Panic

by Monica J. Casper

A Book Review in the Form of Autoethnography: Panic Diaries: A Genealogy of Panic, by Jackie Orr.

 

Scene 1: San Francisco, California, 1994

Fragile and raw, I feel as if my nerve endings are exposed to air like salt. I slowly shuffle onto the airplane, bovine, sandwiched between other bodies. Carrying only my battered Coach briefcase, I remove my suit coat and sit down.

An aisle seat, as usual. Terribly claustrophobic, I cannot sit next to the window, and being stuck in the middle seat makes me want to curl up into the fetal position and sob. I always require a quick getaway route should the need for escape present itself—and it often does. Mine is a life shaped by panic and its containment.

As other passengers file by looking harried and burdened by too many oversized black suitcases on wheels, I consider my own emotional baggage. Just over a month ago, I moved into my own apartment, beginning a troubling separation from my husband of five years. I am confused and scared about the future, not to mention the very painful present. After almost a decade with Simon, how can I possibly live on my own?

This bright fall day at San Francisco International Airport, I am on my way to New Orleans. My Dutch friend Marc will meet me at the airport on the other side, after flying in from Amsterdam. From there we will drive to Memphis, where I plan to conduct an interview for my dissertation research. Then we will return to New Orleans for a conference.

I am excited about spending time with Marc, who I adore, but also nervous about flying. I am a white-knuckle flyer even under the best of conditions.

Suddenly and without warning, just as the last few passengers are straggling aboard the plane, my heart begins to pound rapidly. My breathing becomes labored and I experience an almost unbearable sensation of doom. My fingers tingle and grow numb and I feel powerfully, viscerally as if I am about to die. The only image in my head for a full thirty seconds is of the plane plummeting to Earth like a fiery torpedo as passengers scream and tear at their hair and
clothing in terror.

Horrified, I jump up out of my seat and run off the plane, shoving people out of my way. I take nothing with me, not even my jacket. Hyperventilating and shivering, I stand in the jetway just outside the plane’s door. I close my eyes and try to imagine something pleasant. Kittens, or chocolate perhaps. But I cannot shake the morbid picture of the crashing plane out of my head.

Several minutes later, a bubbly, dark-haired flight attendant bounds out of the plane. “Miss, are you feeling okay?”

I nod. “I just needed some air. I’ll come back in a moment.”

“I’m afraid we can’t wait that long. Everybody is on board now and the captain has asked that we begin preparing for takeoff. Can you please take your seat?”

I shake my head. “I don’t think I can.”

She frowns. “Hmmm. Can I do anything to help?”

“I don’t think so. It’s just that I can’t seem to make my legs work.” And it is true. No matter what signals my brain is sending to my limbs, my feet are glued to the dirty floor.

“I hate to say this, but if you can’t get on the plane, then I’m going to have to go get your things and bring them off.”

I grab her arm. “Please don’t do that. Just give me one more minute, then I think I can get back on the plane.”

Honestly, though, I do not really want to get back on that plane, convinced in my marrow it is an inflammable, metal death trap. But neither do I want to abandon my trip to New Orleans. Not only would I be letting down Marc, but I also fear that if I refuse to get back on the plane I might never again fly.

She nods and turns back into the plane.

I stand in the jetway talking to myself, like some street corner lunatic. “Okay, Monica. This is not a big deal. Take a deep breath and just walk right back onto that airplane. Move. Your. Legs. Now.”

But my treacherous feet, still they deny me.

Another minute passes. I close my eyes in frustration. When I open them, the pilot is standing right in front of me.

Kindly but firmly he drawls, “Ma’am, I appreciate that you’re not feelin’ well. But I really need you to either step back onto the plane and take your seat, or allow my flight attendant to bring you your baggage.”

I am mortified. Now the (very cute, very Southern) pilot is involved. I feel like a fool. I am a fool.

I nod hesitantly. “Okay, I’ll sit back down. Thank you for, uh, coming to get me, and for your help.”

“No problem,” he says with a blinding smile.

With the pilot gently holding my arm, I take one step, then another. I am an invalid. I am invalid. With a light squeeze of my hand, he turns into the cockpit and I am alone.

