Mental Health: U R Doing It Wrong.

"I know the world's got problems

I've got problems of my own

Not the kind that can't be solved

With an atom bomb."

---------

I keep forgetting, either honestly or willingly, that it ever happened. When you trip over yourself on the sidewalk, you don't stand there and think about it, you just keep on walking. Right? 

The first time I remember having what I would later know was an anxiety attack, I was skipping high school, sitting with a girl at a window table in an empty, busted Chinese restaurant on the second story of a building overlooking King Street in Hamilton. All I really remember is that I was looking out the window at the street below and I started laughing helplessly. Nothing was funny. There was absolute dead ambiance in the place, and no one else there but the staff and the two of us. The girl (I say that pretty coolly, "the girl", but we went out from the time I was 16 till I was 21) didn't get it, was getting pissed. She didn't get what was happening and I couldn't explain it. As far as I remember, she actually walked out (things to never ever do to somebody having a mental breakdown - check). Somehow, it worked itself out. It passed, I paid, I left. I chalked it up to an anomaly and didn't do anything about it. 

[A thought that tugs at me often: People know and like you better as a pile of stress and confusion. You keep yourself a neurotic mess. It's your penance. For what?]

Volatility. My whole childhood and adolescence was volatility and confusion. Love? There was lots, no doubt. A loving mother. The best. But it came with all the rest. The unspoken but staggering anxiety, towards inertia, being found, being found out, that's in my DNA. I have always been leaving, and seldom for any concrete reason. When I found as a teenager that I could take my self, and build into it the consistency that I never had, that I could consistently choose not to do a thing, I kind of went overboard. It was total war on vices both real and imagined. Booze, cigarettes, meat, the religion I'd grown up with, television, media, modernity, the values of my culture - evicted. Get out and stay out. All the things I could not control, the inconsistencies of the world around me, I could at least control within myself. Right? 

At that precise moment of life, I happened to come upon a particular subculture whose essence (at least at the time) was the conscious restructuring of the individual, by the individual. Away from the influence of socialization and manipulation by outside forces. Being fairly young, it didn't occur to me that all these people were also very young for the kind of line they were talking. The most terrible and comic part of the whole thing is that the words they were mouthing were right. Just maybe premature. Didn't take into account how much you will change in those next few years between high school and adulthood, whether you like it or not. 

I saw all my friends go towards the precise things they were out to avoid. I mean, 98 out of 100 of them. And I mean, precisely those things. It wasn't a vague misinterpretation of their politics, they had t-shirts and tattoos about it. But like I said, when you're young and wrapped up in something, you don't see the big picture, you think you can account for the rest of your life at that moment. And the more I saw that, the more I hung on to the person I'd decided on being. Which seemed right. 

Well fuck me. As it turns out, rigid attention to lifestyle consistency is not just unnatural, it's straight up unhealthy. I took a lot of time thinking, deliberating, all the time, the existential consequences of everything. Every last possible dilemma. I had always had sleep and anxiety problems. This spun them into a manic cyclone of swirling half-thoughts that were ever present. I couldn't figure them out and I couldn't shut them out. But medications were also on the long list of enemies to my self-sufficiency. So there were a lot of sleepless nights, paranoid generalizations, surreal days and rash decisions made. And I think that some of the most violent and honest moments of my life came out of that angry sleepless desperation. 

Skip ahead about 15 years. 

2008. In the psychiatric emergency ward of a downtown Toronto hospital. With no family doctor to call, no one to explain how this person came to be sitting here in this state. Standard question. "Do you have any sharps on you?" Fair enough. They must deal with the worst of it, they want to know you're not going to stab them or yourself if they take their hands off you. As it turns out, I did. I had a really sharp sharp, in my pocket. I gave it to them, they put it in a hospital bag with a Biohazard sticker on it. "I knew you were heading towards something like this", she said. My wife. Now this, on the flipside, is a girl that gets it. I had been on a tear for a few weeks. Little cracks around the edges. It comes out in frustration, trying to forcibly impose sensibility on the outside world. Curb Your Enthusiasm times 1,000. 

