this is me trying to give you an idea of what it feels like to go crazy

There are certain things I became really good at as a result of my unusual childhood: my parents divorced when I was Very Young, and accordingly, I underwent years and years of mandatory psychotherapy with a variety of specialists with diverse degrees of competency, as the legal professionals involved figured the ensuing custody ordeal would Probably Really Mess Us Up. 

 Because of this, I’m very efficient at Talking About My Feelings: interrogating their origins, describing various colors and moods associated with them, linking them back to pertinent events and Conversations That Struck Me.  I can do this with the simple precision of, “Show-me-where-the-bad-man-touched-you,” albeit substituting the proverbial doll for my morass of emotions and neurosis, and ‘bad man’ for, well, the universe and its infinite unpredictability. 

I believe in feelings – perhaps too much – and the Abstract, whatever that is, and however much I use it to mask my fear of Properly Figuring Out How Things Work.  Even thinking about science makes me nervous, which is ironic given that everyone in my family is somehow affiliated with it – from cardiology to nursing to marine biology – except for me, the writer-person-creative-type black sheep. 

From what everyone around me who Knows What They’re Talking About says, and from what I understand from religiously google searching “human brain +mystery,” no one fully comprehends what the brain does.  We know it’s powerful, we know we only use a small part of it; we know that it’s not an entirely predictable organ.  I know that all of this scares me, and here’s why:

I had my first big panic attack in May 2009, which was when I was first confronted with the potency of the Brain, in addition to the profundity of Science’s lack of knowledge when it comes to understanding where feelings come from, and the mood-altering science behind Psychotropic Drugs. 

One minute I was sitting in a lecture at the top floor of one of Johns Hopkins University’s oldest brick buildings, my mind focused tranquilly on a historiographical analysis paper about Sartre’s Reflexions sur la question juive that was due in a week, and the next thing I know it felt like my brain was being squeezed through a cold tin pipe.  I became certain my body was shutting down – I had visions of my lungs collapsing into each other, the total disintegration of my heart like a handful of dirt – a flood of sweat released from my palms, and I excused myself so I could take my final breaths downstairs, slumped against a wall somewhere, undramatically, such that my impending death wouldn’t traumatize my unknowing classmates.

Luckily I ran into a friend on my way to my final resting place, to whom I tried explaining calmly that I was dying and needed medical assistance urgently.  He called the student paramedics – I don’t remember what it was he said was wrong with me – who arrived instantly and hooked me up to an oxygen tank, which I proceeded to breathe out of until I no longer felt on the brink of total collapse. 

This went on for about five months: I had panic attacks from a few times a day to once a week – with magnitudes of varying degrees, like earthquakes – that were prompted by markedly odd triggers, things my brain was apparently afraid of even though I wasn’t: shopping malls, artificial light, the sight of pavement at dusk, leather seats in school buses, the smell of parsley. 

Initially I tried to conceal my problem: at work I would take long toilet breaks when I could feel one coming on, in which I would stare at my reflection, look into my pores, and imagine everything that was alive about me.  But after a while the hiding became tedious – the subtle pulse-taking, the laborious breaths I took to combat my anxiety’s worst symptoms, while still trying to look like I wasn’t convinced I would be dead in ten minutes – especially since I knew exactly what was happening to me, or at least my own non-scientific version of it. 

I decided it was time to start figuring out how to fix what was obviously becoming detrimental to my sanity.

My therapist, Vernon, was recommended to me that October by a nurse from the university health clinic after I went in for a check-up, citing the predominant medical concern as, “something is terribly wrong with me.”  I had convinced myself somehow that I was suffering from a concussion after having slept at a weird angle the previous night, and as the fear masqueraded itself as reality in an increasingly compelling manner, I panicked, and demanded that she x-ray my brain to check for damage.  Fortunately she saw through my hysteria, told me, “we’re all afraid of something, dear,” gave me Vernon’s number, and told me to give him a call.  I’m glad I did. 

