

“There’s just so much going on,” I tell Gerald before sipping my mocktail. “Work is stressing me out. I promised three people I’d blurb their books by the end of this month, and I haven’t even started reading. I have two big grad school assignments due by the end of next month. Managing my social media accounts is a nightmare.” I take another sip. “Not to mention the surgery.”

I rarely mentioned the upcoming surgery. The more I talk about something, the more it grows violently, malignantly, before me. As a teenager, I talked about my first love so much that he manifested into a cinder block-sized emptiness in my stomach that pitted me well into young adulthood. As a young adult, I mentioned my depression so often that, in the mirror, the shape of my outline became obscured by the largeness of my sadness.

“You’re going through a lot,” Gerald validates, stirring his drink. “Plus, the surgery is a big deal.”

He was right, of course. The surgery — a hysterectomy plus the removal of fast-growing fibroids and endometriosis — was a big deal. My body had heavy, thorned chains around me. I’d been in physical pain so long that, at this point, it felt like I welcomed (and was strangely comforted by) psychological pain. Stress is easier to endure than an aching belly. It gave my brain the illusion of control. 

As we return to the car from our Happy Hour Vent Session, my left arm tingles viciously, like TV static gone rogue.

“Wouldn’t it be funny if I was having a heart attack?” I joke to Gerald, shaking my arm as if snapping a wet towel. 

I start the engine and find directions to our dinner spot. Five Guys, again. I don’t want a burger, but Gerald does, and I love him. I reverse the car as Gerald DJs. I think about our happy hour conversation.

My arm continues to tingle. God, I have so much to do. Things will be fine, I think. I don’t want to do anything. I’m scared about surgery. God, my arm won’t stop tingling. I’m okay. I look at Gerald. He smiles. He is the love of my life. I have a lot going on. I have a lot going for me. My hands begin to tingle, too. I mean, I think I have a lot going for me. There is a lot going on. What the fuck. I’m not sure what’s going on. I am loved. I think. What am I doing? After the surgery, I won’t be able to have kids. I have 139 unread emails. Things are okay. I don’t. Where am.

The light switch in my brain flips on sideways. I grip the wheel so tight I forget it is possible to let go.

“Something is wrong,” I say to Gerald. I don’t allow him to respond before I repeat: “Baby, something is wrong.”

I can’t see. Where are my legs. My breath is. I can’t. I stop the car. Gerald asks if we need to go to the hospital. I open the driver’s side door in the middle of Manning Street. 

“Something is wrong,” I say again, louder. I am standing in the street. I want to run. Where do I. Oh my god. Gerald ushers me into the passenger seat and takes the wheel, waving the traffic around us. Again, with his whole belly, he says: “Do we need to go to the hospital?”

I put two fingers on my neck to feel my pulse. Oh my god. My heart is bursting. There is a woodpecker in my artery. I am dying. Oh my god. I am. I am dying. 

The cliché says you will see your life flash before your eyes when the time comes. I can only see Gerald, looking at me. So, the cliché must be right. If I am dying — oh my god, I’m dying — at least I am dying seen, I am dying loved. I rapidly plan my funeral as Gerald makes the final decision to call the paramedics. He speeds through our neighborhood. The firefighters meet us in the lobby of our building. 

“She’s on a few medications,” Gerald tells the suited men. “Yes, a few medical issues. She has a big surgery coming up. Yes, a history of anxiety and depression.”

Another firefighter takes my blood pressure. “Could you be having a panic attack?”

I have tried to end my life three times — I know what it feels like to almost die. I swear, I am almost dying. The paramedics say my vitals are fine. My heart rate is sky-high, but the propranolol I don’t remember taking is starting to work.

It feels like I have been unplugged. My body continues to shake. I take a deep breath. Yes. Yes. Of fucking course it’s a panic attack. Why would I be dying? Only life has happened.

My body, revenge-hungry for the terrible everything I forced it to endure, willed me to listen in the only way it knew how. 

In the loudness, in the beating chest of the goings-on, in the so much to do — the body remembers each knuckle crack, each angry, salty tear, each time it has been ignored in the name of survival. I have never felt so scared of my body and what it could do. I wonder if it has always been this scared of me.

