in mortal terror the car would die on me. And basically, it did.

I melted down. I clambered into bed for six hours and hoped I'd never wake up. The universe cruelly denied my wish. I got up, but the hopelessness was gone. I had a meeting the next day I didn't want to miss. I walked to the credit union, by the bus stop that would go to where I needed the following day. I timed the walk. I got money from the ATM for a bus pass. I came back and checked the bus schedule. It occurred to me the curse was a blessing. It was the best season to start walking--spring. It was the most readily adapted-to thing I could have break down--much better than an eviction or a heart attack. It was timed and chosen exactly suited to my needs.

I felt more actualized and accomplished than I had in maybe 7 years. I hate cars. I always have, even when I was too scared to live without one. They're cop outs. They're crutches. I realized I didn't need one. But I would need to plan. Plan my days around bus schedules and around grocery store runs. I'd need to plan my weeks around laundry trips to the nearest laundromat, miles away.

It brought me out of my house. It brought me out in the sun. It forced me to exercise. It forced me to eat small (only so much I can carry back home). It put me next to people who I started talking to again. It gave me energy and a feeling of control. It made me feel human again. I started enjoying sun, clouds, wind, sky, rain. I'm enjoying life more because the simple stuff is harder, so it's harder to take for granted. It gives me less time to endlessly fret over the big stuff.

I carry a backpack with me everywhere; pen, notebook, book, phone, water, shopping bag. I feel so much more alive. Everyone has their own way to that feeling. I don't recommend everyone give up their cars. But I wish the feeling on everyone, no matter what you have to do to get to the feeling.

I remember now how great I felt living in SF without a car. And while there were other factors more key, I know that I began to spiral down when I got a car. So, while there are still other factors, some more crucial, I feel like I'm ready to start the slow spiral back up. On foot.