CW107

I had a rough year off between high school and college: the spring of 1994 to the fall of 1995. I moved into an apartment with three guys that seemed old but were all still in their twenties. It was in Newmarket, New Hampshire, one town over from Durham, where I’d just graduated high school and where I would yo-yo back to go to UNH, shaky and chastened. I managed to get a single, but it was still strange moving from my own apartment into a dormitory. It felt like being a kid again—a relief, actually. Though my Newmarket time was only barely adulthood. I was underemployed and very lost. And then I had a nervous breakdown.

I was drinking and smoking cigarettes, but had no other drug experience. My friends were getting into drugs, but apparently I couldn’t even handle marijuana. My couple experiments triggered severe anxiety. I had no language for my reaction, but I termed one of the effects “framing.” All of reality would seemingly reset—with a distinct visual snap—wiping my memory of the moment before away and flooding me with fear. Aspects of reality I had previously considered foundational could apparently be obliterated by slight adjustments to brain chemistry. My friends could not relate, and when I got into pot in my thirties—at first as a form of exposure therapy—the framing never happened again.

In the spring I quit smoking cigarettes. I had to quit drinking in order to quit smoking. (I started drinking again when I turned twenty-one, but I never smoked tobacco again.) It was in the months after this that the terror I had experienced on cannabis showed up in my regular life. It happened suddenly one day, eating lunch in a mill building in Dover, in a sad little styrofoam-cup café scattered with old people who also worked in the building. (I was the sole employee ($4.25 an hour) of a married couple’s gelato company that did not last long.) It remains the worst day of my life.

The problem was: I did not know what was happening. I did not know that this was a panic attack. The effects were so powerful that it was not a stretch to wonder if I was schizophrenic or something. I was the age where that can happen.

There are stories within stories I’m resisting being pulled into. Broad strokes: by that summer I was in therapy, and I knew I had panic disorder. I was taught “relaxation response,” a strategy which ultimately proved counterproductive for me, and was soon considered counterproductive more generally. (I learned this eight years later in Austin, Texas, when I got therapy for my panic attacks that actually worked: cognitive behavioral. The gist: actively courting panic to short-circuit its mechanism, as opposed to trying to avoid it but only reinforcing the phobia.)

1995-2003 was touch and go. Where panic went, I tried not to, and my world was always shrinking. Sometimes things would chill out, but then the panic would show me again who was boss. It was the worst possible feeling I’d ever felt. Like being irradiated by a sun that’s inside you, like having your entire body turn into quicksand.

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All of this, though, is just context for the thing I want to tell you about: the wainscoting.