Into the void...
“That night she sat for hours, too numb even to drink, teaching herself to breathe in a vacuum. For this, oh God, was the void. There was nobody who could help her. Nobody in the world. They were all on something, mad, possible enemies, dead.”
-Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49
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2002-07-30
12:07 p.m.
Last night, I fell apart. One minute I was watching TV, and the next thing I knew I was coughing and sputtering, fighting off the simultaneous and ferocious tension in every muscle in my body, trying desperately to manipulate my body into a position that would encourage the breathing mechanism that's supposedly involuntary. My brain seized hold of all the nerves and anxieties in my physical and mental being, and my muscles wrapped themselves like constricting snakes around the pathways of my body that require freedom of movement, like veins and the esophagus and the spine.
I feel like absolute hell.
The panic attacks I get come literally from nowhere, and they startle me so violently that I feel simultaneously like I've been thrown off a cliff and held underwater so that I'm flailing around in mid-air while gasping for oxygen in a watery environment. My spine is still prickly from the sudden violence it withstood last night. My muscles are still sore and stiff. My throat is still reeling from the attack it underwent.
My mind is a diaphanous haze of nothingness.
My brain feels like it went through a mental war last night. My body feels like it was violently attacked and raped by an unwelcome stranger in the middle of the night. My panic attacks are a struggle to survive. The moment I realize I'm having a full-fledged panic attack is the moment I become increasingly panicked by the thought of the horror I'm about to withstand. I don't remember an attack like this one since my senior year in college when I collapsed in the middle of my bedroom floor with my forearm spurting blood and my eyeballs feeling like someone was pounding on them from the inside with tiny but powerful sledgehammers.
I'm still dizzy and confused. I'm still having trouble breathing. I'm still a little wobbly and shaky like I've just learned how to walk, talk, and think. My neck is still having difficulty supporting my head. My eyes are still barely able to focus. My mind keeps involuntarily lurching backwards into some esoteric realm of fogginess that I can't understand at all.
And I'm supposed to just go back to work like nothing happened.
But something DID happen, goddammit. If Rob hadn't been there last night, I surely would've found some way to crawl to the hospital because I was so scared that I just wanted to grab some doctors by their perfectly clean, sterile, healthy, sane white jackets and scream in the faces, "LOOK AT ME! DO SOMETHING ABOUT THIS! I CAN'T TAKE IT ANYMORE!!!!!"
Every time I have a panic attack this severe, I feel like I've aged about two more decades. The energy that could've been stored up for a lifetime of exertion exploded all at once in a disastrous combustion of pain. One would think I experience enough pain on a daily basis the way it is, but, apparently, I'm not allowed to lead an even remotely human vein of existence. The stress, the worry, the anxiety, the constant wondering if it's going to work out or if I'm going to kill myself without realizing it, the daily reaffirmation of limitations placed around my neck like a chain detaining my ability to live life as an ordinary human being by my debilitating disease must not be enough. The constant pain must be complimented by these sudden, horrific, cannon-blast shocks to my already failing system.
It only makes sense.
For the slower readers out there, that was sarcasm. I'm sick of pretending to graciously accept this. I'm sick of trying to put up with this. I'm sick of feeling guilty for whining like a little brat whenever I experience a life-altering panic attack. I'm sick of being shaken like a human snow-globe so that my chaotically rearranged characteristics can scramble into some shape of a human form once again in an effort to fake my sanity for the sake of everyone else ten seconds before someone picks the damn snow-globe up again just to shake me off my feet repeatedly.
Fuck it. Fuck it all. Fuck the attempts to look busy and intelligent at work. Fuck the next Great American Novel. Fuck the conditioned response of optimism whenever someone asks how I'm doing. Fuck the hollow statements that come from my mouth when I'm asked a question by one of those less sagacious humans out there who supposes their life is as difficult as mine, when they wouldn't last two seconds through one of those tragically disheartening, hope-corrupting, value-disgracing, health-destroying episodes that feel like someone is scraping out your brain with an ice-pick and scratching the sharp metal edge up against the side of your skull with a horrible screech like nails on a chalkboard over and over and over and over....
I have had it.
I don't even know what to do anymore. I'm already on the strongest anti-anxiety antidepressant on the market. I'm already on drugs that make it stronger. I'm too tired of bothering to worry about trying to find new medications or any of that bullshit. I'm down to frustrated resignation and furious yet apathetic acceptance. I don't have the strength to fight it anymore.
Let it do to me what it will.
