My Body Is Screaming Right Now
My body doesn’t speak English, it speaks Plagues. The first time I hear it I am twenty-two. I’m in my bedroom and on the verge of sleep, that in-between time when reality and the subconscious are spooning. A commercial for the 10 o’clock news fuses with a dream about my cat, who won’t get out of my backpack and into a carrier and I’m freaking because we have a flight to catch (hadn’t flown in ten years, no cat). And suddenly, I’m scratching at the sand-dollars that have formed on my skin. I see one on my arm, then two. They’re on my stomach now, three-four-five. My face. I wake up my roommate and ask if this is normal, she says probably not. I call my mom, my dad gets on the line. “Oh, those are probably hives. We get them when we’re stressed out.” We? Like all of us? “Just be careful, because if you get them in your throat you might stop breathing. Go to the doctor and get an allergen test, maybe it’s your sheets. And just… stay alert, okay?” my dad says, although I’m pretty sure you have to *be* alert to *stay* alert, and I’d been blowing through the lights, asleep at the wheel.
I wanted to say that something happens to girls when they reach a certain age, but it most assuredly happens regardless of gender, so maybe it just happens to people with anxiety (but perhaps not all of us — I don’t want to generalize).
Anyway, something happened to me — or did I happen to myself? — as I got older: I turned down my volume. I was one of those kids who liked being a kid; I was mischievous and loud and my hair was a constant frizz. Volume on ten, but then puberty. I looked wrong and liked the wrong jokes and moved my hips the wrong way but I thought, no one will notice me if I just quiet down and hide behind these other people. So I hid, put on my headphones and tuned the world out. Started journaling or whatever. Got older, became a stoner, blamed any extraneous self-expression on ~the weed, man~. I could laugh harder, then. I could talk in circles and bury the lede. I could be forgetful, but not enough so to erase years of being told, “I heard your voice from three blocks away,” of wishing myself small, of learning the different ways in which the world wanted me to shut the fuck up.
I just turned it down some more. I graduated college and took work way too seriously and only let 40% of my emotions out of Pandora’s Box. I lost my feelings vocabulary, didn’t talk about them, no journaling. I could still publicly get worked up over a guy, but the other stuff was private — so private even I wasn’t aware of what I was feeling half the time. At some point, I stopped being able to properly articulate my feelings, my anxiety. So my body began to do it for me.
At ten, I took to standing up at the dinner table. Just in case I had to jump to push the food down, I explained to my parents. It was more of a hop, really, and it all made sense — there was this invisible but constant lump in my throat, see? I just had to help the food along on its journey. We all need help sometimes.
The hopping phase passed, but the lump proved more resilient. These days I treat it with water. Whenever I forget how to swallow food mid-chew, I use water to coax the contents of my mouth down my throat. At restaurants, I pause eating once my glass is two-thirds empty, don’t resume until it’s refilled. I get anxious around steak, gummy bears — foods that linger in the throat. It’s just a thing. I have plenty of friends who’ve seen me waterless and choking — a hairball-type choke — so I know this isn’t all in my head. Except that it kind of is.
Globus Hystericus. I only learned this… situation had a name in 2014, when I read Miranda July’s The First Bad Man (the main character has the lump, is constantly referring to her “globus”). Just a fancy name for that anxiety-induced, lump-in-your-throat feeling. Still, a name! A name means this has happened before. A name means I’m not alone.
A year before the hive incident, I had a flirt with sleepwalking. Running away from my problems except never far enough. That summer, I’d wake up on the wrong couch, or in the wrong room, or on the wrong floor — typically when staying at a friend’s house, someplace unfamiliar — with no memory of climbing stairs or walking through bedrooms. Come morning I’d laugh it off, recount my travels while leaving out the more worrisome bits of the story. I’m leaving out details even now, which, why even bring it up then? I know. But I bring it up because until I began seeing a therapist seven years later, I didn’t see a connection between anxiety and sleepwalking. I just thought I was out of control.
Then there was heartburn summer. Have you ever had heartburn? The commercials make it sound all benign, but heartburn summer nearly ruined me. I would eat a food — one that had never bothered me before — and get this demon pain in my chest. This convinced me I was going to die soon and someplace inconvenient, too, like a beach or a wedding. My heart would start pounding thinking about this inevitability, sometimes for hours at a time; the fact that I’d just been diagnosed with a fairly mundane heart murmur didn’t help. I was convinced my doctor had missed something, the EKG was low-battery, the hole in my heart was less needle-prick and more black. Months of this but then one day in September, a friend asked if I’d ever had heartburn. Tums and then a return to normalcy, or so I thought. I quit caffeine and bought a stockpile of Zantac later that week, ready to be done with it, but it quickly became apparent that my latest anxiety tell was chest pain. The kind of nagging, endless pain that makes you think crazy shit, makes you Google “female heart attack symptoms” at two a.m. I remember thinking how unfair it was to find the source of my original pain only to have to trade it to Team Anxiety. But I guess the body remembers, even when you’d rather not.
I’ve been on medication for about four years now, and still I have to convince myself, mid-panic attack, that what I’m experiencing is anxiety. That I’ll probably stop thinking about heart attacks if I just take the pill. What if this is the big one? The real heart attack? My dumb brain says. You don’t wanna be on Xanax for The Big One. We do this for at least an hour. Even after all its subtle hints, I still don’t believe my body when it tells me I’m anxious. That I need to breathe, that this is real and valid.
But it is, right? I mean, it even has a name. This has definitely happened before.
