Writing when I’m healthy — and tired.
Reading when I’m sick — and awake.
A week and a half ago, on Friday, it started with fever. Then came severe diarrhea and nausea.
And then came the panic.
It all happened very quickly.
The lines I wrote twelve days ago, at the end of the last text, were an attempt to write away the panic. While I was still sitting at the table with the blue plate, I felt that something strange was happening to me. I tried to write against it.
I tried to include the panic in my writing.
No, actually it was an attempt to get it out of me, to put the panic on paper.
Years ago, that’s exactly how it worked. I had felt the panic coming. I sat down at the table and wrote. The panic subsided, disappeared.
This time it didn’t work.
The panic came over me. Panic flooded through me. I felt exactly what was happening. I could feel myself losing control. But I didn’t lose it completely.
I stopped writing.
I stood up.
I took two steps to the day bed in my study, lay down on it, and breathed. I tried to breathe the way I had practiced with Kate.
I tried to control my breathing. Breathe into the abdomen. Slow. Exhale again. Slow. I put my right hand on my lower stomach to feel the breath coming.
Now, when writing, it sounds so easy. But it wasn’t easy. It was like a fight, a struggle.
There was the panic that was about to flood me, drown me, distance myself from myself, bring me to myself. To the true me. To the ego without control. To the ego of fear.
And there was breathing. There was still a piece of consciousness trying to gain control. Inhale. Into the stomach. Exhale. Slow. Inhale again. Did I have my eyes closed? It was bright morning. Maybe not.
At some point I felt that breathing helped. I regained control of myself. The panic subsided, disappeared.
All this happened in a very short time.
I had experienced this before. It wasn’t new.
The first time it happened was when I got sick, maybe five years ago, maybe seven. It was a flu-like infection. It was evening. You and me, we sat in front of the TV and watched an episode of the Netflix series “The Crown”. The musical leitmotif of the show, the music of Hans Zimmer, had an intensity that was more than I could bear. The music was spinning inside me. It became self-employed. I walked away from the room with the TV. I couldn’t stand this intensity. I went into the bedroom. But it didn’t stop. It went on. It was as if it was always spinning — not: faster. Rather: More intense. And it turned into something I hadn’t known before, back then. Something for which I did not yet have a word. This was the opportunity to familiarize myself with the word. It was also the opportunity to introduce myself to an aspect of myself that was new. This was the opportunity to give a name to what I was experiencing: panic.
Back then, writing had helped. It was “the first lines” in the blue Moleskin notebook.
Apparently, something happens inside me when I get sick. I’m going crazy.
I get sick less often now than I used to.
But when I get sick, it’s different today than it used to be. It’s not just physical. It is also: fear. Fear is always there.
Earlier — when was that? — I often got sick. Once or twice a year. Quite regularly. Mostly at the beginning of the holidays.
From Warren, NJ, I remember these inexplicable episodes of illness. They came out of nowhere. Suddenly, fever came. Once there was a situation where the fever did not go away. A few more days of fever, only fever, no other symptoms, the family doctor thought, I should better go to the hospital.
Nothing changed. I left the hospital without it getting better.
The doctor hoped that it would somehow get better on its own. There were high levels of infection in the blood. I felt dull and feverish. There was nothing else. No one could tell what the cause was. No one could do anything about it.
Eventually, it stopped.
Could it be that these illnesses had to do with the tremendous tension that had built up in me? During all the years of speechlessness, during all the years of helplessness. During all the years in which I had repressed everything. Everything buried under everyday life. I had looked away from myself. I had suppressed something, something that I did not want to see, not to perceive, something that I did not want to admit.
I suppressed myself. I suppressed what I was, what I wanted, what I felt.
But it wasn’t gone. Whatever it was that I wanted to suppress, it wasn’t gone.
Nothing was gone.
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Nothing is gone.
Everything is still there.
And — whatever it was — it sought its way into perception, into perception through illness, through panic.
It was me who sought the way into my own perception. There is nothing alien thing, nothing strange in me. That what I wanted to push away, the repressed, that’s all myself. Nothing else.
Is that still the case, the suppression? Certainly it is not completely gone. But now much more of it comes into the perception.
If I do get sick — from normal infections — I obviously get sick differently. I get sick in such a way that I perceive an aspect of the real self: the panic.
A great excitement comes. It’s a bit like the cramps in my legs and feet that come when I’m too tired. Something in me concentrates, collects in panic, in convulsions.
That’s me.
Something true then appears. Something that is otherwise imperceptible. It appears when I am weak. When I’m tired or sick. When I can no longer control the demons well with my alertness, with my so-called reason, with the so-called consciousness. Something unconscious comes into consciousness through panic and convulsions.
What is this, this unconscious?
Is it the physical, the eternal tension, the lack of physical balance of inhalation and exhalation? Is it the lack of mobility, the stiffening, the constipation? Is it being wedged in, being squeezed into memories? Is it the truth about myself, suppressed out of fear, or out of convenience, or out of habit? The truth that I am free and that I am strong and that I am here, present, present in the world?
I will not allow that. I don’t dare. I may not even know how to do that: to be free. I’ve worked it off. Since I was seventeen years old, or even earlier, since I was thirteen. Or even earlier. In childhood, my parents practiced it with me: suppress the self, suppress freedom. They showed me how to do that.
They themselves had forgotten freedom.
Or: Freedom had been brought away from them.
Just as they pulled it away from me.
And just as I pulled it away from my children. Probably.
Probably inevitable.
Where did it all start? Did it start when my grandfather, my father’s father, lost his arm? Did he lose his self-confidence? Did fear enter his life? And thus, did fear enter the lives of his wife, his sons, into the lives of their wives, their children, and so forth?
Is there a starting point?
One thing is for sure: there is no end.
My convulsions, my panic, are these the cramps, is this the panic of my paternal grandfather?
Maybe.
With his arm, he lost his self-confidence.
How did that happen, the loss of the arm? This was never discussed. There were also no pictures that I could have seen and used to ask. There were no pictures from which my parents, my father could tell. The pictures were forbidden. Telling stories was forbidden. The narration was dangerous. The images were dangerous.
But why?
What had happened was turned into silence.
Why?
Because of the pain my grandfather had when he lost his arm? Because of the fear of death? He didn’t want to remember the pain or the fear. That is why there was silence.
How old was he when this happened? Did he have parents, siblings with whom he could have spoken? Presumably, he had not yet been to Mansfield, OH, when this happened.
Did he lose his arm in an accident? Maybe as a teenager or as a child? Did it happen in his family´s carpenter’s workshop?
Can this be found? Are there any files about what might had happened to William Potter, born October 8, 1890, in Williamsburg, JY? A file from which I can recognize a story. A file about a man who died before I was born, and his self, whose fear is still very present in myself.
The fact that one day, sometime in the first half of the last century, he lost his arm — that causes me to panic. No, not that he lost his arm triggers the panic. But that he didn’t talk about it. This still leaves me speechless today. Maybe that will eventually leave my children speechless. This is at least part of their speechlessness. Because in addition to speechlessness in my family, there is speechlessness in your family.
I have the feeling that my mother’s family, the Spine family, was not speechless. They spoke. They laughed. Only my mother was captivated by the speechlessness, by the fears of her husband’s family, the Potters.
It wasn’t necessarily like that. But that’s how it happened. So, it happened.
I don’t think fear is necessarily stronger than anything else. Only if you don’t do anything about it, then it becomes strong.
But there is something you can do.
I can do something.
I can stop being silent.
