I guess you could say I’ve always been moody. I’ve always preferred rain to sunshine; found peace in the night while the day leaves me uneasy. As a child I openly appreciated the way leaves turn upward in anticipation of rain, the way the Universe deepens its color saturation, the metallic smell of stormy air and the elegant dance of heather clouds roiling in the sky. As Hurricane Hugo ripped through Western North Carolina in 1989, I watched, transfixed and unafraid, from a window as trees crashed down around my home. Later, my mother found I had opened the back door to explore the jaundiced chaos during the eye of the storm.
Cloudy day Caitlin, at your service.
But none of that is strange, really, because people love storms, especially from the comfort and relative safety of their homes. Those moments are charged with potential. We find ourselves laughing like lunatics as lightning renders a tree in two. Storms feed something primal in us, a need to take risks, a need to feel fear, but — in the average summer thunderstorm — without any actual danger.
Most importantly, storms reward us with perspective. We now know how tumultuous the world could be and it gives us the ability to appreciate calmer states of being. We’ve watched things cease to exist — that tree rendered in two — and our own existence becomes more precious.
We survived.
The same can be said of the storms we weather in our minds.
I started to notice my anxiety when I was in third grade. I was already aware of my nervous nature, driven to excessive worry by a need for perfection. But at 8 years old I began to recognize a new kind of angst, one that rendered me almost useless when it struck. I loved school and had the grades to prove it, but I found myself scared to the point of dry heaving many days, fretting over the fear I’d written down the wrong problem set for my math homework or whether I’d embarrass myself when I couldn’t do a chin-up in P.E. I’d worry so much that the world began to take on a cartoonish sharpness and sounds became indistinguishable. I would grow dizzy and the sharpness of my vision often gave way to spots, like the kind you get from staring at the sun. I’d sweat and my cheeks would flush. Teachers thought my need for perfection was adorable — hell, it was commendable — and never once did an adult suggest that an 8-year-old shouldn’t feel like this.
Then again, I didn’t really have the words to explain what I was feeling.
As I got older, I endured increasingly severe panic attacks, but there was also a growing sense of worthlessness that sometimes made me sad, and sometimes left me feeling nothing at all. These sensations would keep me in bed, afraid of the world, afraid of myself, for a day or more. But I functioned. I went to class and made good grades and marched with the band and did community service for Honor’s Society. But the fear stayed with me, ready to crop up and remind me that I did not deserve real greatness; I couldn’t achieve it even if I wanted to. I developed anorexia with bulimic tendencies to deal with the anxiety that came from being overweight, but even as my hair thinned and my cheekbones created new angles in my face, I felt the anxiety build. Ironically, my hunger fed the anxiety and sadness.
I went in and out of therapy for years, but I couldn’t seem to stick with it. I was in my early 20s by this point, and while I enjoyed talking, I never found myself closer to salvation from the never-ending fear and worthlessness.
It was, as cycles tend to be, vicious. I would find just enough confidence to succeed — in school, at work, in a relationship — and then the fear would start to close in like water on a sinking ship. I’d bail the water out, but sure enough it would come running back in again, sooner or later.
It all changed during graduate school just a few years ago. A deep snow had settled over Boulder, and a bout with the flu had kept me in bed for a week. I was trapped in a number of ways, growing more and more panicked about the classes I was missing, passing in and out of consciousness as the fever came and went. One morning while lying in bed, I heard children outside playing in the snow and the sound of their laughter was so foreign to me I thought I might be dreaming. But I was awake, struggling to make sense of the world. My breathing had grown shallow and I was crying uncontrollably. I was soaked through in tears, mucous running from my nose, and I was suddenly struck with a brilliant revelation: my life was meaningless. If this was life — my life — then there was no point.
I called a suicide hotline for the first time that day, and stayed on the line until my partner came home.
That day I realized I couldn’t bail the water out of the sinking ship anymore. I needed a life vest. I needed a lifeguard.
I needed to learn to swim.
I got into therapy for the rest of my time in graduate school and got on medication for a mood disorder. I’ve struggled to stay in therapy because of changing insurance plans and the day-to-day struggles of managing life as an adult with a mood disorder, but I don’t kid myself anymore; I can’t do this alone. And I can’t fear my mind or my emotions.
Enduring a panic attack is like surviving a storm while out at sea on a dinghy. I have this clarity, this animal-like awareness of my mortality, and at the same time a sense of immortality; one comes from the other, they cannot exist alone.
I am covered in sweat and tears and mucous, and for the past hours of enduring this storm, I have felt more alone in the world than I thought I could endure, but on the other side I am connected to everything that lives and ever lived. All wet and slimy, I’m reborn.
Now when I have panic attacks I am able to remind myself that eventually the storm will pass and I will find myself safely back on shore, my dinghy scraped but in one piece beside me.
The storm feeds something primal in me, a need to feel fear.
It rewards me with perspective. I see how tumultuous the world could be and it gives me the ability to appreciate calmer states of being. I watch things cease to exist — my will to live — and my own existence becomes more precious.
I survive.