I could tell that Vernon liked me immediately because I was open with my feelings, and provided intricate, textured visuals of my anxiety.   He called me “psychologically sophisticated,” which I hesitated to take as a compliment; given the long, painful path it had taken me to arrive at the skill. 

We talked for one hour each week, during which time we discussed what could be causing the attacks: Vernon determined that I had dealt with all of my childhood traumas effectively from the ease and frankness with which I addressed them.  I had become accustomed to listing all of the unpleasant details of my personal history with the nonchalance of informing a physician of my allergies, notably in order to avoid comments like the one made from a psychiatrist I saw earlier, “It seems like your life is just a cycle of tragedies.” It remains the most hurtful thing anyone has ever said to me. 

Vernon and I did these exercises during our sessions where he asked me to close my eyes and wiggle my toes, telling me that the ground below my feet would never feel the same as it did in that moment.  

He gave me pamphlets about panic attacks and generalized anxiety, how the condition has to do with irregular serotonin levels and something I can’t remember about neurotransmitters: medical jargon that brought, for the first time, what seemed to be a self-constructed fable of wayward emotions – into the realm of the clinical, the diagnosable. 

On my own, I made up catchphrases as a form of meditation – which Vernon suggested I start doing – to coax my rogue neurotransmitters back from their frantic rampage on my psyche: I would repeat the word “everything, everything” to calm myself down during a panic attack, until that idea became too all-encompassing, so I thought, “nothing, nothing,” but that, too, became a watchword more daunting than the one that came before it.  I found a delicate medium with a recitation of, “happening,” or “the fact of your existence,” or just my name, “Rose Foran,” over and over, to remind myself that I was made of flesh and breathed air and I was born once, twenty years or so before that moment, even though I was too young to remember it when it happened.   

I told Vernon I was shit at meditating and we needed to start exploring other options. 

“Everyone has the right to happiness,” Vernon said.  “You need to live, and let-me-tell-you-something, you can’t live right like this.  I think you need to consider going on some form of anti-anxiety medication.”

A staple thing that mental health professionals will tell patients who are wary of taking psychotropic drugs is that whatever you have is a Real Disease, like cancer or something.  Even though someone trying to tell you you have a real imaginary disease seems like the last thing that would be comforting, it strangely is.  They tell you that mental health problems are heavily stigmatized, but they’re as real as anything else, and have real remedies that have been proven effective. 

“Let’s say you had diabetes, for instance,” he said with the confidence that the point he would soon be making would reassure me, “you wouldn’t refuse insulin, would you?  That would be depriving yourself of a cure.  It would be irrational.” 

And so, reluctantly, I took his advice and took my prescription to a Baltimore Rite-Aid – unsure of whether or not I found it sad or funny that it was the same drug my mother had been taking for years (whatever I have is hereditary) – and spent the interim waiting time for it to be filled at the adjacent nail salon, where I got a manicure and had a small panic attack.  I knew it was because of the weird lighting and smell of nail polish remover, in the frustrating way that a parent of a petulant child can identify the origins of a public tantrum, despite it sounding ridiculous out loud when someone else asks, “why is your daughter crying?”

As the sullen, obese pharmacy tech handed me my bag of pills – officially inducting me into the fraternity of children-of-divorce on mood-stabilizers, which I had previously vowed to avoid at all costs – I decided to make myself a deal.  I would keep with Vernon’s remedy, despite my fears that it would erase the very thing that made me who I was – that unidentifiable combination of elements that, under the right conditions, equaled Me. 

But I knew that my only way of beginning to understand what was happening would be through a painstaking personal analysis of the changes to my mind state: an inventory of everything as it once was, with constant monitoring of even the most subtle of changes.  I promised myself that I would gain control over what was happening to me by trying to understand it the only way I knew how, and the moment I arrived at conclusive evidence that I was Losing Myself, I would stop with the medication and find some other way to deal with my anxiety.

