I am laying on my bedroom floor. I am breathing. I am choking on how fast my heart can go. I am laying on my bedroom floor, and I am alive, and I am here, and I am dying. I’m not really dying. My heart can’t tell the difference between flirting with the great beyond and lifelong commitment. I am laying on my bedroom floor, and I am having a panic attack.
Yawn.
Usually. Before the pandemic. If there was something to me before I was in these 4 walls. Usually, a panic attack would warrant a bigger response. It would warrant some concern. It would warrant a night of face masks, taking it slow, and reading a new novel cover to cover. Back when being inside was rare, a panic attack on my night off would be detrimental. A panic attack on the one night I get to not be worried would set my progress back a week. A month, maybe, if it was that bad.
Now, in quarantine, my knees are to my chest, I am choking, and I am at my most normal state. The most natural I could be. Frightened, small, in over my head. I am laying on my bedroom floor, and this scene is rewritten nightly. Sometimes I’m in the shower. Sometimes I’m at the computer. Sometimes I’m in bed. But every time. Without fail. Without fail I am back to that choking, alive, and dying child.
Around 352 panic attacks later, and I’m a year in. One year. What do I have to show for it? I thought I figured it out, that I wanted to be a musician and an artist. That is what I would do to pay bills. These nightly panic attacks lie to me. Or maybe they tell my truths in tongues I refuse to translate. They tell me I can’t and that so many people are so far ahead that there isn’t space left. Maybe that fear is right. Maybe that fear is so I don’t waste my life on things that I can’t and won’t be good enough to do.
I don’t want to believe that. I hate that. I abhor that idea in the space between my throat and stomach, the place that fills with painfully hot air. The place that aches for me to make up my mind and major in something already. The place that I can’t stop from holding me back.
I’m convinced the love of my life is irony. I’m a dyslexic writer. I’m a depressed entertainer. I’m an uncoordinated dancer. And now, in a much less succinct way, I’m married to irony in a new way. I fight till the skin on my knuckles bleeds into new shades of unstoppable when someone tells me I’m not good enough. But after one round against myself, I’m ready to throw in the towel and never listen to the bell call me into the ring again. I’m in love with being what I’m bad at. I loved the idea of being a social butterfly so much that I stopped being anxious to talk to new people. I’m in love with being a musician because I love music, but maybe I am bad at it.
Then what am I good at? Do I kill my darlings and abandon the arts altogether? Do I commit to research and hope that along the way, I come to love citing my sources? Do I try at medicine and find out I can’t do it without being fully vaccinated? Do I just wait till something comes along and I forget to dream till I wake up at 40 with kids, a mortgage, and an aching hole in my chest that came from the fact I never tried to be good at what I loved?
Tonight, I will be laying on the floor. Knees to chest. Choking on my heart strings. Hurting. Hurting the way I’ve been hurting every night for a year. I will be alone. I will cry. I will cleanse myself from the inside out.
I will hurt and ache in every cliche I’ve been avoiding the reflection of. I will see the tears and short breaths in the gaze of my black computer screen. I will swear at people who love me and apologize to people I should have cut out of my life by now. I will blink and 20 minutes will turn to 4 hours will turn to 11 PM.
No matter how much or little I accomplish, I will not be settled till I have more. Till each bone of productivity has been stolen from my spine and I support more weight than I can carry. Till each tooth of motivation has been ripped from my skull and I eat the remnants of the work life schedule I planned out weeks ago. I will hope that one day, my panic attacks go back to the old schedule we had. A simple date here and there. A meet up at a crowded coffee shop. A quick kiss on the cheek at a park, on the days where picnic blankets overlap and children roam from family to family like a free range indicator of aging. A hope one day, a date with a rapid heartbeat and nausea is an occasional occurrence. One day, I hope I don’t live in the same room as my fears.
This post is shorter than I want. Maybe 900 words is all I can muster. Maybe 950 is going above and beyond this week. Maybe productivity would be kinder to my skin if it came in gentle waves, constant and cool, as opposed to the lashing of summer rain. Hot. Thick. Too much and not enough, all in the same drops.
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