After the Fireworks

A perfect evening.

I mix a lime and tonic, no gin, and carry it upstairs. In the main bedroom — the one I still call ours, not mine — I push open the door onto the small deck my husband built over the flat roof of the kitchen. Standing barefoot on the cedar planks, I look over towards the golf course.

A fireworks playlist is pretty routine. Small teasers, like kernels of popcorn, hang in the air as the bigger ones overtake them. An American flag is a given; it’s the sponsor’s logo. Oddities appear: spidery tendrils, talons, quirky alien-like appendages. The classic starbursts seem brighter this year. Good job, America, I want to say. But the fireworks are probably Chinese.

Between the explosions, I hear dogs barking. Heartless, this stealth attack. More dogs run away on the Fourth of July than on any other day of the year. On the other side of the river, my daughter’s pointer tries to dig her way to safety. She tears at furniture, rips at the floor. Crated, she will claw the metal bars underfoot until her paws bleed. Nothing in her brain says, This too, will pass. For Saga, time does not exist. She lives only in the terrifying now, where there is no safe place.

I reach down and pick up a piece of slate, flaked from the surface of the gas firepit. My sleeve catches on a strip unravelling from one of the two wicker chairs. The boards of the deck are warped from neglect.

The familiar surge of grief. Every breath enters through a wound.

After a couple of hard tugs — it’s been ages since I’ve been out here — the door shuts behind me. It muffles the show’s big ending. I don’t return to watch. There have been too many endings.

Friends,

If it seems like a long time since you’ve heard from me, you are right. I owe you an explanation. All I can come up with is this: I have panic disorder. This summer, it hit me hard.

Perhaps I should be whispering in the privacy of a therapist’s office instead of shouting it on Substack. But the psychiatrist whose treatment method was talking about books for as long as I needed to, then writing a prescription for my most pressing symptoms, retired in 2016. I started seeing him in 1989. I intend to name my next cat after him. Don’t talk to me about therapists.

I’m telling my story out loud, in public, because it’s important that people hear it.

The poet Rainier Maria Rilke wrote:

“Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final.”

Most humans are able to enjoy watching fireworks while tolerating the noise. If you are a dog, you don’t look up at the pretty sky; you look for a way to escape the noise. Run. Hide. Claw at whatever stands in your way: grass, carpet, concrete, dresser, wall, door. The one who feeds and walks and loves you becomes an obstacle like any other. Traffic means nothing, you’re only intent on getting across that road.

As a human with panic disorder, I’m digging as frantically as Saga. Unless you know the signs — blank gaze, clenched hands, stiff movements — you probably have no idea how hard my mind is working to make me look normal. Maybe there’s beauty somewhere, but I can’t see it.

Unlike Saga, loud noises aren’t sufficient to trigger my fears. Anything, identifiable or not, will do.

Stepping into fresh snow once sent me skidding into a mental crevasse so deep I emerged from the other side fourteen hours later. Looking up from reading a novel launched me two thousand light years from home. Getting an A on a paper when I knew I’d gotten an F knocked me from one circle of hell (I will be living under a bridge forever) to another (I can’t tell what’s real. I’m insane. They’ll lock me up forever) in nanoseconds.

Anything.

Let Everything Happen to You

I am in hiding.

Lights off, windows closed, body curled in a fetal position on the daybed in my daughter’s old room. It’s where I spend most of my time. I pace. Try to write. To sleep. To fly blind, with no instruments other than an aging MacBook Pro and a printer low on ink.

For most of my life, I’ve been able to keep fear under control. To hide, manage, mask, deny, cover, conceal, bury, and suppress it. When my brain takes leave of my body, I’ve learned to sit, nod, smile, and hold what appears to be a normal conversation while in my head, I’m clutching the accretion disk of a black hole, thinking God oh God don’t let it pull me in.

This summer, it pulled me in.

Panic begets shame. Shame hates the light. I’m out of food except for peanut butter, potato chips, and one egg. I wait until after dark to get in my car to buy groceries, because I’ve become who scuttles out only when hunger demands, under cover of darkness.

At a gathering in a neighbor’s backyard, I sat between two women from my block. They’re older than I am, know everyone’s names and histories, and learn about these little pop-up parties before anyone else does.

We chatted about sandals. So cute, where did you buy them? Normal talk among women at any summer gathering. Cute sandals are gone from the shelves before Memorial Day, but it’s possible that Shuler’s got in a late shipment. You never know.

At the potluck table the conversation came close to turning divisive. “Potato chips cooked in beef tallow? Didn’t”—

Good thing I didn’t finish my sentence — “the FDA ban it?” — because someone’s husband responded, “Yes, no seed oils. So much healthier.”

Right. The food pyramid, upended. Dodged that bullet. We sat down with our paper plates.

“Cilantro. Who puts it in fruit salad? ”

Me again. I may have gone on to complain about how everything that nasty herb touches turns to soap. The look on my companion’s face should have told me she’d brought the salad. Or someone could have just tackled me and dumped my plate in the grass.

“What an original idea! I mean, mint is where you go first, or basil. Cilantro is just so, uh, fresh.” Like an Irish Spring. Did I say that? What other creatures sunbathe on the rocks I carry in my head?

The slow uncontrolled spin as I finally got it. The snap into apology overdrive.

“The salad’s wonderful. It’s the cilantro gene. So weird, my kids have it too. We’re like, four percent of the population. Cursed. We miss out on so much.”