I make a mental note to apologize to my body when it helps me find the words. The paramedics pack their equipment, and Gerald kisses the crown of my head.

My body’s tenderness is the only wound I have survived, that I will always have to survive. More bloodthirst occurs within my chest than could ever drip from my palms.

I must survive all of the worst my body has endured. I am my body’s only spokesperson. It will make itself heard even if it must take my breath. Even if it must hold my heart hostage, a ticking bomb strapped to my aorta. 

I hear my neighbor get off the elevator. She walks into the lobby to see Gerald, the paramedics, and me. She questions the room. “Has anyone seen my DoorDash order?”

I remember I can laugh. My body lets me. Electricity bullies through my blood cells until it escapes through my open mouth.


Only Life Has Happened


While everyone was riding the waves of different Covid-19 variants over the past few years, I found myself pulled into my own personal swell: A resurgence of my anxiety disorders.

Anxiety, like water, is easy to drown in. I bought my first car and spent months imagining crashes in horrific detail. Then my anxiety surged like a sneaker wave, swelling from one specific fear to every fear, everything. I was starting grad school soon, something I’d wanted for years, and all I felt was dread that I wouldn’t be able to handle it. I’ve been told you should never turn your back on the ocean when it’s at its wildest; life itself became anxiety. I fixated on my health, convinced something was wrong with my stomach, my heart, the way I breathed. I didn’t sleep for nights in a row. Floating through those days, my connection to reality faded in and out. I’ve never felt more like a ghost.

I could write about therapy sessions I attended, journal entries I wrote, medications I took, meditation retreats I went on, all the practical techniques I used to try to help myself feel more like myself. Those have their uses. But this kind of anxiety, the kind you’re swept up in, requires something more. It forced me to shift my perspective. 

I started this past new year in Seaside, Oregon. One night, snow drifted down, blanketing the beach, adorning each individual blade of seagrass. I ran outside to witness my first oceanside snowfall, and there it was, shy moonlight making the snow glow and the waves sparkle, the bite in the air clouding my breath. This place of breeze and sea spray and undulation suddenly rendered still. 

Standing in front of the dark waves that night, watching soft flakes drift down, I was reminded that nothing lasts as long as we think it will. Snow melts. Storms die. Even in the cold, standing there felt the same as it always does when I stand in front of the sea, placing myself before a force so powerful, everything worrying me seems utterly insignificant. 

The power of my anxiety never awes me like the ocean does. The long days and nights working to mend my overreacting nervous system can’t be romanticized. They’re a blur of survival, of doing the bare minimum. They’re an endless string of reminders: This won’t last forever. You always get through this. Life will be better soon. 

The snowstorm brought me wholly into that fight. I ended up trapped on the coast a few days longer than anticipated. One day, I was even trapped in my sixth-floor hotel room, the elevators down after a power outage and the only set of stairs, exposed to the elements, coated thickly in ice. I could watch the ocean from the floor-to-ceiling windows in the room, could see what I couldn’t reach. I was anxious, but I never had a panic attack, never even came close. Instead, a dull acceptance tinged with dread settled into my body. If experiencing so much anxiety in the past few years — indeed, feeling possessed by it, feeling like the embodiment of anxiety itself — had taught me anything, it’s that I could live through it. So that’s what I did. I waited, a little uneasy but continuing on, and the storm passed. 

I don’t believe that anything happens for a reason. But why suffer without learning from it, allowing it to change you in some way for the better? Not all types of suffering lend themselves to this approach; sometimes pain is just pain. But I do know what I’ve learned from anxiety: How to be kinder to and not judge others, because you never know what someone is fighting internally; how to appreciate feeling deeply, even when it hurts; how to savor the calm moments and experience gratitude so deep it’s in my bones.

Anxiety is a necessary evolution, a way to keep ourselves safe; it has helped keep me alive and, in the next breath, made me feel like I’m dying. It’s ultimately a story my brain tells itself, and while I can’t always control the narrative, I can control the way I tell it. Anxiety can be an ocean if I want it to. Or the ocean can be a place of healing from anxiety.

Or both.


Mental Health

Only Life Has Happened

Listening to the Ocean