Stormwatcher

The email was the rumble of thunder in the distance. I felt all the familiar panicky feelings come rushing back--the muscles tensing, coiled for a fight. The tightening in my chest and the shallow, labored breathing. The blinders in my field of vision turn inward, shrinking my peripheral vision. Hard to see. Hard to breathe. Hard to move. 
It felt strangely comforting to see the onset of the panic attack on the horizon. It’s been long enough since I’ve had a full blown one that I forget that this is a thing my body can do. That this is a familiar pattern for all the circuits and breakers that make up me. It’s a little like seeing an old friend after a long time, even if the old friend is a jackass who returns your car with the gas tank empty and is never available to help you move. It’s a familiar pattern, a well-worn road my body races down long before my brain can catch up. 
It was different this time, though. For the first time, I could see it coming, rather than once I was in the midst of it. I was no longer standing in the yard in the rain, but on the front porch watching the sky blacken. All the synaptic cows in my brain lumbered to the ground. Cows sitting down, rain’s coming down, my grandpa used to say. The heat dropped off, a chill took its place. I knew what to do. Leave the computer. Make some tea. Grab my headphones. Get yourself ready for the worst of it. This is a thing you can ride out from your mind’s front porch, Jamie. In it, but not overtaken by it. Fully aware that eventually, it’ll be over. 
 I come from a family of stormwatchers. Folks who either figured out how to bear witness to their own turmoil, or else hid in the basement with booze or food or both. As kids, we’d wait for the storms and then watch them, picking out lightning bolts that were particularly striking. Did you see that one? Over there! As we got older, we’d start commenting about how the crops sure could use the rain. By adulthood, we could sit in silence, watching them roll in, and then roll along. 
When I panic, my body is on autopilot, but sometimes my mind is still my own. I can intellectualize, am still capable of rational thought, even if executive function is beyond my limits. I can say to myself, this isn’t like last time. You are in no danger. This is a solvable problem. You can handle it in two, maybe three emails in the morning. This is a speedbump, not a catastrophe. These thoughts don’t stop the adrenaline from rushing out of my kidneys, but they remind me that the world isn’t ending, even when it feels like it is. 
Other times, these thoughts add fuel to the fire, a fuzz of static-y dry brush that kindle into a blaze of self-doubt and shame and guilt. Why bother panicking, they say. Quit overreacting. You’re being dramatic, they wheedle, as though the chasm between my brain and my body is one I can choose. As though I were a set director, commanding the lights and the rain and the sheet of metal being whub-whub-whubbed to sound like thunder. But I am a spectator. If I were in charge here, crying and shaking on my patio with the lights off would not be my first choice. It can be comforting and horrifying in equal measure to know that sometimes my body, this fragile collection of electricity and meat, is outside my control. 
The middle of the storm is familiar. I have not yet reached the stage of enlightenment where I can greet the cyclone of catastrophizing or the self-flagellation beating itself against the aluminum siding and the tin roof as friends. But I don’t quite see them as strangers anymore, either. They come sometimes, and then they go. After a few years’ experience, I’m fairly certain while I’m in the thick of things that they will, eventually, go. 
This time, they do. There’s no rainbow at the end of the horizon, none of that clichéd bullshit. It’s just dark, the way a thunderstorm at dusk moves on and there’s just silence and steam in its wake. It’s quiet in the dark. There’s enough energy left in my internal flashlight to drink some water and take a preemptive aspirin for tomorrow’s muscle aches. I’ll be keyed up for a while; there’s still the smell of ozone in the air. But there are crossword puzzles and an endless stream of digital content to help me wait it out, until the last of the adrenaline fizzles. My brain will wear itself out eventually, and there’s nothing to do but wait. 
In the morning, there’s coffee, and avocado toast, and the making of weekend plans. No mention or outward sign of the night before. There’s still those two emails to send, but they don’t produce the same internal warning klaxon that they did the night before. They are just spots where the siding came loose, waiting to be patched up. Off in the distance, far enough away to be heard but not seen, are the familiar rumbles of thunder.