On one of the last Fridays in January, I awoke to the sound of a candle flickering. It sounded like a stink-bug pretending to be a wasp, a stink-bug in midair, buzzing vociferously before it lands somewhere new. I like stink-bugs as symbols of protection, but I fear the possibility of forgetting to snuff the candles I had going before bed. I opened my eyes and swept the covers away from my face, along with the good silk smell of Theo’s longish hair. My heart was zhushing in my cheeks as I eyed the mantle where the candles were. All extinguished, nothing burning, but still that flickering sound. Still my heart going on about my face like it belonged there. Still the squeeze of daylight coming even though the neighbor’s rooster hadn’t even deigned to crow. Sweat on my face; fist behind my lungs. Flicker, zhush, ohhhhh, I remembered now. This is what a panic attack feels like.
I had them all through chemo, and again at the beginning of the summer when I was dealing with being a body on display in the first of my sisters’ weddings. An old friend, really, this feeling, not unlike trying to squint my way through understanding Deleuze. Huddle in, deep breaths, locate the misunderstanding as bodily sensation—there in my chest and ears and cheeks mostly—let it drop away with the exhales. Voilà, a short end to anxiety1, and I could get out of bed, even if the malaise remained.
Later, in the kitchen, Kiernan wondered whether the panic attack was related to work. I’ve been lucky and grateful to have a lot of things going on—weeks booked full with clients, a set routine for and a lasting drive to get into the writing weeds with my book-length project, collaborations with other friends to teach classes at the intersections of literature, well-being, and various occult practices. But in the process, I’ve started to do that thing I do, which is to rush right over any pockets of downtime, rest, leisure, pleasure, whatever you want to call it. I get into these grooves of “work feels meaningful” and “I need to pay the bills” and then it’s hard to figure out when those tracks should stop, switch over, fall silent. Things start to crackle.
I find myself looking around at my office when I’m done with the last thing on a Friday and I feel frantic to start something new, something difficult, while at the same time feeling ground down by the intellectual effort that makes up my week. Effort that largely goes unnoticed by much of anyone but me, because I like it that way. I don’t want my clients to feel like they are burden to me. I don’t want to show my memoir to any audience other than my editor just yet. I want the people who enroll in the classes I’ll teach outside of the university setting to feel like this is an experience that is explicitly for them without any begrudging on the part of the teacher—a reality of academia that caused me not a small amount of dismay.
“I was in my mid-30s and writing didn’t equal love. Writing was intensity, tablecloths, cafés, friendships,” Bhanu Kapil says of the struggle to complete her book The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers at a time in her life that felt rife with meaningful effort but not a lot of time to do anything other than work. When I listened to Kapil say this on a podcast during a long walk, post-panic attack last week, the sentence felt like a gift, a sense of myself in this moment but spoken from another woman’s mouth, time, and place.
The panic attacks are not about the work, I told Kiernan later. Or not only. They are also about the fear of myself when I am not vibrating with the intensity of condensing experience into language. The warm wood of my desk. The pitch of text message, voice note, zoom chat, phone call with friends. The endless excavation that is writing about cancer as an initiation into public and private spiritual practices. I am more comfortable with these exertions than anywhere else in my life. But the effort is not necessarily love, or not a complete picture of it. For that I need to reintroduce myself to gentleness, intensity’s opposite. For that I need what Daniel Ingram, in Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha, calls figuring out “how gentle you can be while still perceiving things extremely clearly.”
The reversed Nine of Cups and the upright Hanged Man, the tarot cards for February, are nothing if not about the balance between effort and ease, the ability to be gentle in pose and sharp in analysis, at the same time. In Pamela Colman Smith’s images, the cards feature solitary figures strung upside-down (the Nine because of the reversal), limbs crossed, visages gleeful in spite of the rush of blood to the head both must be feeling. They remind me of how much I used to love inversions when I was a yoga teacher and a more athletic version of myself than I am today. I found headstands, forearm stands, and (assisted) handstands impossibly philosophical—my body was whipped and flipped into a shaky tension while my mind unfurled like a pool, a flower, a labia. The feet, the Piscean tuning forks of the body, were in the sky. Everything was effort and ease all at once.
Everything in a yoga inversion was, in the words of Olga Tokarczuk’s narrator in Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, a reminder of the personal horoscope, how it both imprints upon and frees us. But “this connection with something as great and monumental as the sky makes feel uncomfortable,” the narrator goes on to say. That’s why, in my mind, I’ve always been better able to tolerate the sky when I’m striving for it rather than resting beneath it.
But we need both things, and February is a month of flipping your perspective in a way you had never imagined you would before. “Maybe if we can catch our mind in the act of making a god or a demon out of an experience, then maybe—somehow—we can liberate something that would have ordinarily got caught up in the act of doing that,” Duncan Barford says in his Occult Experiments in the Home podcast exploring his fear of a ghostly encounter during a paranormal, overnight stay in an old Brighton town hall. He goes on to wonder if, in the process of attempting to liberate ourselves from either demonizing or deifying an experience, we might open ourselves up to some new capacity, some way of being-in-the-world that wasn’t possible to us before.
Wishing you many new capacities and absolutely no panic attacks in February.
Below are bibliomancy tarotscopes for February, using Nicola Griffith’s Menewood, the last book that I read that utterly sank me into a delicious balance of pleasure and alacrity. The way I do bibliomancy is to use the divined quotes as a provocation to stir up some feeling, or some argument within myself. It’s not about whether I agree with these assertions, it’s more about what does it point me toward that I might need to understand, to develop understanding around? My own suggestions for the month follow the Menewood quote.
Aquarius Rising: “Breguswith was wagering her daughter knew and remembered every food hoard in Elmet, that most had survived, and that they could be retrieved. Feast now, replenish later from the hoards. A risky wager” (293). People turn to you to make the risky wager this month; you can trust yourself—and have fun—with this responsibility. Flip your perspective at work this month to enjoy an a-ha insight with regards to your maternal inheritance, arriving on or by February 24.