When I was young, my father would take us to the dock overlooking the Gulf near our house and let us run around while he stared off into the dark blue. I never knew why until now. Looking out across the lake in Cassadega, I had this overwhelming urge to rattle the earth enough to make waves in the murky water. Thats what it was all about for him. Waves. Watching the ocean topple over itself in sheer chaos and then calmly withdraw itself exposing hundreds of feet of clear, smooth sand that it was hiding underneath for only a few seconds until the choas comes hurling itself towards the shore again. Theres nothing more important than that because thats how life works. It comes in waves.
I learned from watching him stare off at the sea as a little boy that there are two types of men; ones who only see the water crash and break over itself while hurling towards the shoreline, and ones who only watch it cower in on itself and withdraw back from where it came. Those who can do both must be something more than human. If you are stranded out there, floating at the top of the ocean, being pelted by waves, you don’t think about the bottom. You cant fathom that there is a blissful silence beneath you when you are so overwhelmed by the choas surrounding you at the top. What kind of a man can furiously tread water with the understanding that everything is OK because underneath is the most pleasant calm imaginable? That would be an ideal way to look at life, though seemingly impossible.
I know that what I see, and what I need to learn to see are entirely different. But I have been learning to be grateful for the times when I notice the empty shore between waves. Even though its brief. The more you learn to pay attention, the longer it seemingly takes for the world to fill back up with dark water again. Thats how you start. Only seconds at a time, and then soon, it will take a minute or two. And thats just enough for a couple deep breaths of fresh air in order to make it just a little easier next time you go under. I have friends right now that are being pelted by tumultuous waves, but there will be a break again soon i assure you. Its corny but that’s how life works. You’ll be able to get a couple good breaths in. Goodnight.
Tag Archives: anxiety
.X
In my own self exploration, I noticed that sometimes there is a type of guerrilla warfare in the mind. Hidden feelings, Paradoxical emotions. They are the sniper fire of brain chemistry. Completely inconspicuous, waiting to strike when the target is most vulnerable.
Really the only effective defense against a sniper is the hide the target or make it hard to hit. The target, of course being me. The rest of me. Seclusion.
I guess what I’m trying to say here is that a persons enemies can say a lot about them. You can learn volumes by studying a persons foes. So in self exploration, the key would be to locate enemies of my mind. Maybe bad or undeveloped emotions and analyze them. Find the source and they should, in theory, disperse or become my ally.
The problem is, I’m not entirely sure where the enemy is sometimes.
and in the battle field of the mind, friendly fire can be devastating.
.Barophobia
Barophobia.
A fear of gravity. A fear of all types of sudden plummet. All of which are equally terrifying: Falling off a building,
Falling down stairs,
Falling in love,
Falling for malicious lies.
I am weighed by the tremendous vertigo of such things. So much so that I clench my fists til they ache as I walk around town – as if I’m holding onto something – as if I’m constantly awaiting a sudden drop. Like, if my foot slips and I fall into traffic, or if I get kissed by a pretty girl and I fall head over heels.
Because each and every pit has a bottom. And I assure you that you won’t look or feel the same when you suddenly reach it as you did when you fell in.
.X
What they teach you when you are treated for a panic disorder is something that I find particularly important. And I would like everyone to read this because this is something that I really think everybody can use.
The whole basis of the treatment is merely a true understanding that although this is terrible and you feel as if this is the end – ITS NOT. The most effective treatment from any really caring, trained doctor isn’t drugs or any other means of escape from it (which is the easy way for both of you and probably more profitable for them) Instead, its EXPOSURE. What that means is that when you’re knees are giving out and it feels like you cant breathe and you feel like this is truly the end. STAY. Dance with it. Let it run through you. It will be ok.
So, It’s like being shot with an arrow. This hurts right now, but you’re ok. You shouldn’t struggle to try to pull it back out, you have to push it through yourself. Let it run its course. Or else you can just keep taking perscription pills for the pain and just walk around with an arrow stuck in you forever.
THE SIMPLE TREATMENT IS JUST WHOLEHEARTEDLY KNOWING THAT ALTHOUGH THIS FEELS TERRIBLE RIGHT NOW, ITS NOT THE END. YOU’RE OK. TIME WILL HEAL IT. BE PATIENT.
And that right there, is one of the most important pieces of information I’ve ever learned in my life. Whether you suffer from panic disorder or not.