How long did I babble? I had to leave, now, get me out of here, I don’t care how bad it looks, I have to leave. Now.

How comforting! Both women had caught on to my distress, and offered to walk me home. But a lot to carry. I’ll help. I stood up and grabbed a purse.

Outrage. Shock. Of course they weren’t going to walk me home. I have no idea what’s real. They’ll lock me up.

Slowly, I set it down. You never, ever, grab another woman’s purse.

I picked up my canvas chair and half-ran to the sidewalk.

My heart was pounding at double its normal rate. I couldn’t breathe. To get home, to cling to my life as if to a floating scrap of the Titanic.

Inhale, hold. Focus. Try to forget that you have just committed social suicide. Forty years of friendship and goodwill among neighbors, gone in one unhinged moment.

Over cilantro.

Beauty

It exists.

Terror

Every morning, I take six pills. One lowers my blood pressure. Another, small as a BB, hunts down cholesterol. A sky-blue tablet smoothes my moods like an iron on the gentle setting. Two antidepressants bolster my spirits for eight hours before punching the clock to go home. The last tablet, the color of Threat Level Orange, keeps me from crossing the line to Threat Level Red.

About this drug, I will only say that it’s gotten bad press. A single discredited study casts a long shadow. When research is inconclusive, people reach for the scare headline. I’ve taken the lowest effective dose for as long as I remember. . There’s a physical tolerance — not addiction, though the two are widely confused. Patients who’ve been taking it for years are pressured to discontinue it. To do so safely takes months of careful titration. Stopping it cold can lead to seizures and Threat Level Four.

Lately, I’ve had problems. One drugstore won’t transfer my prescription to another because it closes at six, the other at nine, I can’t make it to either of them before seven and didn’t I know Mercury is in retrograde? A pharmacy tech hisses “It’s a narcotic!” and refuses to ring it up. (It’s not). I become that woman, pacing the aisles, on the phone with the urgent-care nurse as she tries — unsuccessfully — to persuade the on-call doctor to prescribe two tablets to get me through the next 48 hours.

They used to call this a compassionate dose.

That bank-robbery picture of Patty Hearst holding an M-1 rifle? Put my photo next to it. Enlarge to the size of a Wanted poster. Hang one behind the counter of every Walgreens and CVS in the Twin Cities metro area.

Oh, wait. They’ve already done it.

Just Keep Going

This post has obsessed me. I’ve worked on it every day for weeks, several hours at a stretch, telling myself for the hundredth time to just finish, hit publish, it’s not perfect but it’s done. I’ve typed and deleted all night and into the morning. Once, I slept for three hours with a finger on a single key. I woke to find I’d written a novel comprised entirely of slashes. Dozing off, head hitting the keyboard and snapping back: a writing process I don’t recommend.

Why all this work? Because if a word felt wrong. I had to erase it, and find the right one. And then, when that word turned out to be wrong, I had to delete it and find a different right one.

It wasn’t just about the words. The essay ran to six thousand at one point. This is the highlight reel, the distillate, the sentences that remained. Disjointed and shapeless as it is, I wanted to get it out to you.

People tell me I’m too hard on myself. Even if I know the bathroom’s on the right, I can’t help looking for it on the left, then blaming myself because I must have misplaced it.

Do you remember pressing Silly Putty onto the Sunday comics, lifting an ink impression of Dick Tracy, then pulling and pinching it into Popeye or Wimpy? That’s what I did to myself. The more distorted the image, the more true to life it felt.

But not right now.

No Feeling is Final

If you are experiencing panic or any other mental health issue, reach out. The National Suicide & Crisis Lifeline number is 988.

No feeling is final.

While I was struggling to write this post, I worked on a number of others. They are now in my queue. You will be seeing more beauty, less terror. (Unless you find trips to Target unsettling). Expect one or two posts in your inbox each week for the rest of the summer. If you are not on Substack Notes, please check it out. Much of what I write shows up there.

I SAVED THE BEST NEWS FOR LAST!!!!!

• On Sunday, July 27, I have the honor of publishing an interview with Maya C. Popa. Maya is the award-winning poet, teacher, and poetry editor of Publisher’s Weekly, as well as the founder and resident genius of Conscious Writers Collective, ranked as one of the top online writing communities worldwide. Her bestselling Substacks, along with her Poems for Your Weekend reach thousands of readers every week. She is a true force of nature.

• Maya’s third collection of poetry, If You Love That Lady, is out from W.W. Norton now. I have three copies to give away. On Sunday, I’ll tell you more.

Thank you for reading Writer, interrupted!

Now, I’d like to hear what you have to say. Have you ever experienced a panic attack? How did it feel, and what did you do? You are welcome to share as much or as little in the Comments section as you choose. I trust you will be respectful. If not, your comments will be deleted and you will be removed from the discussion.

At this time, everything I write is given freely. If you’ve been reading for a while, please consider a paying subscription. I put many hours into each post. Your financial support allows me to continue bringing you my best writing.

My husband died in April, 2023, a year after he was diagnosed with Stage 4 lung cancer. Grief opened my heart. I began to write again, is the soul of Writer, interrupted. These are words that continue to inspire me. I sit down at my laptop every day and write something for this Substack. It may not make the final cut, but only because I want to sent out only my best work. I’m grateful to every single one of you.

Whether you subscribe for free, or choose to support my work with a paying subscription, I’m thrilled you’re here.

My heart is open, and my heart is full.

Mary xo