Chapter 16 — A vision of hell, and a warning

An Ordinary Disaster — chapter 16

Much as with depression, I never used to really get what people meant by anxiety. In retrospect, I felt both of these things a lot, but at the time I didn’t feel that my own experience connected to those terms, in large part because I didn’t want to identify with some sort of general condition. I still don’t. I don’t say that I “had depression,” or that I “am anxious,” but that I felt depressed, or that I feel anxious. Why would I want to identify myself semi-permanently with what should be a transitory psychological state? I still think that’s right, although for a long time it also served keep me at a distance from what was often my actual experience of recurring depression and acute anxiety.

By the middle of 2006 it had been more than a year since I split with Jenna, and just two years since I dropped out of grad school and returned to San Francisco. I was living alone again, working away at my now just-more-than-nascent business, scrambling between dates and girlfriends, and although I had started to take better care of myself in some basic ways, things were still very much getting worse for me on the inside. Thanks to my friend Peter, I did start seeing a therapist—and was soon seeing her two or even three times as week—but again, nobody explained how it was supposed to work, and I was too naïve and needful to think of asking. I just showed up, usually feeling desperate and alone, and left feeling a bit less desperate, still alone, went about my business for a day or two, and then found my way back to her office again. All of that inner work did eventually make a huge impact on me, but it was a long, long road, with some major incidents along the way, and if I’d thought to look into such things, I might well have been better served by someone a bit less of the traditional Freudian variety, but again, I didn’t.

The fact is that on one level, I was in a lot of psychological pain and well aware of how much I needed help, and on another I continually discounted what I was experiencing as not all that serious, and not really that acute or very urgent. I didn’t see myself on a downward spiral, and I still don’t really know if I was. I may already have been moving slowly upwards, or, really, in both directions at once, sometimes feeling better—and sometimes still descending further into toxic hellspace. That’s also part of the reason why I didn’t want to identity myself as “depressed,” or “anxious” or whatever, because if I “was” depressed, then how could I also feel great sometimes? The reality is that it’s just more complicated than a single word can encompass, and that, certainly for me, a word is like a spell, and using a word like “depression” is an invocation of a place that I didn’t want to be in, or to embody.

However, there was one morning when it became very clear to me that things were really not OK for me, and that I had to work harder to change course.

Ten-thirty on a Tuesday, and I was still bleary and sour from whatever I’d had to drink with dinner the night before, in no way cured by two cups of overstrong coffee.

My work for the morning was already done. With nothing in particular to do, I was pacing the kitchen, hoping for the phone to ring. As was often the case, I might have been glad to be free of demands on my time, but I felt just the opposite. Earlier that same morning I’d been crying in the shower. I was so desperate for something to relieve my deep, deep feeling of being alone, and it felt like that was just never going to change.

There was only so much space to go back and forth in there in my flat, and I began to feel boxed in by my mounting unease. A very familiar feeling began to approach on the horizon and then to rise up within me, a feeling of dread and loss and a scattered searching for something unknown—and a question, also very familiar by then.

The question began to flash in front of me with a neon insistence.

What do I do? What do I do with the rest of the day? What do I do with the next hour? What do I do with the next five minutes?

It’s just that I don’t know what to do about feeling so alone; that feeling is so pervasive that it erases everything else and all other possibility so that I am left feeling that I literally don’t know what to do with myself in the next moment. I’ve become unmoored, first drifting, and then spinning, overcome with not knowing or not being able to see my way even into the next minute, everything obscured by sadness, aloneness, and desperation.

When I think about that now it seems clear that that was true, in that nothing of what I was doing in the habits and patterns of life was going to deliver an answer, or relief. It was a demand for something different, a demand for change—but at the time I don’t know what to do eclipsed everything else. It blotted out the sun and made my world dark.

Sensing the approach of something else, something terrible and also familiar that I’d seen in glimpses and put out of mind like a bad dream or a ghost, was pacing faster between the kitchen and living room, up and down the hall, looking for something to hold on to. By then, in that moment, all I could think of was finding an anchor, some comfort, something that would remind me that there was another hour, day, week on the other side of this desperate not knowingness, but I couldn’t see it.

I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know beat into me like a drum, growing louder and louder by the second. I still had almost two hours before my therapy appointment. I needed seeming to eat. Returning to the kitchen, I pulled out a loaf of bread, carved off a slice, and dropped it in the toaster, pushing the handle down until it clicked into place.

The toast gave me something to aim for, something in the future. I could just about see as far as the two minutes it would take for the toast to pop. If I could get that far, then maybe I could make it another two minutes.

A threat was dancing at the edge of my sight, and I began to recognize the shapes I’d seen hints of from time to time in recent years. Clearly malevolent, I’d always been able to push them away before, but now, with the the timer ticking away as I stood there tense and immobile, leaning against the counter for support—a maelstrom hit me, winding around me like a sheet, blinding me, and spinning me up into a white wave of confusion.

