A Is For Anxiety

At long last I have found the perfect metaphor for ANXIETY. Sadly, this metaphor comes from real life. Not surprisingly, the event occurred in Texas, which, unless you are a hardcore right wing white male, is pretty much a pit of anxiety on the daily. A woman named Peggy Jones was out tending her six-acres when a snake fell out of the sky, landed on her arm, wrapped itself around this flesh perch and began squeezing. 

As I am guessing most of us would do in this situation, Peggy began screaming. In return, the snake constricted more and then began striking at her face. Fortunately she was wearing glasses which afforded her a little protection. 

During this spontaneous dance with the snake, as if all that weren’t enough already, a hawk dive bombed the pair of them, hoping to retrieve its reptilian lunch, which it had dropped while flying over poor Peggy. 

Peggy, if you’re reading this, I’m so, so sorry that happened to you. Despite years of run-ins with snakes at my ranch, including once coming *this* close to stepping on a six-foot rattler, I have never fully acclimated. And while I mostly encounter non-venomous rat snakes, typically at a distance of at least a few yards, I still want to shit my pants every single time. 

Which is not at all unlike how I feel whenever anxiety drops into my life and begins constricting me and hissing in my face. I panic. I freak out. I strive to assess the situation in real time so as to hopefully alleviate it. Instead, usually what happens is that the emotional equivalent of a hungry, pissed off hawk shows up as if to say, “You thought you were already anxious? HAHAHAHAHA.”

This past Monday the Anxiety Anaconda dropped into my life, unbidden as ever. To be clear, there has not been a single day in my life I have not experienced some anxiety. I have worked hard to learn taming techniques—meditation, exercise, therapy, nutrition, asking for help etc. And these do help quite a bit with the low level, background buzz of being on edge that is my constant companion.

But some days Capital A Anxiety descends upon me with a grip so tight I literally have trouble breathing. Sadly, recognizing the thing for what it is is not enough for me to escape. 

When this happened on Monday, I had a choice to make. I could cancel my plans for the day and stay home and cry or I could push ahead. I decided on the latter. 

Because I had made two very different appointments that day without scheduling time in between for a costume change, I arrived at my first meeting dressed for my second meeting. Normally this would not be a big deal. But the second meeting was with a group of girlfriends to see Greta Gerwig’s adaptation of Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Women, for which I had decided to dress as Western Crone Barbie in a hot pink jumpsuit, pink Elton Johnesque glasses, and a pile of pin curls. 

Fortunately, my first meeting was at an art museum, The Old Bakery Emporium, a stone’s throw from the capitol. I was scheduled to meet with the director, who by coincidence is also the supervisor of my supervisors at the O. Henry Museum. OBE has a really cool program where they display and sell arts and crafts created by Austinites over the age of 50. The director had agreed to take a look at my pinch pots, bolos and a watercolor series called The Bluebird of Happiness. 

I stopped at a gas station on my way to town and noticed my stomach wanted to exit through my esophagus. I did a quick assessment. This might merely be a stomach bug, in which case rescheduling would be the correct move. More likely, I guessed it could be that I had imbibed the magical tincture my doctor turned me onto, in lieu of a prescription for Xanax. As one prone to addiction, Big Pharma Rx is always last on my list of solutions. The tincture works pretty well but the catch is that to me it tastes like shit. Also, on this day I had deposited it straight into an empty stomach because when I am having an anxiety attack the first thing to go is my appetite. 

I decided to forge ahead. I also decided that despite my extreme lack of appetite, I absolutely must put something into my system. I grabbed a P. Terry’s veggie burger to eat on the way. This is one of my Emergency Food Choices, a rare item I can almost always manage to get down even when other foods seem disgusting. 

I got two bites in and could not go any further. 

Still, I pressed on and drove into the city. Five minutes into my first meeting, I couldn’t take it anymore. I excused myself momentarily, stepped into the loo, bent over the toilet in my pink finery and blew major chunks. 

Let’s just say I would make a lousy bulimic. Even though I know that sometimes the only thing to bring relief to a twisted stomach is to hurl, the hurling itself freaks me out even more. 