Definitely Not A Fan. 

A few days earlier, I'd had a meltdown trying to buy a fan. It was a heatwave and we'd just moved into an old house. Just a regular fan. Sounds easy enough, right? I was trying to look up fans at Wal Mart (Seriously, go here and tell me if you can look up a basic f-a-n anywhere without blowing your fucking head off.) I ended up on the phone asking some girl if they sold any "cool air relocation devices", and what in her opinion such a device should be called, and could she please fucking spell it for me because I must be overcomplicating the matter. 

At any rate, this is the typical scenario, I get wrapped up in a circular, throbbing, overly logical (yet not at all rational) thought, to the point where I'm so pissed off I can't put one foot in front of the other. The safety comes off and it builds until the whole thing cracks and the trigger is pulled at some random point. It could be minutes or weeks later, but it will happen. You have passed that irreversible point whether you know it or not, and without a doubt you will momentarily throw the breaker. 

Go back two summers. 

University of Toronto Athletic Centre. The day of my friend Damian's wedding. Maybe I overdid something, pushed myself too hard. I was in the change room, I went to undo my lock and realized I'd been sitting in front of this locker. I had just lost about 7 minutes of my life. Which is to say, for the first time ever, I couldn't account for the present moment. This was new. "Who are you? Why are you sitting here?" I drew a total blank on the combination, it was something I did routinely every day, hundreds of times. It was the same locker I usually used. I tried to think about my mother's name and at that second I couldn't. Someone came by as I was sitting there. "Excuse me" he said and opened the lock, which was his that day and not mine at all. So at least there was some comic relief. But it was shaky, wondering if I was going to black out while riding my bike home. Trying to remember everything I could think of in case it happened again. I went home, I explained what had happened. "Are you sure you should go to a wedding reception right now?" We went, but I felt like I was driving a car with a blindfold on. Everything really cautious. I told a friend who I seldom see but who goes back far and through a lot of close calls and near-death experiences, who understood everything. "You're precious to me", he said. One of the most touching things I've ever been told by a friend. You know who you are. 

Skip ahead another year. 

When it happens, you will think you are dying. At least, your body is sending this signal to your brain. Your brain is looking for data to validate it, and your body backs up the suggestion - your heart speeds, tingling down your arms, lightheadedness, everything spins, perhaps you fall down. Because it comes out of nowhere, with nothing stressful happening at that moment, you think you must be dying.

At work. In a video store. At 2:30 in the afternoon. For a minute I couldn't access my left arm. Dead weight. Panic adds to the debilitation. In all likelihood, you could very well be having a stroke. You take super-detailed stock of the situation, as if you are floating above yourself. "I am dying right here and now, at 2:30 on a Tuesday and no one is coming in. I am going to die listening to this song ("Lost in the Dark" by Entrance), wearing this shirt. In a video store." I realize that I am still in the moment, consider phoning someone, but feel ridiculous, what do I say? Somehow it passes, I think about it for a few days, then discard it as one more in a series of anomalies. There are more and more of these than I care to remember. 

 

The long and short of it is this: Internalizing stress does not mean that you fully metabolize and dispose of your problems, only that you feed your demons, and build the house of cards higher and higher. You withdraw from voluntary social situations, or take them on more and more cautiously. You can't help but resent how many people walk through life seemingly oblivious to the things that keep you up at night, and do just fine that way. You want to think that you're more responsible, more aware, less ignorant, more conscientious, more self-controlling. But as it turns out, that's a lot of self-sacrificing bullshit. That's an angry, alienated teenager commandeering the throat of a nearly middle-aged man. Face it. These people don't fall on their faces, and the "Real World" does not come crashing down on them. It is their world, and they have great jobs, sleep at night, and live to ripe old ages there in it. 

And you, little man, have little to show for all this striving and thinking but the broken machinery of reason, the weight of neurosis 

and a series of little heart attacks. 

On the fast track to a dead end.

And by you, I mean me.