Sunday, December 30, 2007

WhenTheMotorWon'tStop

The motor won't stop. When I get hit by something, the motor starts, and becomes the energizer bunny.
My mother's car broke one day on the highway, years ago. A piece inside the engine somewhere broke off and rattled around in the guts of her minivan until it stuck in the mechanism that controls the accelerator. The car behaved like the pedal was floored no matter what she did. She started flying down the highway faster and faster, the engine roaring louder and louder. It took her a while, but she finally got it out of gear and coasted it to a stop.
This is my nervous system. When life takes one of its normal innumerable little shots at me it knocks something loose and the heart pounds, the hands shake, fight or flight cuts loose, rattling around inside a small box. I can't find the way to get it out of gear. A thousand unhelpful visions flash across the screen inside my head and like Alex amidst the Ludovico technique, I can't stop it. Last night it took an hour of computer trivia at 2am to make it stop.

My brain doc was outraged, in his mild idiom, when I told him the HMO wouldn't pay for enough pills for 60 mgs daily. "Let me know if I can help..." he said.

Wednesday, December 5, 2007

Charlie Brown

This is how I often feel. A hot thrumming guitar string across the middle of my stomach lets me know my dread has crystallized into a fear of something concrete. Stupid things. What ifs. Conflict with people who's reactions to me shouldn't cause me to bat an eye. Charlie Brown always said his stomach hurt. I understand what he meant.
Charlie Brown wasn't nearly the comic figure that his creator intended him to be. He was the poster child of depression and anxiety disorder and if he had ever been allowed to progress to adolescence he would without doubt have been a teen suicide or a serial killer.

From A Charlie Brown Christmas.
Lucy: "Are you afraid of responsibility? If you are, then you have hypengyophobia." Charlie Brown: "I don't think that's quite it." Lucy: "How about cats? If you're afraid of cats, you have ailurophasia." Charlie Brown: "Well, sort of, but I'm not sure." Lucy: " Are you afraid of staircases? If you are, then youhave climacaphobia. Maybe you have thalassophobia. This is fearof the ocean, or gephyrobia, which is the fear of crossing bridges. Or maybe you have pantophobia. Do you think you have pantophobia?" Charlie Brown: "What's pantophobia?" Lucy: "The fear of everything." Charlie Brown: "THAT'S IT!"

I grok this. Pantophobes of the world unite, you have nothing to lose... since you're afraid of everything already.