2021: Welcome to Wherever You Are

I sit down for a therapy session this year, a few months into what has become a new ritual. Every Tuesday. The time varies. Sometimes it is a different day of the week. We try to make it the same time and place, but 2021 has other plans most of the time. I’ve never met my therapist in real life but Zoom therapy during the past 1.5 years of pandemic Zoom world seems somehow fitting.

We get into the deep shit like 40 minutes in. I’m recounting bad stories. Some deep shit etched on my soul that I’ve been trying to get off my chest for a long time.

And it happens for the first time- I’m telling the story, and I find myself saying that I wasn’t actually upset about this one thing I had previously talked about, I am actually upset about something a lot deeper, a much more primal scar. A betrayal. And I say this, I verbalize it, and I feel something well up inside of me I haven’t never felt before. I feel like I’m expelling evil from my body- I gag repeatedly, I nearly throw up, I uncontrollably make noises. I feel out of my body for a moment, but not in a drugged high good way. In a way that I have no control over what my body is trying to process.

And then it happens. I have my first panic attack. I’m 40 years old and I have my first panic attack. I can’t breathe. The therapist guides me through it, encouraging me to take deep breaths. She’s not sure what the hell is happening, maybe I’m having a heart attack? There is a moment of real confusion but then it ends just like it began.

I breathe. I try to at least. I finally get down some air. The involuntary movements stop. I feel okay again. We talk through it for a couple minutes before the session ends. And then the day goes on as normal. I was talking about a memory involving my dad and I talk to him later that night like everything is normal. Because it is I think. It is just a blip.

A week later, I’ve been going through a few days of shortness of breath. I’ve gone through periods of this before from allergies but it’s not like the other times. I feel like someone is sitting on top of my chest, stopping me from fully taking that first breath. I keep it to myself. In my head I know this might be a byproduct of what has happened over the last week. I got my Covid booster shot a few days earlier and was feeling pretty under the weather. So I chalk it up to this.

The next few days, it continues but I try to ignore it. And then it happens again. I’m at home, cooking dinner while my kids play in the next room. And my mind is racing. I can’t stop focusing on the shortness of breath. I feel concerned. It gets worse. I feel like someone is holding my head underwater in the bathtub. I’m trying to let out silent screams.

My mind continues racing, going through every possible worst case scenario. Covid? Heart attack? Crippling anxiety? I have no fucking idea what is happening. I stop cooking. I tell my kids to go call up to my wife for dinner. As they run upstairs, I feel myself coated in panic. I haven’t taken a breath in what feels like minutes and I honestly feel like I might drop dead.

My wife comes downstairs and looks at me in a concerned way.

“Are you okay, you look really pale?” she asks.

“No. I’m not okay,” I say, full panic beginning to set in. “I’m really concerned I’m having a cardiac episode right now. I don’t feel okay. I think I need to go to the hospital?’

“Honey, it’s okay, it’s okay,” she says and comes over and starts rubbing my arm.

I head to the hospital and spend a few hours getting tests done. My heart is fine. All tests look normal. The ER doctor chalks up my shortness of breath to allergies, heartburn, and maybe some reaction to the booster shot. He can sense the panic and asks me if finding out I’m okay relieves me. It does.

Upon leaving the hospital, my breath returns to normal again and for the next few weeks, I feel like I can breathe without thinking about it every second. I feel like a curse has been lifted.

This whole episode feels like an analog for how this year has felt. There’s been lots of steps forward, lots of steps back. Our family has had some real accomplishments this year. My wife was a semifinalist in the Nicholl Fellowship competition. After keeping our daughter home from kindergarten due to the school not requiring masks, our daughter is excelling really well academically and thriving in being home schooled by my wife. Work has been good. Challenging but rewarding. I feel like I’ve grown a lot as a person.

But beneath it all, the panic and anxiety I’ve felt, I begin to realize this year that maybe I’ve felt it my whole life. That’s it’s always been there lurking in the background. And this is the first year that I’ve begun to process this fact. When I talk about why I began therapy, it was because one night I was standing in the kitchen, doing dishes, and began thinking about a mediation scan where you look for pain in your body. And I realized maybe there was a lot more pain there than I thought, beneath the surface. It’s been there for a long time, slowly pulsing, but I was not listening.

My biggest learning this year has been that strength comes from confronting generational trauma. From humanizing and understanding those that have caused us pain. And I’ve also learned that the more time I spend away from grievance machine known as social media, the better.

You see, we have a whole nation filled with people who have suffered trauma, tragedy, sadness, have had the rug pulled out from under them many times. But it’s not just that our society has stigmatized mental health issues, it’s that we’ve made it nearly inaccessible except for the rich, the lucky, the chosen few. I consider myself fortunate to have the opportunity to process the trauma. And I feel sorrow for those that had to do this entirely alone. Or never got the chance to do it. Past ancestors.

During an earlier session before the panic attack, I find myself telling my therapist a story from when I was around my daughter’s age. I watched my family dog get run over by a car speeding down our street. I vividly remember the screeching tires, the dog yelping, whimpering and returning to us. I talk about begging my mom to take the dog to the vet, even though she seemed okay. And about the car ride to the vet, when the dog began gasping for air, her lungs filling up with blood. And how I cradled her as my mom drove, telling her she was going to be okay but thinking she would not make it before we got there.

I talk about all of this and finally admit something for the first time: it was my fault. I opened the door to the house and the dog squeezed past me and ran into the street and I watched her get run over.

I admit that I was wrong. That part of this was my doing. I’ve never realized this before. I’ve spent so many years being angry at some of the cards I was dealt in life, at struggling with being raised by a parent with mental illness, that I’ve at times forgotten my own agency. It feels a relief to tell someone I was wrong. That I caused this. That the dog did not die, she survived. That it was okay in the end, even though I made a mistake. Life moved on and I moved on.

December is here. The year begins winding to a close. I sit here wanting to relay more happy news, but growth has been a moving target, a journey, not an end. I sit and contemplate. For the first time in years, I’ve sat and just thought. When we moved from LA at the start of last year, I hoped for a few more moments of just being able to think, not do. And it has been enlightening. I think about the better parent I’ve become. The better husband. The better artist. The better boss. The better person. And it’s because for the first time in my life, I’ve started being honest about my faults. Not seeing them as weakness. Seeing them as part of my character. Understanding the source of my anxiety and learning to sit with it, to live with it. To observe it from afar like the Buddhists do and not immediately judge it. Life right now feels like a practice. A repeating of the same day, over and over, but with small little tweaks, variables changed to make something just a little better. 2021, I can’t say it was a pleasure getting to know you, but I’m certainly glad I have gotten to know you. Now onto tomorrow, with no promises except being present in wherever it is that I’m wound up right now.