little panic review

I finished reading a memoir last month. Or maybe the month before

Chicken Little vindicated little me. The movie, not the book. My panic. He spoke it out loud and it was true.

Once when I was 6, my mother and embarked on a challenge: I was to walk one way around the block between Park, Lexington, 96th, and 97th Streets, and my mom the other. We would then meet at the 6 train and go home. When I reached the end of the block - a site I'd passed every morning and afternoon for months at this point - I watched the lights change and the bus scream past and remembered that terrible feeling I'd get when my mom made us rush to school. Like my failure to arrive on time was hers and I'd be branded late as a poor and black bridge-and-tunnel boy would be. I felt this feeling overwhelm me and I crossed the street when the walk sign came up and walked farther than we'd agreed, further than I'd been from my mother. Her office was across the street from my school.

I remember a doorman, a police cruiser, and my mother, effusive. I remember a blank feeling like it didn't matter that I did that or what could have happened. I was safe and hadn't realized I was ever unsafe.

At some point later I began to panic. I began to imagine myself unsafe. Strive to always be safe. To never upset the status quo. If a dodgeball knocked my glasses off in P.E. I'd break down crying. Once I was done crying, I'd keep the act up out of embarrassment.

Once I knew something was unsafe I wouldn't touch it for years. I like to think this is why my skateboarding never got great, though I ground it out for 15 years. Around 10 or 11 years old I could not ollie and tried to 'hippy jump' a rail at Andy Kessler Skate Park. I jumped off my board, cleared the rail, board went under, planted both feet on my board with my legs stiff, and fell right on my ass.

I never tried those again.

The panic came back. Recently. It's been around, shaping my life and keeping me from harm, challenge, and achievements. It was lurking around every corner and now it's back. I stopped feeding it beer over a year ago now and it has nothing to quiet it but my thoughts and actions. I cannot rid myself of it on my own. It never leaves me. I thought it was a thing everyone had. I see others without the panic and wonder how they got rid of it. I don't know when and where I got it and I don't know how to make it leave.

I must ask for help but I must first ask for understanding. And leeway. And gulp support. I must remind others that despite how put together I seem, I am unwell and have been for most of my life. I've just gotten good at hiding it. Hiding myself and hiding it.

Every day I spend with the panic feels like the first day I realized it wasn't normal to have. That there were ways to work with it. From the bits I've learned about dealing with the panic that's a normal feeling. Every day is a journey from beginning to end. That life with the panic was an understood thing and I could pay doctors and social workers to help me with it. That I could read wonderful, tragic narratives from all sorts of people about their panic.

Little Panic is a book I discovered at a temp job. Pulling textbooks for NYU students. A temp job I worked because of the panic. Because the panic prevented me from striving, from trying. In school, I'd struggle with the bare minimum of help. What I perceived as the bare minimum. So I could not even be grateful for the incredible support I did have, proud of the hard work I did do. I felt like I was eking by. Afterward, I had few professional plans. I wanted people to stop bothering me about my future so I just nodded and went. If I asserted myself the panic told me things that were overblown and untrue. And I'd believe it.

I heard a lot of myself in this book.