Posts tagged with "reflection"

Awakening: Cause

Worry does not emp­ty tomor­row of sor­row — it emp­ties today of strength.

—Corrie ten Boom

It start­ed with a sin­gle pan­ic attack, at work, in the mid­dle of the day.

Heart rac­ing, dif­fi­cul­ty breath­ing, par­a­lyz­ing ter­ror, fear that I was about to die.

If you’ve ever had a bad trip off psilo­cybe, or mag­ic mush­rooms, the effects are very sim­i­lar. Not that I’ve ever had a good one. Half an hour into inges­tion, I start to feel nau­se­at­ed. At the back of my head there’s a creep­ing sense that some­thing is wrong. My hands start to trem­ble, my mind feels like it’s shud­der­ing. Eventually, there’s a com­plete uneasi­ness in the body, both phys­i­cal­ly and men­tal­ly. Around that time, the body reacts quick­ly to rid the stom­ach of what­ev­er is caus­ing these symp­toms, and vio­lent­ly ejects them in the form of vom­it­ing. Stems and caps come out as dark brown flecks, and you won­der how eat­ing some­thing so small thing can make you feel so ter­ri­ble.

But with a pan­ic attack, there’s no expla­na­tion. No sense of pre­ven­tion. No float­ing fun­gus in the pool of your toi­let you can point your fin­ger at and say, “I’m nev­er doing THAT again”.

It comes with­out warn­ing, with­out obvi­ous rea­son. All you want is to end the attack. To crawl into a cor­ner and hide. To tear off your stran­gling clothes. To die.

Afterward, you’re not won­der­ing what you’re going to lis­ten to on the way home, or how to get the atten­tion of that cutie in the porce­lain depart­ment, or when you’ll have time to go buy more sham­poo. All you’re think­ing about is when the next one will hap­pen. All you’re left with is a bunch of ques­tions and a sense of insta­bil­i­ty. I have my sus­pi­cions, but I’ve cho­sen not to write about them until I’m cer­tain, some­thing which I believe will come in time. There’s no sim­ple diag­no­sis, no easy answer.

Recently, sci­en­tists have dis­cov­ered that the word “wheeze” can acti­vate asth­ma attacks in asth­mat­ics. The mind trig­gers an asso­ci­at­ed emo­tion­al response, and the body man­i­fests the reac­tion. It’s the same after a pan­ic attack. Sometimes, peo­ple with pan­ic dis­or­der can bring on an attack just wor­ry­ing or think­ing too much about it.

Not that I have a dis­or­der. The fear of an attack isn’t detri­men­tal enough to stunt me social­ly, and does­n’t pre­vent me from func­tion­ing as what the DSM IV would con­sid­er “nor­mal”. It was only a sin­gle episode, but habit of con­stant self-eval­u­a­tion means that the threat of it hap­pen­ing again is always there. It’s in the back of my mind whether I’m at work, or play­ing games, or cook­ing din­ner. Every minute of every day becomes a strug­gle not to think about it. And when you know you feel like dying dur­ing an attack, you start to won­der whether it’s worth liv­ing at all.

People face this ques­tion when they’re diag­nosed with ter­mi­nal ill­ness­es. Told that they have only have a few years left, they live more in those num­bered days than they do in their entire lives until then.

They awak­en.

The Awakening Series

  1. Introduction
  2. Cause
  3. The Reborn Dreamer

Awakening: Introduction

Sharpen a blade too much
  and its edge will soon be lost
Fill a house with gold and jade
  and no one can pro­tect it
Puff your­self with hon­or and pride
  and no one can save you from a fall

—Verse Nine, Tao Te Ching

Every time I start to write, I’m led back to this. It would appear that it’s time to express myself. Perhaps I’m ready. It feels like I’m only scratch­ing the sur­face, try­ing to cov­er aspects of some­thing that I have yet to under­stand. In the show­er I decid­ed to split this into sev­er­al entries of a series, and in my room the lights are all on.

There’s been more insta­bil­i­ty in the last month than in the last three years of my life com­bined. Everything I knew, every­thing I believed in, has been turned upside-down. Although I’m still try­ing to fig­ure out what hap­pened, the fact of the mat­ter is that there was a long, drawn-out cri­sis. This cri­sis, which appears to have passed, still affects my thoughts, my actions, and my beliefs.

Even though I don’t com­plete­ly have my feet on the ground, it feels like I’m com­fort­able enough to explore what’s hap­pened now. This is not an easy task. A sin­gle, seem­ing­ly innocu­ous thought can end up break­ing the strands of the del­i­cate web I’m tread­ing.

If I can get it all down, I’ll know I’ve gone that far at least.

The Awakening Series

  1. Introduction
  2. Cause
  3. The Reborn Dreamer

The Most I Can Say For Now

Between the over­time and the ven­ture meet­ings with Aaron, the rest­less nights and the ear­ly morn­ings, I try to catch my breath. It’s good to be busy, but not when it means I don’t have the time or ener­gy to write. This is the prob­a­bly the most infre­quent pub­lish­ing peri­od I’ve ever been through since the start of this blog. Thoughts devel­op in my head, but I’m not ready to get them down and hit pub­lish yet. Maybe it’s a com­fort thing, maybe it’s a front, maybe I’ve sim­ply lost the desire to doc­u­ment every sin­gle detail of my life.

Through all of this I feel myself regain­ing some sta­bil­i­ty, although I tread light­ly, remain­ing both con­scious and cau­tious. This is the most I can say for now.

Living On Borrowed Time (Bonus)

An old nurs­ery rhyme pro­posed that life is but a dream. If Dr. Leary were alive today, he would add, most like­ly in an LSD induced state, that we’re just an imag­i­na­tion of our­selves. I have a hard time agree­ing with either apho­rism, but even if they were true, it would­n’t mat­ter.

A cer­tain glut­to­nous cat once mused, exact­ly 19 years ago today, that life can be com­pared to some­thing found on the din­ner table. Perhaps the most famous com­par­i­son, how­ev­er, was by a tech­ni­cal­ly bor­der­line defi­cient per­son who said that life is like a box of choco­lates, because you nev­er know what you’re going to get. As things go on, one real­izes that there isn’t one com­par­i­son that’s more valid than anoth­er.

Even an out­spo­ken Queensbridge rap­per has flowed, “You a killer or a hus­tler, deal­er or cus­tomer / Gangsta or buster, young­ster or old nig­ga / A weed head, a coke snif­fer / You rich or a broke nig­ga / Know you all relate to this shit that I wrote nig­gas / Life is what you make it nig­ga”, and I tend not to dis­agree.

For me, it now seems like life is sim­ply a test.

More impor­tant­ly, how­ev­er, from here until the end, no mat­ter what, life is gravy.

One Of Those Days

I’m hav­ing one of those days, actu­al­ly, one of those weeks where I can’t seem to write any­thing down. I have all these ideas float­ing around in my head with­out the words to fol­low through. Maybe it’s because I don’t exact­ly know what I’m feel­ing, like a bit­ter­sweet mix in the palate, or an indis­tin­guish­able taste. For once I’ve start­ed to take con­trol of things, start­ed to be pro-active instead of reac­tive. Started lis­ten­ing to hope­ful, inspir­ing, ener­getic music. I’ve real­ized that I have the abil­i­ty to point my life in the direc­tion I want to go, that I can’t rely on oth­ers to make me hap­py, that I can start liv­ing for myself now.

And it’s all new to me.