4. In the Belly.
February 1st is the ancient Gaelic cross-quarter holy day of Imbolc, sacred to the goddess Brigid. The name Imbolc derives from the Old Irish for “in the belly:” the ewes pregnant with lambs, the first flow of milk and sap, the first stirring of the roots under the snow. Brigid is a goddess of the flame - her purview is blacksmithing and healing and livestock and poetry, and I’m feeling that energy as the year unfurls towards spring, pregnant with possibility, and I hope you are too. ⚔️❤️
The first time I had a panic attack, I was 18 years old, barefoot on the back porch of the small, tidy, concrete-and-brick apartment that I shared with my friend Sam, where I had just given my boyfriend Matt a haircut. Matt, like most of my friends, had gone home to Stockbridge, Georgia for the summer to live with his parents, but on days he wasn’t delivering pizzas for Papa John’s and I wasn’t waiting tables at DaVinci’s Pizza-in-a-Pan, he would come up to Athens to lay around with me, us mostly smoking weed and having sex and listening to records and sometimes driving around in his ancient tan-and-woodgrain Subaru stationwagon.
On this particular languid day, on the back porch overlooking the Oconee Hills Cemetery, after I cut Matt’s hair and I stepped back to survey my work, I watched in horror as his previously flowing, golden brown curls shrank and coiled into a truly deranged-looking and deeply unflattering asymmetrical bob. When he smiled at me dumbly and said, “what? It’s probably fine!” my guts liquified. Yes, my hands got clammy and my tongue went dry and my heart slammed in my chest, but it was my mind that truly careened: a free fall into a dread the size of the universe, a nightmare, impending doom, the apocalypse.
Of all the ridiculous things, what injected that first metallic shock of panic into my psyche, the panic that would become a constantly thrumming current beneath my life, was a feeling of revulsion for my boyfriend. Suddenly, I was disgusted by him. I actually hated him. And as soon as that feeling emerged and I acknowledged it in my mind, an overwhelming counter-wave of shame washed over me: not only is it absurd to instantaneously lose all desire and attraction towards a person because of a haircut that YOU GAVE THEM, but also, you can’t be reviled by this person, you can’t be repulsed by him; this is your BEST person, your FAVORITE person (he was also becoming kind of my only person).
But I knew in that moment that he was not, he would not, we could not, it was over. And I also knew that I loved him with all my heart, was in love with him, needed him, needed to be with him, could not live without him, could not. And both were true, and that was impossible. And so, since I simply could not hold these two wildly disparate truths simultaneously in my mind, and since I could not choose, or reconcile one to the other, I shattered.
The strain of holding two opposing truths simultaneously is something I now would call “cognitive dissonance,” and it had been a hallmark of my life all my life, and I was a real star at it. So, I do find it amusing, looking back now almost 30 years, that it was giving my boyfriend a haircut that finally brought my whole elaborate suspended-disbelief machine crashing down around my ears. But what I also know now, is that often the content of the anxiety, the fixation, whatever, is a safer, smaller version of the real issue at hand. There was actually a deeper reason that, having barely eked myself over the threshold into adulthood, I couldn’t find a self to stand on. There was much higher-stakes cognitive dissonance taking place in my life.
Because what was also happening at this time was my first estrangement from my parents. I couldn’t and wouldn’t do what they required of me, so I was cut off, I couldn’t go home. I was on my own for the first time. Sam and I found one another in the dorms at the very end of Spring Quarter, the only people in our friend group - which mostly centered on the hacky-sack circle outside of Creswell Hall - who were staying in town for the summer. We made a sweet home in the Village Apartments. She had houseplants. I got two cats. She taught me how to make queso by melting a block of cream cheese into a bowl of salsa in the microwave. I had always worked, but I had never paid bills before, or lived on my own and now I had to do all that and pay tuition and go to school. It was sink or swim. I didn’t blame my parents, I couldn’t blame them, I literally didn’t know how, so it was me. I blamed me. I broke. I gave. I sank. I eventually went back to my parents, hat in hand. I had learned my lesson.
So much is clear to me now, but back then, all I could feel was the panic. The panic was so horrifying that it became a funhouse mirror of ever more reflecting and refracting panic: I woke up every day, having a few sweet seconds where I forgot that I was going crazy, then, just as I came into consciousness, I reflexively checked to see if the panic was still there. Of course, by thinking of it, I conjured it, like the paradoxical pink elephant, except instead of a pink elephant, the thing that I was unable to avoid thinking about was the fact that I was definitely going crazy. The fear would instantly overtake my body in a rush of adrenaline, and I would squeeze my eyes, try to breathe, and push through another day. I’m so sorry to say it (as I type, I feel such sadness and care and a rush of tears for that very anxious, very confused, and very earnest girl that I was), but this state of affairs lasted for years. I white-knuckled through daily panic attacks at all my many pizza jobs, through all my social work and women’s studies classes, through a whole gut-wrenching, on-again-off-again, year-long painful breakup with Matt, through parties and protests and the next summer canoeing over lakes working at a summer camp in New Jersey, through another year of classes and work, through another summer hiking through the high desert working at a summer camp in New Mexico, meeting Duncan, another year of classes and working, another summer living out of a canoe working at a summer camp in Vermont, working, working, always working.
