The Ink-Pot and the Palette

So. Panic attack this morning. Whee! First one in six weeks or so, and on the panic attack Richter Scale this one was about a 5--which means you have to sit down and hyperventilate for a minute, and you have only a minor adrenaline hangover afterwards, and not the ravenous sugar-hunger of a Richter 7.

You'll sometimes see one coming half an hour or so before it hits, and try to turn it aside, but these suckers are sneaky. Just when you stop singing ("Loooook around, we're living with the lo-o-o-o-st and found...") or concentrating on a task (mascara--every single eyelash...) for a second, wham! Weird shit starts going through your head, images that feel like memories, but aren't and you know it.

Images like...something to do with an advertisement for epoxy. That was this morning's, what I can remember of it. Epoxy. WTF. And Sandra Oh. Go figure.

Then the dread floods in and a thousand thoughts lance through it, each one tainted with a horrible physical feeling of hopelessness and terror, and you wonder how you'll go on living like this.

There's a part of you standing there saying, "It's not real, it's not real, it's not real," and another part of you that recognizes that that part of you isn't the part having the seizure and you're not gonna die of despair.

And then it passes, and for a few minutes--fifteen at most--your thoughts continue to rear up a bit and show you the whites of their eyes as they settle.

Half an hour later you're on the bus on your way to work and almost normal, and then you're getting off the elevator on the 14th floor and trying not to think: I thought these were over. When will they be over?

On October 17, 2006, I awoke thinking about a clay-colored Ralph Lauren raincoat. The memory of it filtered into my awareness: I remember a coat...didn't I have a coat like that? Yes! I did! What happened to that coat?

The slight startlement of realizing that I had lost that coat and completely forgotten about it till that moment brought me fully awake and got me out of bed.

The next day, October 18, after oversleeping, I half-sleepwalked to the bathroom and got into the shower on autopilot.

I had put shampoo in my hair and was washing the rest of me when three things happened in rapid succession.

( A detailed description of normal consciousness getting very, very messed up is behind the cut. )

By the way, the raincoat was on a rack of clothes that no longer fit but are too high quality for me to have let go of. The rack is in my basement. I'm sure Jung would have a field day.