There is an image that keeps coming back to me lately: a science-fair volcano, the bubble and froth of baking soda and vinegar overflowing. Not because I remember making one — although I’m sure I did at some point.
The summer I turned freshly teenaged, there was a hot still afternoon when my father said something that sent me yelling and crying through the house — I don’t even remember what, but I knew and still know my reaction was out of proportion. When he came to find me after I’d simmered, he knelt and said gently, You’re like a volcano. You take in everything, and you keep all those feelings to yourself, but eventually they have nowhere to go. So you explode.
I’ve done a lot of searching over many years for healthier ways to channel what I feel, to keep those overflows few and far between. It has taken conscious effort, sometimes fighting against impulses that reach deep into the woodgrain of me. I have to choose it: choose to be vulnerable with the people in my life, choose habits like journaling, choose to face conflict and not run from it, choose to seek out help when I have no resources left. Some of it has worked: I’m not the pressure cooker I once was.
But I feel the rumblings more and more lately. You take in everything, my father said, and lately everything is, well, a lot. There is just so much. The periods of dormancy in me shrink faster than I can take a breath.
One morning last week, I woke to find I couldn’t. Breathe, that is. I watched the clock tick from six-thirty to seven to eight, trying to take a deep breath and feeling the weight like a river stone on my chest when I did, my pulse skyrocketing with the effort.
The two days before that morning were some of the worst of this spring: I had had the proverbial rug pulled out from under me and was in danger of losing my apartment, having to move out in the middle of the pandemic. I’d had a handful of meltdowns, a furious mad dash of strategizing, and the single most stressful phone call of my life. And — with willpower, a script, and a lot of restraint to avoid screaming — I’d managed to band-aid the situation, temporarily. My household congratulated me on how well I handled it. With grace, was the phrase they used.
Grace seemed to elude me that morning. By that point not being able to take a breath had scared me into weeping. I was terrified that the stress and panic had been too much for me at last, that this was my body giving out. I sat rod-straight in bed, facing the window, watching the sun come up over the trees, still weeping. Grace, I thought, would be seeing a morning after this one.
I spent four days with that terror, with my pulse hammering every time I even stood up, the river stone lodged in my ribs, pain shooting through different parts of my body as if in protest. My anxiety is a fellow at this point, a shadow, I know it well. But it’s also a shapeshifter, so I can’t explain it any better than this: it felt different, this time. It felt like some kind of end coming.
Some parts of the story are better not told, so I won’t tell you what changed the tide. But on the fifth day, though the weight was still there when I woke, I knew this time that I was safe, from this, for now. But I also had to reckon with the violence that the events of my life routinely wreak on me, that my brain and body had wrought on each other.
My therapist surprises me when I relate the week to her: She calls me sensitive. Not sneering with her nose upturned; she sounds almost admiring. She calls it my blessing, and my curse, to feel everything so intensely. Her eyes shine out gently over our video call. Feeling this much means you are alive.
I know she is trying to comfort me, but I can’t help thinking of a friend of mine, a conversation we had weeks ago. (Was it weeks? Time is a rubber band, constricting and stretching.) Everything is different, and nothing is different, my friend said. She meant that she can’t distinguish her feelings from one another, experiences everything the same. She meant: outside looks so different, but in here it’s fog. She meant: emotional flatline.
Is she less alive than me, just because feeling is hard for her right now? That seems unfair.
When we first spoke, I wondered whether I would swap my experience for hers. But it’s like the old question: would you rather be deaf or blind? — a ridiculous proposal, so incredibly insensitive that I feel embarrassed by it.
It’s not until my friend and I speak again weeks later that something changes. It’s probably my brain protecting me, she says. Like, if I actually try to process everything all at once, I’ll go insane.
A spark goes off in my brain when she says it. Of course: everything is terrifying right now. Everything is something that our brains want to protect us from. For some that means shutting down to stay safe, crumpling feelings down because they are just too raw, too much. For others it’s just the opposite — revving into overdrive by predicting every terrible scenario and honing in on every strange sensation.
But that’s what it is, the thread between us. We are our own shelter. We are trying to protect ourselves. From the threat always simmering, the rumbles waiting to break forth, the skies darkening with ash.
Knowing this, I am not suddenly immune to stress and anxiety, and my friend does not magically regain her emotional spectrum. But when I recognize it as a protective instinct rather than an attack, I make room for some lines to be drawn.
We are living through a crisis, and there will be overlapping crises within this one, to be managed as they come up. But if I can be sensitive to looming threats and the terror they give me, I can also be sensitive to the things that bring me calm, or pleasure, or outright laughter. If I can’t take a breath some mornings, I can stick my nose in a blooming bush and catch its earth-sweet scent. If I spend the day sobbing every other hour, there are still hours between them to make good simple food, and read old comic books out in the yard, and call my friends. Both falling ash and clear sky.
You take in everything, my father said. I can make that true again.