#83 Panic attacking

I had a panic attack Saturday, a thing I used to experience that I don’t anymore, except I guess I do now.

It started because I was driving to a yoga class I was counting on to save my life when I blew past a sign that said “Road Closed 7.3 miles ahead”. Don’t ask me why I read the sign but kept on driving, or why I assumed this sign applied to everyone else but me, or why this kind of thing is an everyday occurrence. All I can tell you is that the road was actually closed 7.3 miles ahead, and I was genuinely shocked, and the detour was going to take 20 minutes, and the class started in 7.

I’ve been going to a new studio with a pretty real cancellation policy—they require 24 hours’ notice or you pay the full price, and I think I’ve now paid for ten classes and attended five. This is an embarrassing thing to tell you, but this is also a thing that happens to people with ADHD who live between two homes and often out of Trader Joe’s tote bags in a rural area where everything is 25 minutes away, who are perimenopausal, and whose country has just become authoritarian. I was desperate to make this class yesterday because I wanted to show the studio I am the kind of lady who can make it to a class she signs up for, and also because I was about to have a breakdown, and hot yoga staves those kinds of things off for me.

When I hit the closure and the reality set in I pulled over to the side of the road and heaved the kind of hysterical sobs that let you know you are not upset about a yoga class, but that you are upset cellularly; spectacularly; fucking wildly.

Jeremy, my boyfriend, whom I’d called upon reaching the road closure because he’s from here and I thought maybe he knew how to get around it, asked whether I saw the sign that said “Road Closed 7.3 miles ahead”?, confirmed I could not pass the detour, nor make it to class on time, and insisted that he come meet me because I sounded like I’d just barely survived something tragic instead of missed something benign.

We met at a halfway point between his house and the yoga studio, at Kenneth Wilson State Park, where I continued to cry and speak very emotionally about how hard everything is and how incapable I am of doing the most simple fucking things, while our cars flashed their hazard lights and the dog looked at us with concern. I was dissociating—in panic attack territory—so we drove to a creek where I stripped off my clothes and plunged into the cold water to come back into my body and stop flying out the top of my head. This worked for a while, as in it put me back in my body and more firmly on the earth’s surface, but hours later after I drove 45 minutes south and seven towns away to get my nails done, I started spiraling, and by the time I sat down in the pedicure chair I was having a full on panic attack.¹

Joanne is a nail tech that I’ve been going to for three or more years, since the pandemic, someone I love, and who straddles that weird line between professional acquaintance and townsfolk and friend. I told her I was in trouble and the kind of trouble I was in, and she understood this kind of trouble immediately. She turned down the lights, lit palo santo, changed the music to ambient hip hop, gave me something to stop it, and rubbed my feet even though she’s not the kind of nail tech who gives massages. I almost had to have Jeremy come get me because my kind of panic attacks leave me unable to operate my fingers let alone heavy machinery, but I was fine by the time we were done.

I drove the 45 minutes home without incident, ate good food, got in bed, snuggled with the dog and the guy, and finished watching The Residence. And now it’s Sunday, and I’ve been on a hike, and to breakfast with myself, and I’ll go on another hike later but this time with other people because that’s what you do around here. In between the two hikes, I’ll work a little, plant some things in the garden, and be a basic normal functioning person who thinsk of herself as healthy, who smiles and notices the nature she is in, who believes in magic and possibility, who feels content and who will not give into fear, but who is also just fucking terrified and horrified.