.Dog Ears
People like me dont hold themselves upright. We curl in on ourselves like the edges of an old book left in an antique shop. I recognize the sound of dear old friends, and I can hear the sound of pretty young girls laughing and reciting poetry in the back yard of a friend’s house. I know what that sound is, I remember it, but all I do is tremble from behind the window. I look out across the dark yard and hear the most gentle voices. I imagine that I could sit outside and watch thier lips flash different shades of amber, gold, black and yellow and then to black again in the light of the fire pit, but I feel my heart pressing up against my upper chest and all I do is shiver. Perhaps I should call an ambulance.
There’s an overwhelming ferocity to life and I wish only to experience it from behind windows…. Windows of a friends house and windows of lonesome hotel rooms. I lean against the wall and I imagine looking out an old antique storefront on a brick avenue where my edges can curl in and give me some type of value. Give me anything at all.
I like to think that everyone feels this way, but there is this joyful lot that I watch running up and down the brick sidewalks. They are the type that ride in airplanes and visit thier family in the mountains each winter. I recognize the sound of those people from my shop window. They go on business trips and they don’t shiver like I do when they stay up late watching movies with pretty women.
I pull out my phone to check the time and realize that its glow makes it possible to catch my own reflection against the window pane. I’m starting to look more and more like my mother, which is beautiful but it doesn’t feel right because I know that having these similarities on my own face would be doing her a great disservice since, even though my years are much fewer than hers, the unbearable weariness of my life has taken its toll and would certainly accelerate her aging – and that I could not bare. It makes life much too heavy and I curl in on myself.
I suppose I am an antiquity with an aesthetic charm but not much else. An old book bought solely for a coffee table, only to be touched during a spring cleaning. The young girls would enter the shop on that brick avenue and notice me, but if they were ever to pick me off the shelf, all my bindings and glue would betray me and come loose and I would certainly fall apart into a useless pile of curled loose-leafs. They would laugh at my faded pages. I recognize the sound of that distinct laughter. Its not like the laughter I hear from out in the yard around the fire pit. Its not a lightened laughter that lifts the spirits, its a laughter weighted with humiliation which presses down on my back and makes me curl inward. I can almost hear it now. God forbid women who laugh like this take old antique books like me home for thier shelves or thier coffe tables. I can not endure that type of laughter anymore. I much prefer the silence of my quiet old shop where I lay untouched.
I could start every conversation with women by first explaining how terrified I am, but my posture already does this for me. I stay up watching old foreign films with pretty women and I wonder if should call an ambulance. I don’t feel right and I cant stop trembling.
I wish it was early morning because my shop on that brick avenue would be closed and that’s the only time that I feel brave – times when I know they can look in through the window with thier friends and whisper that I’m charming, but they could never reach out and spill all of my blank, curled pages onto the dirty shop floor.
But women luckily dont take antiques such as me home any more. We have no purpose. You cant take ancient objects like me up to the mountains to visit your family each winter or stay up late with me watching foreign movies. There are no business trips or romantic getaways when you live your life as an outdated, soiled piece of literature in an old shop window that fate has written with no intention or purpose. No plot line and no heros or damsels to be rescued. Just a beginning and an end.
Life like mine is pieced together so gently that if I even moved a muscle, each day of my entire life would fall apart onto the dirty shop floor to be trampled by the whole world as they walk by looking for a more valuable item to take home. And then I watch from my window as they walk back down the the brick avenue towards better things.
Towards the mountains in the winter. Towards warm fires in an old friends back yard. Romantic getaways and business trips.
And I sit on a dusty shelf in the window and wait for morning when the shop closes its doors so I can finally feel brave.
. Survivalism
Todays heaviness bore down on me from the very start. My mind was not built to cope with the type of punishments that I put it through and days like this worry me because I can feel the very last of my sensibilities giving way to much more devastating things.
Madness conveys its affections towards me,and whatever distasteful creature lurks in the dark attic of a mans soul, begins to figet in its chamber – behind my eyes.
These anxieties do not speak a single word and yet have the ability to convince all of my common sense of its inferiority and redundancy and so all logic leaves on its own accord, and what’s left is what you’d see of me on days like today; lowly, writhing scraps of a man.
But how could one talk down such a frenzy that knows nothing of any type of vernacular? Consisting only of a mouth that gnaws and hands that only rip and claw.
