A bigger splash

dispatch 10

Nov 17, 2021

Hello friends.

That this essay, centered in joy and embodiment, is unsurprisingly coming as I’m focusing on both of those things in my own life and recovery. I am dealing with the re-emergence of panic attacks at work and trying to navigate supporting my brain and body through them with more acceptance and ease. It is wild how, given half a chance, I will still jump to intellectualizing things to avoid dealing with/being in my body. But I don’t think the answer to this lies in my brain, I’m going to have to feel my way through it.

The first time I had a panic attack was in my last job. A place that had my trust morphed into something toxic and my body reacted, as bodies do, with chronic hip pain, messed up sleep patterns, and panic attacks. Sitting with the truth, that it will take some time to undo those things, though I am now in a supportive environment, is frustrating and a little embarrassing. But as I re-learn how to breathe, there’s some hope in it too.

If you have tips for remembering how to be in your body in moments of panic or deep anxiety, please send them my way! If you’re working with this too, know that I see you and I get it.

A bigger splash

In front of my desk, I keep a photo of a young me on the bulletin board so that I can look at her everyday. I used to keep her in a box under the bed, until once in a meditation, the image of that little child in that exact photograph came to me so fully formed that I got up in the middle of the night to dig it out and keep it close. In the photo, I’m maybe 4 years old. I’m on a carousel horse and I am smiling. My body has a kind of ease in its unselfconscious childhood softness, wearing a light pink outfit, a single string of pink plastic beads. There is a joy in that photograph, a way of looking into the lens dead-on that I have lost and found many times over in the time since, but if I were to think of myself at my truest, I hope it would be her.

I turned 33 last month, and it’s the first year that I can find strands of silver tucked into my brown, the gentle whispering of time, vines growing up a wall to remind it that it will one day be dust. When I was young, my family had a year of dead children. Claudia, then Brian. Impossible tiny coffins; the oppressive smell of calla lilies. Mortality became a fixed point early for me, one that I have never forgotten. Memento mori. Remember that you are going to die. Because of this, I do not fear aging, at least not yet.

But that photo of me on the carousel horse knows nothing of death or pain, just joy. That surefooted and stomping run of a child who is clear on who she is. The future, a question that she is sure she can answer. Back then, I grabbed joy with both hands and held onto it fiercely, claiming it as my own. In some ways, I think that growing up has been a cleaving from that small person, sometimes with unnecessary violence. Since I got sober, I have been trying to find my way back to her, to that joy and curious clarity. To a child who lived.

I was around that age when I spent my summer jumping into the deep end of the Levittown public pool. This wouldn’t have been a problem per se, except that I didn’t know how to swim. My parents kept pulling me out and warning me repeatedly, but theirs was a fear I did not yet share. So the second that they weren’t looking, I was once again abandoning the shallows for the deep. As if it was calling to me. A cord tied to my wrist that meant I would always come back here, toes curling over the edge.

What stands out to me now in the remembering is how that little girl was fearless. Those summers of chlorine hair and popsicle stained fingers were the height of my childhood joy. I didn’t understand my love of the water, didn’t think to question or examine it. It just was. And I was, within it. The present moment was tangible in a way that no amount of meditation or therapy has brought back. It was so easy, when I didn’t get in the way of it.

I kept jumping, until they got tired of pulling me out. That’s how I learned to swim, from pure parental frustration. But learning to move in water was a new freedom, an access to new worlds. I’d stay in any water I could find until my lips turned blue. Land was clumsy, but this was like flying. I’d dive down and touch the bottom, my little feet kicking with force towards the depths of something, just to see if I could reach it. Turning to the surface and marveling at how far away it looked, living in that moment when your breath is running out and you are empty but still moving. Your mind is clear, every cell moving towards the surface, towards the inhale. The water reminded me that I was alive, and that my body wanted to be. Maybe that is what joy is.

These decades later, I still have so much to learn. There is so much I don’t know. Sometimes my time in sobriety feels like an eternity, like a whole life, and in a way it has been. But mostly, I am still so young. It’s still so early in the long arc of the journey. The magic isn’t gone. There is a little bit more self-assuredness than I remember, less to prove. I have rebuilt my life on the unshakeable foundation of this thing in so many ways. It is the starting point, the pebble rolling down a hill gaining speed and mass until it is unstoppable.

I spent so much of these first years forging an identity around sobriety, around this thing about me that soon replaced everything else. A new shield. I spent the beginning of the summer wallowing in it, drowning in accumulated insecurities that felt slick, wet to the touch, like they do not want to be held. Like they do not want to hold me. But if there is one thing that this year has given me, it is the belief in myself as a person who exists beyond sobriety. It is a star but not the whole constellation. I did it no favors by giving it so much to hold. And amidst all of this new jumping into the depths, there have been new joys, truer joys. It’s strange to write from a light place. From the up instead of the down, though the two are often so intertwined that it’s hard to trust that they are truly separate. Maybe they’re not as far apart as I thought they were. Maybe that’s another false binary; another lie.

Right now life feels good. And I feel myself wanting to arch my body over it, protect it from the world, keep it precious and separate and safe. But that is not what joy is. If you try to hold it tightly, it will slip away all the faster. It exists in those moments of standing at the edge of the possibility within the impossible. Like learning to swim. Like that moment of empty, reaching out for the inhale. Like a carousel horse and a string of beads. What I know is that in these last months the small things have taken on an incredible shine. I can see the tiny moments that I have spent these last years blowing by and they are beautiful. I look at that little kid in that photograph, her eyes a question, “What were you doing, missing this?”

[**Image Description:** A picture of a photo pinned to a cork board. In it, the writer as a small child with brown hair in a bob sits on a carousel horse and she is smiling.]

A bigger splash

dispatch 10

A bigger splash

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