The drinking helped.
As I grew into my twenties, my relationship with anxiety morphed and changed: for a while, there was Zoloft; sometimes, there was therapy. Often there were friends, listeners: there was my love. Things softened, settled. The panic attacks subsided, or, more accurately, I learned to live with them, to accept them, to scooch over a little bit on the couch to let them sit. It helped. What also helped was my own strange kind of zeal, a desire to be OK, to get better: a fire in the belly to find some relief, to soothe the burn. This zeal led me to many bright and dark places: spiritual communities, activist communities, books, teachers, healers. It also razed cities and severed ties and shook planets and burned down everything in its path: a great, clear, powerfully destructive flame.
This zeal is strident and unseemly and I’ve often been embarrassed by it. But it is only very recently that I have also started to love it, to see how my very life has depended on it, to become so grateful for it: without it I might not have survived.
But what happens after you survive? How do you live in a small room with your zeal? How do you draw down the fire of the conflagration to the flame of the hearth, to the lick of the gas range burner, to the warmth of the tea kettle, a candle, a cozy string of lights?
I don’t know.
Sure, in clinical terms, I could tell you: it’s a process of trauma healing involving learning to self-regulate the nervous system, expanding the window of tolerance for discomfort. Herbs, therapy, EMDR, sleep hygiene, vitamins, long walks - all of which presume some level of freedom from poverty, structural racism, patriarchal violence- but the truth is, it also just feels like a fucking miracle, like a magic trick, this learning to stay in it, to let the pain wash over you and through you and behind you. It feels like an unearned grace and a blessing, one that arrives fresh every day and could dry up and blow away just as quickly.
I don’t know if people can change. I don’t know if I’ve changed. But I hope that, like Gabor Maté says, healing is not actually changing, but becoming more of who we truly are. That the fire in the belly guides us through the dark winter, a sacred flame.
Dear friends: thank you from the bottom of my heart for being here. Thank you for your words and texts and emails and shares and, in the case of my mother-in-law, for becoming a paid subscriber by slipping some twenties into my hand and saying “now I’m a subscriber to your newsletter!” How did I get so lucky? Love y’all big. Thank you. Also, I can’t seem to get the “subscribe” buttons right. There’s either none or too many. Sorry about that. If anyone has any advice, let me know. ⚔️❤️
Home
Please enjoy this Imbolc playlist that bears no particular relation to the season, just some songs I’ve been listening to a lot, some shared by other writers and friends, a vibe.
The World
One of the things I’m really enjoying about Substack is the collaborative nature of cross-pollination among writers: the guest posting and especially recommendations feature feels very Blogger.com circa 2006 (shout out to BlogAsheville! We used to have monthly Asheville Blogger meet-ups! Award ceremonies! Can you imagine?)
One of my favorites on Substack is Recovering by Holly Whitaker. Holly is probably my dearest and most enduring parasocial relationship- I’ve been following her work since way before I got sober, and I finally quit drinking for good through her online sobriety program Tempest Sobriety School (RIP). I love and recommend her book Quit Like a Woman. I relate to her journey so deeply- especially the last few years where she has felt lost and broken well into the phase of her life that by all accounts should have been a shiny morality tale with a #girlboss success story happy ending.
The most recent Recovering newsletter asks:
“why there’s no largely accepted concept of secondhand drinking, why people who drink to the point of addiction are irresponsible people who didn’t follow the guidance vs. victims who weren’t given informed consent and were marketed a carcinogenic neurotoxic addictive drug in ways that subvert all logic, and how that distinction contributes to blocking any forward movement in Big Alcohol having its Big Tobacco (or Big Pharma) moment; why there aren’t nutritional labels or warning labels on something that kills so many; why Big Alcohol pours so much money into those “Drink Responsibly” campaigns.”
I’m going to be sitting with these words for quite some time and just continue to be grateful to Holly - I consider her work to be required reading if you’re interested in harm reduction as it applies to alcohol use (and everything else).
There are also many great newsletters happening not on Substack, of course, and two that I want to highlight are:
The Ann Friedman Weekly: AFW, to me, is like the gold standard of a newsletter. She curates the internet in smart and compassionate ways; it enriches my life. My thanks to Ursula Gullow, who has her own awesome newsletter, for introducing me to it.
A. J. Daulerio, who is an inspiration of a personal essay writer, is writing and cultivating a recovery community at his newsletter The Small Bow. It’s wonderfully illustrated by Edith Zimmerman, who also has a great newsletter! It’s just newsletters all the way down.
Instead of a tarot card this week, let’s just look at this picture of a forsythia in bloom, shall we? Have a great week y’all. ❤️⚔️
