My panic attacks usually don’t have any obvious triggers. The last time I was hospitalized for a bad one I’d had a surprisingly good day: brunch with a friend at m.henry, a field trip to the metaphysical bookstore for smudge sticks and oils, back home in bed watching eyeliner tutorials on YouTube for the rest of the afternoon. Bills paid, snacks in the fridge, clean clothes folded and put away and then bang: pain I couldn’t ignore snaking up my left arm before encircling my heart and squeezing it so hard I thought I was going to faint. I remember thinking to myself, “CHILL OUT, BITCH, YOU KNOW WHAT THIS IS,” but you know how that goes. I just freaked out harder and tried to breathe and get my shoes on, but every breath felt like an ice pick to the center of my chest and I couldn’t lace them up. I called an Uber, then sat in my lobby wearing headphones and disgusting Crocs, and when the car arrived I tried to say hello as cheerfully as possible, so I wouldn’t tip the driver off. The emergency room was slow that night and they saw me right away and talked to me in their most soothing voices. I got some X-rays and a CAT scan and when the doctor came in to tell me my heart was enlarged, I asked, “Is it because I love too much?” and we both had a hearty laugh before he was like, “STOP EATING MEAT” and put through the order for me to be admitted and hooked up to a ventilator for two days.
All this might be easier if I could punch something, but I’m not a punch-something person. I’m a “sit in the dark in the bathroom with a package of sharp cheddar cheese slices” person. Except I don’t even really eat cheese anymore. Plus I can’t fight. I’m soft, man. And I don’t have any answers. The world is scary and terrible and people out here don’t want Obamacare to fix a paper cut let alone offer some discounted mental health care, so what is left for us to do? Talk about it? Stop being afraid of it? Shut down those who want to dismiss us as fragile or crazy?! I went on Lexapro, but after three weeks I had stopped sleeping and fuck that. Maybe it doesn’t work that way for everyone, but I’d rather be angry and well rested than tired and happy. Or “happy,” I guess. I have pills that make me sleepy instead of panicky, and I learned how to do this four-seven-eight breathing technique that’s supposed to switch your body from fight-or-flight to a passive response, but come on. Seriously, the only time it even occurs to me to do it is when I’m already sweating and trying to dry swallow some of these benzos. Do black girls even get to be depressed? If I ever have more than $37 in my pocket I’m going to open a school for girls with bad attitudes where we basically talk to therapists all day while wearing soft pants and occasionally taking a field trip to the nearest elote cart. And if that doesn’t work, I’ll just tell some more stupid jokes. Good thing I’m hilarious.
A Civil Union
I witnessed a Civil War reenactment once. And that is a straight-up miracle, considering I had absolutely no idea that people in the North even participated in that kind of thing. Having grown up in this liberal North Shore enclave where no one blinks an eye at your Liberal Gay Blackness, I sometimes forget that the minute you jump on 355 heading west, Illinois becomes an entirely different place. A place where mullets are still fashionable and fanny packs are considered an acceptable accessory.
My homie was getting married on a gorgeous Saturday afternoon in Naperville, because that is where he is from and that is where his parents still live and would it kill one of my idiot friends to marry some asshole who could afford to throw a wedding downtown? But I love him, so I had to go. After waking up at noon and dragging myself out of bed, the first thing I thought was “Shit, I totally forgot to buy nude panty hose. I am going to look so out of place around these sensibly shoed people.”
Deciding who to drag with you to a wedding when you’re unattached is a tenth-circle-of-hell situation for real. Especially if it’s a church wedding and you have the type of friends who might burst into flames upon entry. I made my friend Amy go with me, promising that I would sit through her traveling folk metal band’s next show in Chicago but secretly hoping I would die before the time came to make good on that promise. When I went downstairs to meet her, carrying my reusable grocery bag with nice shoes, makeup, and one of those inner-thigh chafe sticks in it, I stopped cold. Amy, my beloved tomboy, typically clad in trucker hats and fitted tank tops and baggy ripped jeans from the boys’ section at Target, was wearing a dress. My sweet, sweet Amy, five feet tall and built like a Lego, was wearing daytime sequins. It looked like someone had stretched an ice-skating costume over a refrigerator box. I gasped. She put the cigarette she was smoking out between her fingers and tried to twirl her sparse mustache, the octopus tattooed on her partially shaved scalp shining in the sunshine. “My tux is at the dry cleaner’s so I’m wearing my old prom dress,” she said by way of explanation, and I put my head down to keep from laughing as I went to toss my stuff in the backseat. “This was the only nice thing I had!” she wailed, and I basically almost choked.
As Amy’s grumbling, oversize truck belched a steady stream of greasy blue-gray smoke from its exhaust, she took my hand to help hoist me up, then climbed over me like a toddler to get into the driver’s seat. We peeled out with a screech, Ice Cube bumping from the brand-new speakers she’d proudly installed herself. Naperville is a relatively wealthy and predominantly Republican suburb a little over an hour outside of Chicago, and I knew I was in trouble the minute I saw how many churches we were driving past as we exited the tollway. Seriously, it was like church, church, Burger King that whole families actually sit down and eat dinner in, church, church, Walmart, church. We saw at least 137 churches in a two-mile stretch, and that was only after I’d actually started counting them.
Despite having stayed at least ten miles over the speed limit the entire trip, we arrived late to the ceremony. Blame CVS for not having any good wedding cards and for putting the generic Aleve too far from the Doritos and snacks we needed for the road. Blame all of the semis that kept trapping us between them, condensing the prolonged horror show that is my life into an incomprehensible flash before my eyes. Please also blame my closet for being disorganized and not having any fancy clothes in it. They were already at the altar reciting their vows as we snuck into the back of the church, Amy in the gym shoes she hadn’t thought to bring (or didn’t own) an alternate for, and me in bare feet so my heels wouldn’t click on the hardwood floors, and while that definitely made me feel like a jerk, I was also kind of relieved and hoping that we’d missed some of the boring “what is the meaning of love?” parts.
Anyway, I tried to inconspicuously scan the room to see if any black people other than myself were in attendance—defense mechanism! we all do it!—and my eyes locked instantly with those of a black woman a few pews over from ours. And she was glaring at me like I’d stolen her fucking bike. I was all ready to breathe a sigh of relief, and homegirl over here was scowling like I’d taken the last piece of chicken off the buffet. Can you even believe that bullshit? Doesn’t she know the unspoken rule that all black people have to stick together within large white gatherings? You never know when a lynch mob might be forming next to the cupcake table!