Living with a panic disorder is to continually be killed again and again and each time is different than the others. What then happens – after years of terrible exposure to this – a pathetic type of survivalism is born. A negative neuroplasticity. Faulty wiring. We grow accustomed to the fear and begin to subconsciously nurture and enable it. It sits within our gut like a wayward son that we care for through some unfortunate instinct and a moment without this mania is even more terrifying than the initial dismay. A days worth of silence is far too eerie. ….like that strange orange hue the sky takes on just before the tempest.
Something sinister is lurking just past the horizon. We know. So we learn to nurse this disgusting companion.
All of this builds an incredible amount of character – constantly fighting for your life. But a deep sorrow comes from the triviality of it all. Awareness that the battles we wage regularly, however endless, are not true. And the only soldier is the now frail voice of reason laying war-torn in the foxholes of a mundane daily routine. There is no honor in a war that no one knows of.
Only through some faulty destiny do we survive. Strong enough to endure this consistent despair in humble silence, yet not enough to rid ourselves of these useless endeavors.
. Fireflies
Pulses of anxiety run up my legs and rush up my spine towards my brain the way squirrels climb up bird feeders out back. They collect tiny peices of my mind and run away out into the yard. Every morning I am confronted with the awareness that there are despicable things waiting, and every morning I wake up with less and less of the pieces required to place logic and reasoning in between me and the fear. The Earth feels entirely hollow beneath my feet and inclined to crack and give way at any moment. I’ve spent the better part of 20 years stuck in that tiny bit of helplessness you feel when you go to pay at a restaurant and suddenly discover your wallet missing.
Vertigo is my consort.
What a repugnant companion.
What an uncharming life.
I lay in my bed and listen to the overwhelming silence and try frantically to discover any type of distraction. I begin to focus on the sound of my cat patting around a small insect – Indifferent to its demise. It reminds me of being a child in Jersey and all the times I used to bring jars of fireflies in from the field. My mother would smile. Even fully aware that I was destroying all these undeserving little things, she didnt say a word. Innocence is so endearing even though it can mean the destruction of another. A child kills something and we feel empathy, an adult kills something and we feel rage and sickness. It becomes forgivable when we know not our trail of ruined things or countless inflictions. That’s the basis of a lot of poisonous relationships in our lives. Its also the basis of a blissful, childlike existence.
My mother crept into my room each morning and threw away my jar of dead things and smiled. As if I was a cat who dragged a lifeless mouse in as a deplorable gift. To give thanks. She understood that its better to pick the mangled rodent up with a glove and a trash bin than to tamper with that type of innocence and instill the kind of messes within a child that no disinfectant can clean. Thats what we do when we are young – our selfishness and innocence is the most admirable and preposessing thing, even through the complete destruction of all else.
My only goal in life is to never stop being capable of this. Everything else can drop dead behind me and I’ll hardly notice. I’d like to playfully rip the world apart limb from limb between my claws like an insect and then move on to another without any recollection.
.Fishtank
Picking up lunch today for work, I watched a fish push hopelessly up against a tiny glass tank inside a fancy restaurant. I guess as humans, we have a tragic knack for keeping other creatures contained and the sight of this caused a worm of regret to start tunneling away through my abdomain. I grew sick. I guess that I may have associated it too much to my current situation; Feeling like nothing more than just a charming decoration for something or someone that merely just appreciates your sacrifice.
If I was a mink or a fox, I would have been skinned and drapped over a prestigious shoulder blade at some upscale event and if I was a koi fish, I would currently be floating hungrily inside of a small, cloudy pond outside of some suburban home. Begging for mercy. But because of whatever chemicals, math, physics or deities designated me to this specific body and mind, I live here and I am me and this whole thing confounds me and twists my insides into cats cradles.
Of course I shouldnt be here in this restaurant feeling mirrored with a helpless fish. I should be somewhere lost in a blue ocean floating oblivious. But certain fates tower over me and rip me limb from limb.
I am perpetually flustered by the gritted teeth of a limitless sky.
I continually wake up to a tightness in my head, and in my lower abdomen and groin as if my organs are cowering into one another for safety and withdrawing further and further from the outside world. My head is weighted and foggy as if pieces of my dreams had stowed away from wherever I went to have them, and hidden somewhere on my clothing, they followed me back into my daily life.
I felt an insufferable desire to peel back 3 layers of earth to lay them gently back over my body and close my eyes and finnaly feel rested.
The familiarity of every day life, once delicious on my tongue as an ignorant child, is now sour, repugnant and unending.
An Introduction To Terrible Things.... 