I don’t envy kids today. Growing up on the precipice of the internet taking over our lives, the lingering impact of a passive aggressive AIM away message was damaging enough. But I find myself feeling jealous of all their language. All the words and terms and ideas that we, and they, have an understanding of now that we really didn’t back then -- at least I didn’t. Maybe if I knew a little something about anxiety at 11 years old I would know I had it before it was too late -- early in the morning at a coffee shop in Tennessee in 2017.
I’ll explain.
Four years ago one of my very best friends got married. Lila and I met first period on the first day of high school in 2003. I didn’t know it at the time -- there was a girl in our class wearing a shirt with a condom on it and the phrase “in case of emergency” that Lila thought was much funnier than anything I was wearing that day -- but we would soon become inseparable. Now, many years later, she was getting married and we were going to Nashville to celebrate.
I often marvel at the things in life that exist just for you to enjoy them. Bachelorette parties and other wedding-adjacent activities come with their own certain amount of hellish baggage. But they are, for all intents and purposes, designed just to be fun. And this was going to be a really fun one. I’d been looking forward to the trip since we decided to make matching cheese-themed shirts for the occasion: BRI(d)E for the bride, “She’ll never be provolone again” for the attendees.
That’s when a Starbucks gift card landed on my desk at work. It will become the first clue on a long list when I think back on what caused what we’ll call “the big one” -- my first ever major panic attack. (No relation to Los Angeles’ “the big one,” but I did just google that the big one and now — I have anxiety).
My work schedule at the time was such that I handled any pressing news first thing and commuted to the office when there was a lull, usually by late morning or early afternoon. That’s when, during this particular week, I’d stop into Starbucks and make good use of my new found star-bucks (get it?) I usually go no bigger than a Grande but I thought ‘fuck it, I’m rich now’ and went straight Venti cold brews every day for five days. I’d come home from work, plan outfits for the weekend and find myself wondering WHAT I was doing up at 2 AM! Must be the excitement.
Then I got to Nashville and binge drank for three days.
My crew. Alex, pictured left, and Lila, our bride, pictured right. 3:00 AM in Nashville, March 2017. Mere hours before “the big one.”
That’s not all we did. We also did one of those bike tours around the city, sang karaoke at a Nashville institution where I completely butchered both Dolly Parton AND Kenny Rogers’ parts on “Islands in the Stream” in front of a room full of music producers (sorry Dolly please don’t take away my second Moderna shot) and ate really, really well. But drinking at a bachelorette party is as ubiquitous as the plastic penis straws you drink out of.
And not to brag, but I’m pretty killer at drinking.
So, on that fateful Saturday morning at 8:00 AM, after two days of hard partying and 28 years of burying unresolved trauma, a massive panic attack bulldozed me out of line at a coffee shop (like I needed more caffeine) and into full blown hysterics without warning, salty tears drowning out the taste of my blueberry muffin, veins thumping like the sound you hear in the front when the back windows of the car are open on the highway. I was shaking, crying, completely out of control — my least favorite thing to be. I didn’t know it was a panic attack at the time and I’d never experienced anything like it before.
I couldn’t believe I was about to die at a bachelorette party.
One of the beautiful (and OK, messed up) things about growing up in New York is that by the time of my first panic attack, many of my friends had already had all of theirs and could identify it as such. Whereas I was 100 percent absolutely sure I was just dying, they moved quickly around me, coaching me through it, assuring me that’s what it was, slipping me a little something to take the edge off. I didn’t want to take it, didn’t want to admit I needed to take it. Even now sometimes when I am panicky and take a Xanax my initial thought (rooted in absolutely no logic whatsoever) is that the Xanax could slow my heart so much that I could die.
I have anxiety about anti-anxiety medication.
Based solely on all the death talk so far it’s hard to believe that I truly, honestly, until that morning, didn’t think I even had anxiety. But I really didn’t. I was proud of it. Look what I had gotten away with!
It wasn’t even until years later, and in the work I’m doing now, that I am starting to understand the real depths of it. The cold brew, lack of sleep and alcohol didn’t help, but there were years -- decades -- of unresolved shit trying to poke its way out from under paper thin ice in my body. It’s really easy to disconnect how our youth dictates our current experience, easy to put distance between ourselves and our history. “It was a long time ago,” I used to say when people expressed sympathy about mine. (I do not say this anymore).
A while after the incident in Nashville I was talking about something with my therapist and mentioned -- in passing! -- a habit I had of kind of rehearsing what I’m going to say to someone before I meet up with them.
“Do you do that every time you meet with people?” she asked.
“Yes, that’s what people do,” I said.
“No. It’s not.”
Huh. What other anxious habits had I mistaken for just “things people do?” There were more obvious ones, of course, like the sweaty airplane palms or the one time I tried to watch an action movie on an exceptionally smooth flight and spent the next 45 minutes forcing a flight attendant to confirm we were all fine and the plane was OK. The turning my ring around and around on my finger, the binge drinking, the endless social media scroll, the need to keep! Making! Content! After that morning at the coffee shop it was like that thing where you see one ant and then you keep looking around and see more and more ants.
They’re all ways anxiety manifests, and consequently ways we dissociate from having to deal with our real feelings.
But the thing about dissociating is that while I may have felt like it was protecting me from real pain, it also makes it nearly impossible to experience anything. When you’re always worried about what’s going to happen next you miss what is actually happening. How many things have I done but not experienced? The thought makes me — anxious.
Having a bit more of a handle on it now feels like hearing music for the first time. And I don’t mean that metaphorically. I mean literally my whole life I’ve been singing songs and only now am I starting to really hear the lyrics.
So much so that recently I had to pull over in the car because a song I was listening to, that I’ve heard many times before, made me cry. Really experiencing things is painful and confronts us with hard truths, but pain is OK, even when it comes as a result of Taylor Swift singing about her grandmother.
I definitely don’t have it figured out when it comes to anxiety and I DEFINITELY still have it, every single day. I regret to inform you that exercise, meditation and eating well really do help, but finding the root, feeling the pain and having the language helps, too. And honestly, sometimes TikTok works in a pinch. It’s *a lot* less stressful than any other social media platform I’m on.
Here are a few other other things besides TikTok that I’m loving this week:
This Coola self-tanning anti-aging serum. I spent a lot of time in the sun last summer but I have a sneaking suspicion this unemployed year will top it. Until then, this serum gives the subtle glow I’ve been missing all winter and feels great on the skin.
My goddamn manicure! Look at it! If you’re looking for a nail place in Brooklyn I highly, HIGHLY recommend Pure Nail on Fulton Street.
Innisfree fresh foot spray because I’ve been wearing the same Hoka One One slip on sneakers for a full year and recently I realized that they ( and my feet) smell really not good. This helps.
This mo-f’in Alison Lou croissant earring that I got a lot of heat for wanting to buy but makes me so happy and it was totally worth it. Plus it’s kosher for Passover.
And egg matzo with Temp Tee cream cheese (the best cream cheese) or Breakstone’s salted butter. Also kosher for Passover and delicious for all the time.
I’m going to meditate. I love you!
Love always,
Jamie AF
I love this one! So eloquent and vulnerable <3
Girl, you rock no matter how old you are or were!
Love,
your #1 fan