I got through it, resumed my interview, took a tour of the amazing facility, and experienced momentary relief upon having my craft offerings accepted. I felt the deep gratitude of being treated with kindness and compassion regarding my sudden need to step away. 

On the drive to meet my friends, a memory visited me. It was August 2017 when I had a similar protracted anxiety attack which, like this recent one, seemed to pop up from nowhere. Very often I can pinpoint the source of my angst, December holidays come to mind—I know that, without fail, I will be functionless Christmas through NYE, that Christmas is a massive trigger. Though it might sound like splitting hairs, something about knowing the source of my anxiety and knowing when it is coming make the attacks slightly less terrifying. 

I wondered if I was experiencing some Body Keeps the Score trauma memory. The attack of August 2017 occurred in Rome. A feeling of severe, unshakable dread overcame me and could not be soothed. I was traveling with my friend G and his two young children. We carried on as best we could. I can still see myself licking half-heartedly at a cone full of gelato, tears running down my face, my entire being consumed by a sense that this was my to be my permanent state of being. 

It’s rare for me to phone family members at all, let alone when I am on holiday in another country. But something prompted me to call one of my sisters across our conflicting time zones. I wanted help trying to remember if something horrible had occurred to me during an August of my youth.

We both remembered something then, a memory I’ve had forever, one that goes into remission for years at a time, only to drop out of the sky like a snake and wrap itself around me every now and again. I was perhaps four or five years old. In my memory I am walking with my three older sisters and we have with us a younger sibling or two. There is a stroller. My memory distinctly involves being told to “GO GET HELP!!” 

This cannot be an accurate memory. Who would tell a four year-old to run off like that?

Whatever the case, I disappeared. I was lost. Full on Missing Child. As it happened we were Down the Shore, to put it in Jersey parlance, on a tiny island less than a square mile and, as islands are, surrounded by water. My mother was pregnant (again/still) and forbidden to help in the search because of this, forced to stay home and imagine that I’d drowned. 

I don’t know if I was gone for an hour or less or more. All I have is an image of a young woman (who to my child self seemed like a full grown adult), leaning out of a window, her hair in a post-shower terry cloth turban. I don’t remember her bringing me inside but I know she did. Because I do remember her serving me cantaloupe.

As I shared this memory, my sister shared her own. I was surprised that she remembered it at all. And more surprised that in her version I was served watermelon. What I mean is, it surprised me that regarding an event that happened more than a half-century before, we each had a fruit-centric takeaway that stayed with us. 

And, because my sister is four years older than me, she has a more conscious memory of how incredibly traumatic this event was for the entire family. Like so very many other traumas we experienced individually and collectively, this is not one that ever got any real airplay in the family. It happened. We buried it. It lived on in us anyway. 

Now it is Wednesday, fully 48 hours since that metaphorical snake dropped in on me, followed by the hawk of terror. My puking and and panic have subsided for the most part. I spent the better part of Tuesday going through the motions of extracting and utilizing all the endless tools acquired in therapy and through self-help outlets and also those stumbled upon along the way. 

Being still was not the answer. Getting going felt impossible. But I forced myself up. Busy work, I told myself. Just do busy work. I tended to the animals. I potted succulents. I washed dishes by hand because doing so affords me a sense of control which, though I know is false, still feels great. I did the laundry. I talked to friends. I talked to the dogs. 

The dread dissipated slowly, like a Mylar balloon leaking helium at a snail’s pace, still floating around like a persistent ghost. Remnants remained this morning, which I attempted to exorcise by blasting Cameo’s Word Up—my musical equivalent of a P. Terry’s veggie burger—and dancing with the dogs. 

Peggy is reporting that she is—very understandably—continuing to experience screaming nightmares from her ordeal. I fully understand. I wish I had some good solid advice for her but I do not. The best I can do now is acknowledge and accept this part of me. To try to memorize the thing that seems to slip from me the fastest: It passes. It will come again. It will feel like The End again. And then, like that, the snake goes away. The hawk flies off. Not gone forever, but thankfully gone for now. 

NOTES

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