Time for an anxiety attack!
Dec. 16th, 2013 08:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
snarpAnxiety attacks happen when I read something that upsets me about, say, just throwing it out there, people wanting to cut SNAP benefits. And then I start thinking about how I'm going to run for office and just RAGE AT REPUBLICANS like some kind of atheist-Buddhist Cotton Mather, and I'm writing speeches in my head and can feel my throat creaking as my pretend voice starts to get hoarse, and at some point I get myself so worked up I start shaking and my ears start ringing and my brainscar hurts.
That's how to have an anxiety attack if you're me. I don't know how Keith Olbermann does it.
...
Keith Olbermann can do what he does because he's not a tiny woman who, on some subconscious level which she has yet to clean the shit out of, expects public anger to be met with wildly disproportionate physical retaliation, due to the sort of shit that happens in underfunded rural schools.
The thing that makes me feel like a shitty atheist-Buddhist is, there are people I haven't seen for more than a decade - people my age who are in worse situations than me and probably will be for their whole lives - who I cannot imagine encountering in real life without physically hurting them. One of them I think I did hurt, the last time I saw him.
I know that this is irrational, because I ran into one of them at someone else's house a few years back, and was polite to him. Another got himself killed while I was still in fucking high school.
But I always forget that when I think of them, because my memory of these guys is frozen in a particular moment when I was in middle school and hearing voices and waking up some days with the solid, indestructible certainty that the world was an unreal facade over something humming and gleaming with existential hostility towards me personally, and that the eyes of the toys I kept over my bed saw just as clearly as did those of people and dogs, which was not very, but nonetheless full of hate. And yet unfairly this mirror-thin world had the power to hurt me, and though I could feel its limitless anger at me like sunlight or wind, and hear it humming in empty rooms, my own anger was intangible, and I couldn't do anything.
Then we got the internet in the house and I made a site dissing a pop band. I got mountains of hate mail and fake legal threats and threats of violence. It was remarkably life-affirming.
I stopped to go pet the dogs for an hour and feel better. I'm just going to post this now without re-reading it.
That's how to have an anxiety attack if you're me. I don't know how Keith Olbermann does it.
...
Keith Olbermann can do what he does because he's not a tiny woman who, on some subconscious level which she has yet to clean the shit out of, expects public anger to be met with wildly disproportionate physical retaliation, due to the sort of shit that happens in underfunded rural schools.
The thing that makes me feel like a shitty atheist-Buddhist is, there are people I haven't seen for more than a decade - people my age who are in worse situations than me and probably will be for their whole lives - who I cannot imagine encountering in real life without physically hurting them. One of them I think I did hurt, the last time I saw him.
I know that this is irrational, because I ran into one of them at someone else's house a few years back, and was polite to him. Another got himself killed while I was still in fucking high school.
But I always forget that when I think of them, because my memory of these guys is frozen in a particular moment when I was in middle school and hearing voices and waking up some days with the solid, indestructible certainty that the world was an unreal facade over something humming and gleaming with existential hostility towards me personally, and that the eyes of the toys I kept over my bed saw just as clearly as did those of people and dogs, which was not very, but nonetheless full of hate. And yet unfairly this mirror-thin world had the power to hurt me, and though I could feel its limitless anger at me like sunlight or wind, and hear it humming in empty rooms, my own anger was intangible, and I couldn't do anything.
Then we got the internet in the house and I made a site dissing a pop band. I got mountains of hate mail and fake legal threats and threats of violence. It was remarkably life-affirming.
I stopped to go pet the dogs for an hour and feel better. I'm just going to post this now without re-reading it.
