ON/OFF

The weight on my chest is suffocating. It’s a dull knife lodged right between my breasts that pulsates and radiates through my chest. It compresses my lungs and renders my body uninhabitable. The stab wound is wide open and beats in rhythm with my heart. Unrelenting. Unforgiving and unmistakably present.  

The sensation is familiar. Yet, each time it returns the dread that it won’t ever leave is overwhelming. I’ve lived with this, on and off, ever since my first panic attack back in 2015, some 8 years ago now: 

My head was lathered up with shaving foam - those of us unfortunate enough to be follicly challenged have to shave our entire heads if we do not wish to look like roman monks. The razor was gliding against my scalp slowly and carefully when the world spun out of control… My reflection in the mirror vanished.

The world was spinning and I with it. 

I lost my balance and had to grab the sink with both of my hands. 

A chasm had just opened underneath me and I feared it would swallow me whole… The chasm hadn't just opened up underneath me… No, it had also opened up within me. It had completely overtaken my mind and erased any sense of self. 

And then everything vanished. 

The only thing solid that remained was the sink I was desperately holding onto. 

I was surrounded by dark thunderous clouds swirling all about me, all within me. I had no sense of which way was up or down. The darkness was all consuming. My body had given up on me and so had my mind. I was so scared.The world felt like it was ending, it felt like I had ended. There was nothing to do but to hold on to the sink; my fingers were pitons trying to burrow their ways into the ceramic bowl. 

I think I screamed. 

I don’t think I’ll ever have the words to describe how terrified I was, how the void of meaning, of self, of anything real shattered me. 

Slowly

…

Very slowly

…

Reality returned and with it, its objects and then its walls and then the entirety of my apartment. 

I finished shaving my head: quickly, frantically with a furiousness about me. I had to leave the room, leave the building, leave everything. Now. 

And so I ran outside onto the streets. The void was there too. The void was inside my apartment, the void was within me and it was even in the glorious daylight of a Spanish afternoon. The pavement was eerily inconsistent - like it wasn’t real. Foggy, that’s it! The road felt foggy. The buildings served no purpose but as a papier-maché backdrop to my madness. All meaning had been lost. Nothing made sense. I was an empty shell. 

Death seemed inevitable. Existing was not an option, not like this. 

I called the only person I thought could tether me to the world. She had never ever answered her phone in the years I had known her but on this day, on the day I needed her the most, she picked up my call. I crossed the city in a daze, guided only by muscle memory and reached her. I hugged her hoping she would make me feel whole again but she was as nebulous as the rest of the world. 

We walked. 

For hours. 

In silence. 

What is there to say when the void has taken everything. 

I didn’t kill myself even though existing was unbearable. I waited patiently for the void to become manageable. My dad killed himself when I was 13. Shortly after that, his brother did the same thing. And some 20 years later another brother ended his life. I know the devastation that follows a suicide. And so I had never contemplated it, no matter how dark things got - and they got dark. 

But on that day… on the day the void took everything, I wanted to die. 

As a souvenir I have kept this dull knife lodged in my chest. I can feel its presence as I type these words. A constant, unrelenting pulse that compresses me and darkens my mind’s eye. It never really goes away but sometimes, sometimes, I forget that it is there - and I’m happy.