This little girl knows terror. 
She knows how it is to wake in the night to the sound of her mother vomiting and her father’s panicked whispers. It will be a few years until she learns that her father had made her mother drink a quart of milk without stopping. He had hoped it would make her mother throw up the twenty or so barbiturates she had swallowed. That time, his strategy worked. And, the next. And, the next.
One of the mother’s doctors told the girl’s father that the mother tried suicide to “get attention.” It was the mid-1950’s and my mother’s psychiatrists knew little or nothing about bi-polar disorder.
At my mother’s second suicide attempt, I knew it would happen again. And again. And, by that time, I had learned about polio and spent hours in terror that I would get the disease and die. If not polio something else would kill me. The knowledge created an eerie distance from my classmates. I believed I couldn’t tell any of them about my terror – and the gray fear which I felt when I walked home from third grade, climbed the stairs to our apartment and found the door locked. It might have been an hour before my dad came home. It seemed – of course – to be forever. And no one could know about the panic attacks that began to jolt me out of my body.
It would be years before I would sit in my First Year college dorm and hear a classmate talk about her terror of dying. “I have panic attacks,” she said. I asked her what she meant, and she told me. I was amazed that there was a name for my shameful fear, and even more amazed that she seemed to have no shame.
I wish I could tell you that forty-plus years of therapy banished my terror. At best, I’ve learned how to be grateful for the hours, days, weeks and even years free from being shaken by my inherited nervous system. I can’t take psychotropic medications. The changes that anti-depressants and other mood alterers create make me feel that I am losing control of my mind. I envy friends who can find relief through medication. (And, as I’m writing this difficult Breakthrough, I understand why I was terrified of pot and acid and mescaline – and why some of the normal changes of aging scare me – I know I put the keys on the key hook – where the hell are they?)
I do have two reliable medicines. The first is a dirt road through a Ponderosa Forest a ten-minute drive from my house. There is an old sturdy log to sit on till my heart, breathing and terror slow. There are old dark Ponderosa, brilliant oak, and in the winter, patches of snow that look like moonlight. There is a network of unofficial trails (the formal name for them is “desire paths”). As I step out on one of those paths. I follow in the footsteps of strangers who become, as I walk, kin. I wonder how many of them have walked through terror, disappointment, betrayal; or how many of them have brought only joy to a bright October day or an August twilight. And, always, as I come back to my car and look up at the darkening sky, I realize that I am not afraid. All I feel is gratitude.
The second medicine? You are reading it.
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