So I began to catalogue my feelings obsessively. 

I filled my notebook with doodles of what I imagined at the time to be the Human Brain – or at least My Brain – divided in different sections and quadrants, as if I was discovering anatomy for the first time, killing small animals and taking them apart, drawing diagrams of their insides.  I drew amateur models of my head, separating the different parts of where I thought my various emotions came from, so I could monitor how they would inevitably change as the drugs kicked in. 

I observed that when I was happy I saw grey and I felt it in my lips.  

I made myself narrate a panic attack as it was happening in a train station one Tuesday morning on my way to Washington DC:

“I was overwhelmed with feelings of my own mortality, and I think I was sad to know that they would, in a matter of days, fade slowly into the vast abyss of psychiatric remedy.

I felt, I felt, I felt.  I stood in crowds and felt my chest tighten while my insides nearly collapsed from tension.  I felt my consciousness evaporate as if my brain matter were dissolving.

I almost passed out.  My vision was blue-tinged, my knees weak.  I sat down to collect myself.”

A few weeks passed until I started to feel differently.  Vernon evaluated the changes through a serious of basic questions, in order to determine if I still needed to keep seeing him. 

— “Are you happier?”
— “I think so.” (*What is happiness if not feeling like you are reclining in your neuroses?)

— “And you still feel like yourself?  Like Rose?”
— “Yeah, I think so.” (*What am I without my darkness?)

As my panic attacks diminished significantly, and then disappeared altogether, so did my edge. 

I didn’t feel, at least not in the same way I was used to – the productive tugging kind of feelings that had pushed me to write as long as I could hold a pen; I just floated around between varying gradients of soft light.

But I hadn’t felt like my body would be reduced to rubble for just as long.  I could breathe easily for the first time in months; not worrying about one part of me being afraid of something another wasn’t: I could forget the ever-growing laundry list of things that triggered my subconscious into disaster-survival mode.  I felt at ease, finally, but troublingly so. 

I came up with a decoding system for what I was feeling – as if I was colorblind, intent on memorizing the Real alternative to the bastardized hue as it came filtered through my retina. 

“Is love heavy or is it light?” I wrote to myself, trying to remember.  Then I made this diagram in my notebook:

What I remember of love = essential heaviness, a type of grinding
What I remember of creativity = reclining in your warm agitation
What I remember of happiness = a kind of biting in my chest

What I feel now = unregulated bliss
What I feel now = everything is fine even though it is not fine
What I feel now = uncomfortable brightness, life through a straw, sunlight everywhere

Eventually there was too much of myself that I had to consciously grasp at to remember again. I determined that my mind wasn’t meant to dwell on this softer plane, even though it was easier, more pleasant.  Despite the fact that I was suddenly nicer to people and found it less of a struggle to be content and didn’t have the constant suspicion that death was right around the corner – it wasn’t me.  So I decided to take the leap back into my darker reality, and made the same promise to myself that once the anxiety started to erase who I was again, I would go back to see Vernon and devise a Plan B. 

There isn’t a real end to this story: I don’t know what would have happened to me if I hadn’t gone on medication, even for the relatively brief period it took to get me back on track. 

I like myself better for the fact that I sought help, and put trust in someone who had the skill set to know better than I did about the methods available for combating my condition.  More importantly, he trusted me to know my limits, my feelings, better than he did. 

I gained a new will to fight for who I am against the mountains of Crazy with which I am now occasionally confronted, especially when faced with the strange prospect of the alternative: my subdued alter ego, Rose Lite.  I learned that what I love most about myself is my imperfections, my atypical definitions of happiness, my ability to embrace my feelings as the script with which I write my present. 

And when I start to feel it again - the beyond-my-control, world-is-falling-apart-around-me kind of crazy - I’ll close my eyes and wiggle my toes and tell myself that the ground below me will never feel the same as it does in this moment.  For the briefest of instants, I’ll be assured that everything is fine.  And that is what I hold on to.