The jagged forms inside my head had leaked out into the world. My vision was taken over by a horrific rent in the barrier that normally contains the unconscious, and a spinning, spitting demon force threatened to engulf me. In this state, I saw myself from the above and to the right, looking down at my open mouth and lips as they were slashed by a cloud of whirling razor blades, leaving my face a lacerated mess of blood, flesh and broken teeth.

An cacophony of discordant bells and blaring horns surrounded me, along with a high-velocity buzz-saw whine that grew to an insane clatter. It was then that it seemed that I could feel sharp metal between my teeth, slicing into my gums—and with the blood and blades came something even worse. It was a small relief that I couldn’t smell or taste it, but I could see that it was shit. Filth smeared in with the blood, the razors cutting into me, everything mixed together in a terrifying, polluted, catastrophic mess. A foul incarnation of damage and fear and shame, and it wanted to destroy me.

It wanted to destroy me, in the sense that it was trying to tell me that I was destroying myself. The message of this waking nightmare was as clear as day—it’s was telling me that it—that is, I—could not longer live this way, that something had to change, and that wishing for someone else to change things for me would remain the fruitless, desperate hope that it had always been.

I don’t really know what to call what I experienced—a panic attack, a nervous breakdown, a psychotic break. It wasn’t so much a literal hallucination as a outburst of psychic energy that forced its way upwards from my unconscious so strongly that it took over my senses for a short while. It doesn’t really matter what to call it. It was frightening—and I knew that it was a manifestation of something deeper. I couldn’t fully digest it at the time, but it was clear that it was a message, not an unhinging into further damage.

Gripping the edge of the sink, my heart pounding, I gasped for air, filling my lungs as I started to become aware of my surroundings again. Sweat dripped from my arm- and elbow-pits. My ribs and chest felt as if they were splayed wide open, letting the cold, foggy air coming in from the deck blow right through me.

I turn to look at the cheap plastic toaster full of glowing electric fire, my gaze following the black wire to where it’s plugged in between jars of coffee, beans, and spices. Pots hang on the wall behind the small gas stove, a relic from another era pushed in between cheap IKEA cabinetry and wide-planked softwood floors. On one wall hangs the painting I bought in Paris a few years prior. The other three walls remain white and empty.

The smell of hot bread arrived just before the toast popped up, just two minutes after I’d pushed it in.

I was still unsteady and weak as my arms moved shakily to paint the toast with almond butter. I knew it would feel good to eat. The clamor in my head was subsiding, my senses returning to normal.

* * *

Five minutes later, sitting at the kitchen table eating my toast, it occured to me that I really did need more help. Nobody else could change things for me, but I needed more of my people to know what was going on for me. I needed to let it out, so that it wasn’t just inside me. I needed to begin to spell it out.

My old friend Anni had just moved back to San Francisco after several years in art school out on the east coast. We ran with the same crowd in our teens, never really close, and then run into each other online as soon as she was in town again.

I opened my computer and pulled up her profile on Nerve, which was a very mid-aughts combination of sex-positive online dating and R- to X-rated writing that made a lot of people curious, but never really took off in a big way.

My heart rate had slowed from the whirlwind attack, and now it was increasing again at the prospect of sexual connection.

I typed words into the little box on the screen:

I just kicked my ex-fiancé out of my apartment, so I thought I’d see what turns up on Nerve. Busted! Nice to see you here.

Anni must have been staring at her own screen on the other end, because her reply came back almost instantaneously.

You fucker. I love you.

Feeling a wash of relief, I hurried to write back.

Wanna get drunk and screw? You could help me exorcize hellbitch juju.

More glowing words appeared in front of me.

I’ll come over later. We can break things. Seriously, what’s your address?

* * *

I don’t know what we broke that night when she came over, and I didn’t tell her or anyone else what happened to me that morning for many years, but I did let her in on how lonely and lost I was feeling. She showed me that I could tell someone that, and that they would hear me. Anni was in her own fragile place at the time, and still, she looked after me. She called me, she checked in on me, she invited me in. We helped each other, I think.

Anni showed me that someone was watching, and she was the first woman in my life who became not just a lover and a friend, but a sister.

That vision never returned, and although it’s message wasn’t entirely clear at the time, I could see it for what it was—a cry for help, and a stern warning.

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Thanks for reading, and for being part of this journey.

This is part of AN ORDINARY DISASTER, the book-length memoir about a man learning to listen to himself, and the price I paid until I learned how to do that, serialized right here on Substack with a new chapter published every week.

You can find everything from the memoir that I’ve published so far right here.

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Further reading

Here’s the table on contents for the memoir. You might also enjoy some of my other work, such as

or any of the other essays that you can find here

What does this bring up for you?

1. Have you ever experienced a panic attack, a nervous breakdown, a psychotic break, a waking nightmare, or anything like what I describe in this chapter?

2. What has been your own experience with “anxiety” and “depression,” and coming to terms with those terms?

3. Have you ever gotten a warning from your own unconscious that was too strong to ignore?

4. Has a friend shown up for you somehow in a new way?

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