Post Writing Sadness

Here's what they don't tell you about finishing your exams: the following night, after some sleep and a few celebratory meals with friends, you will sit down on your couch, stare at the blank television screen in front of you, and feel a pit open in the bottom of your torso. This will be the beginning of an immense sadness that will leave you unsettled for, perhaps, weeks.

I have two weeks until my oral defense. My body feels heavy--not in the way that it feels when it hasn't had enough sleep. I've slept. In fact, I had an amazing dream where my 14-year-old terrier was taking care of a baby wolf (interpretations welcome in comment section). But my body feels heavy in the way it feels after someone close has died. And time is passing in that same way, too-- a passing marked by meals and sunsets but not any feeling of change.

And I wonder, what is it that I'm mourning?

Exams: An Alaska Kind of Feeling

I think I got a gift last week, on the Monday before my exams were to begin. It came in the form of the flu.

So I cancelled my Tuesday class. Slept 19 hours straight (I woke up to talk with my partner for a half hour, then slept more). On Wednesday I went to the store for treat-t0-myself-Naked-juice-smoothies (I prefer the green), chicken noodle soup, and dayquil/nyquil. I began my regimen.

On Thursday I taught.

Friday morning, when my exams were to begin, I woke up, took the dayquil, made some tea, and told myself "You only have to work for three hours, then you can nap." And I did. Between naps, I wrote. It felt luxurious--nothing expected of me all weekend but writing.

When I passed my exams in Monday morning, I felt the whole thing went...well....anticlimactically. Smoothly even.

Now that my energy is back, the tail end of a cold working its way out of my body, my head clearing from the congestion-haze, I am in panic.

So I'm pulling an old trick out of the mental health toolbox. My therapist suggested that, when panic begins to make my palms clammy and my joints jittery, I remember a time when I felt both a little nervous and a lot excited. Because some nervousness is good. It keeps out senses heightened. It keeps our bodies in movement, fingers typing across keyboards. But panic to the point of paralysis is not helpful.

So I'm remembering the morning I boarded a plane to Alaska. I had just graduated college. I landed a job assistant directing a girl scout camp. I had four and a half months of employment ahead of me, two pairs of pants in my hiking backpack, and copy of Anne Sexton's collected poems in my carry-on (they had been my constant companion since I was twelve--explains a lot, probably). My bank account was depleted due to a traffic ticket I had gotten the week before while trying to impress a girl on a first date.

And yet, as my dad took me to the airport with a reluctant send-off (I still hadn't bought a return ticket home--for all I knew, I could stay in Alaska a year and ask my college roommate to send me my winter boots), handing me the twenty bucks that would become my only cash for three days as I was stranded in Anchorage, I felt light. I had butterflies in my stomach. I wasn't able to drink coffee that morning because the nausea was overwhelming. But my body, heart palpitations from eating disorder recovery and all, was in forward motion.

When I landed, there was no one to meet me. I called my new work office and there had been a mix up in my flight plan. Could I find housing for a couple days until they sent someone out to get me?

I paid cash for the cab to the hostel. I ate from vending machines. I slept a night and when I woke, I took in the vista and the sky scrapers and the overwhelming brightness of a sun that doesn't set and I thought, "Well, damn, I'm on my own."

This feeling, tonight, is what I'm going to get back.

This is What Anxiety Feels Like

It's familiar but not comfortable.

My body temperature has risen. My palms sweat and there's an emptiness behind my bottom rib. There's also the usual tightness behind my sternum, piece-y vision speckled by black dots, a feeling of warmth spread across my cheeks and behind my neck.

They say that panic attacks only last about 15 minutes. But I've spent whole days with my mind in a tunnel.

My first real panic attack happened when I began my Masters program. Before that, for my first few years in recovery, I would feel heart palpitations and shortness of breath. I thought I was always having a heart attack. I realize now, though, that this was also panic. And arrhythmia.

For some reason, grad school transformed my panic from something sitting just behind my chest to a full body state. These attacks started around the time my uncle passed away suddenly. And I was reading a lot of Foucault and other cultural theories about power. I began to have existential crisis, fears that my entire family was disappearing, fears that the only thing I'd ever have to look forward to in life was stifling hot subway rides and luke warm coffee, fears that everything was predetermined into mediocrity. Fears that my student loans would come due and I would be left unable to find work, living in a shelter, a person tossed away.

Yoga helped. Medication helped. Talk therapy helped. I began seeing a feminist therapist who believed, like I did, that diagnosis was an inappropriate operation of power. I cut caffeine. I adopted cats.

And there was something about an animal resting in the calm quiet of mid-morning, breathing in and out on my stomach, licking its paws, that became meditative.

I'm feeling anxiety now like I felt then. I worry that in a few weekends when I'm to sit my exams my mind will freeze up. Or my mind will work just fine but I'll discover that I have nothing new and interesting to say. My chest will tighten. My palms will sweat.

So in anticipation of that moment, my chest tightens now. My palms sweat. My neck flushes.

And I think there's no where to go but forward. Student loans in tow. Cat mouths to feed.

And it's very, very scary.