A Breakdown

“Thou makest darkness, and it is night: wherein all the beasts of the forest do creep forth.” 

A breakdown was like being bound, blindfolded, and pummeled, then dropped in the middle of a thick, dark wood. I was completely beaten, covered in bruises and still vomiting up bile and blood when the blindfold was ripped from my eyes and the denseness of my isolation pressed heavy on my skin, heart, bones. I started to scream. Like Diana in the woods with Anne, I screamed myself hoarse, standing stock still in terror — frozen in place, my hands clenching my belly or ears, every sense heightened and afraid. The screaming went on for two months. I wouldn’t have called it screaming at the time, in reality it was more like panic attacks that left me rocking and hyperventilating on the floor, absolute anguish of mind, and a body that rejected every bit of nourishment I and those who loved me tried to give. 

The terror of those early days still slices sharply through my memory, but the intensity has faded. That such a memory fades is astounding.

Since the beginning, I have described this mental breakdown as having my train tracks blown up, wooden tracks, like the ones my children own. “If my brain is made up of a series of tracks,” I’d say, “and if my mind is the train that rides those tracks, then the tracks have erupted and my train car has nowhere to land.” Every moment of every day for the first two months was spent trying to lay the next track for a mind that wouldn’t stop moving. When the tracks ran out, the train flew off into the dark abyss.

At first I thought I was having a spiritual crisis. I prayed, I sought my soul. I worshipped. I spoke Scripture. I used all the tools I’ve ever had and looked to God to fix the tracks and hold the pain and come near with peace. At my first therapy appointment my anxiety popped and I emerged out of a six-day panic attack, and I thought, well, that was it, thank God. I made it through. But six days later when I was laid lower than before with anxiety even more intense, my doctor gently told me, “you have at least two months ahead of you of recovery, maybe more.”

“At least two months,” my counselor agreed, “but probably more.”

Six weeks into the breakdown one of my oldest and dearest friends, also a therapist, held me on my couch after the lowest night of my life and said: “please consider medication. It can be the difference between drowning in the pool while trying to uproot issues, or getting outside the pool where you can lean over and uproot from the safety of land.” Weekly therapy and weekly doctor visits and as-needed anxiety medication were keeping my tracks somewhat laid, but I was still in the forest screaming, buckled over with crippling anxiety and mental trauma and invasive thoughts. My body had so far rejected every natural supplement and remedy we had tried. So I added an anti-depressant. Five weeks of hell later (on-boarding was a beast) I stood on my deck and tentatively stretched a hand to the sunlight. I turned my fingers and felt the wind on my skin. My mind held no thought, no emotion, but for awareness of my skin, the solidness of the breeze, the warmth of the sun. I was present in a moment, and stunned by the depth such presence contained. I could not remember feeling so wholly myself, so entirely present and still – it had been years since I’d felt that way, at least. The moment was fleeting, but more moments like it came, increasing in frequency and duration. The screaming stopped. The tracks began to lay. Days began to shift their weight from insanity with no lucid moments to insanity with some lucid moments to lucidity with fragmented moments – or just general fragmentation – scattered in.

I woke to the reality that my panic would not kill me.

If I was standing in the forest, screaming my terror, you would have seen me dropping to a quieter muffled sob.  I tentatively began to take stock of my surroundings. I keyed in to my physical presence in the midst of this foreign place. My heart grew, if not still, then stiller.  In my real life I began venturing out – a trip to the store despite the sheer panic that permeated every minute. A visit to a friend. I sat on the deck out my kitchen for hours, watching the winter pass. I knitted two blankets. I rested both my body and my mind. My mind was not the same. My body was not the same. My life was not the same.  I tried to remember how to do simple tasks. I tried to hold onto basic information, like my children’s names. I let all the things I’d forgotten and the few I remembered not define who I am. I was humbled before my children. We had no choice but to be open with the kids about what was going on, and though I kept the worst symptoms from their eyes (and thanked God that they were in school), in their different ways they all tracked with my journey. It was our journey, we could only be honest and make a lot of room for grace. Here is a thing that we can face, and we will not pretend to you that it is not happening. We will not confuse you in that way.

So my position in the forest felt perilous. I ceased screaming and was surprised to find myself alive. I began the work of separating fear into two categories: that which is about something real, and that which is made up in my mind. When all systems are on overdrive, it’s hard to tell the false from the true. I began to sift the positives and negatives of the experience. Here I am alone in a forest. But I am alive. The air is cold. But I have skin to feel it. My skin is chaffed from the bonds. But I am loosed. My mind is exhausted from the screaming. But I am still here. My eyes are frightened of the shadows. But my eyes can see. I have eyes. And that’s something. That’s a good place to begin.

What do you see? My counselor once asked me. You see rightly. There’s nothing wrong with your thinking brain. It’s your emotional brain that is fragmenting.

No, my thinking brain is gone.

It’s not. What do you see?

I spent the winter seeing. I keyed into the weather. I watched the sunrises and the sunsets. I noticed the birds and times of day they arrived; I memorized their colors, I learned their songs. I know now the phase of day the shadow from the barn will cross the pond, the moment before sunset that the pasture and bordering forest will turn to gold, and how to anticipate the later times of these as spring lengthens. I know the constellations and where they sit above my head at each watch of the night, and how they shift with the passing of the season. I know where in the sky to look for each phase of the moon. I know what the cold feels like and no longer dread it, I know that January holds more sun than my anxious brain had feared, I know the feel of the ice beneath my toes in the middle of December nights. I know that March smells like flowers. I know that April smells like rain. I know the patterns of our ducks and chickens, the habits of the creaking house, and the rhythm of birch and cedar and fir as they roar in the storms alongside the pasture and against the walls of the house, as they sleep in the starlit nights, as they sway in the westerly wind. I know 90 blueberry bushes intimately, and as I pruned right through the anxiety I held each branch before my eyes, to see.

It is a new world and I am getting my bearings. It is new, I don’t understand exactly where I am. I don’t have a grip on who I am, not all the way. In the proverbial forest I still fall down screaming before the surprise shriek of an owl, or the jolt of something in the bush beyond, but now I am able to get back up and add owl to my vernacular, or deer, or whatever new word belongs. There are dashes of sunlight between the magnificent firs. I can mother my children. And that’s something, too. That, also, is a good place to begin.