I keep walking until I am halfway down the aisle near my seat in the rear (safer) half of the plane. All eyes are upon me, my fellow passengers looking both curious and annoyed. Few appear sympathetic.

Nobody likes the idiot who holds up a plane.

I take my seat.

I strap myself in, grip the armrests, and prepare for a miserable flight and possible incendiary death by airplane.

The jet taxies to the runway. I breathe in and out with my eyes closed.

The pilot revs the engines until they whine and the plane shakes, and then he lets ‘er rip. Within moments, we are racing along the runway toward certain oblivion but maybe into the sky like a bird.

My breath quickens.

I keep my eyes tightly closed and press myself back against the seat.

And then I can feel my body float as the wheels come up off the ground and we are airborne. I open my eyes and we are climbing, the shimmering blue of San Francisco Bay spread out below us like a blanket of sapphires.

A passenger to my left is calmly reading the paper. The girl next to me appears to be asleep. The plane is quiet. Nobody is screaming. We are still aloft, miraculously.

We climb and climb until we are high above the marshmallow clouds.

When the plane levels off, my breathing returns to normal. My hands no longer tingle. I feel calmer. And the fantastic images of tumbling airplanes and obliteration skulk back to the spongy interiors of my brain, like ghouls.

I will survive, at least for now.

Fifteen minutes later, another flight attendant, this one blond and several years older than Bubbly, kneels down next to me. She places her hand on my arm and says, “You know, I get panic attacks when I drive across bridges. I know exactly what you’re going through. If you need anything at all on this flight, you just let me know, honey.”

I tear up, so touched am I by this moment of human kindness and connection. And also a little embarrassed that the flight attendants have been discussing me.

I reply, “Thank you so much. I really appreciate just knowing that you’re here.”

And I do. There is nothing quite like the solidity of another person to help quell panic.

I make it to New Orleans in one piece and in a relatively peaceful state of mind. But I dash off the plane before the pilot can see me, fearing more humiliation, and in the airport I hold on to Marc for a long, long time, grateful for his warm and comforting presence after my excruciating ordeal.

For the next several days with Marc—lounging poolside at our hotel, enjoying Twinkies and soda at Graceland while pretending to be honeymooners, eating shrimp po’boys along the river in Memphis, or meandering along the Natchez Trace Parkway in a rented Taurus while ridiculing country music lyrics—I cannot shake an underlying sense of doom.

Sheltered by Marc and other friends at the conference, I manage—just barely—to harness my anxiety. But my mind is chaotic, multiple circuits firing all at once, one on top of another in a crazy dance, and my body is a sheet of glass, sharp and brittle.

A single, delicate flick of a finger on my taut shell, or a whisper of an angry breeze, might just crack me into a million deadly shards.

 

Conceptual Interlude I

This was not my first panic attack.

Nor will it be my last.

Of this I am absolutely, wretchedly certain.

Panic is my persistent, stalking demon lover: seductive, hateful, cruel, disabling, generative. I fear it, but I learn so much from it, too. I am who I am because of, in spite of, this thing called panic. It is the space, the miasmic air, around which I have constructed my emotional scaffolding (note the insistence on agency here), organized my rational life, and crafted a competent, reasonable public persona.

I have had a longer relationship with panic than with most of the people in my life. It is the one marriage, thus far, that has endured. Mysterious and bewildering when it first honed in on me like a psychological assassin, panic has made itself known to me over the years. Part unclassifiable animal, part creepy, creeping psychic entity with an unrecognizable shape, it haunts me. It has become a crucial, undeniable fixture in my life.

Panic is my familiar.

All human beings experience anxiety at some point or another, the fight or flight response to a scary situation, adrenaline pumping, heart frantically thump-thumping. This seems to be a basic, taken-for-granted physiological process.

Those of us disordered by anxiety, like Jackie and me and millions of others, are intimately aware of what happens when anxiety shades, or lurches, or runs shrieking in the mist, into full-blown panic. We are acutely aware of that peculiar state of mind in which the gray matter spins, the gray matters spin, whirling out of control.

Anxiety is disturbing, but panic is unbecoming.

It is the self, imploding and exploding at the same time.

And so, just like war and natural disasters and the stock market, panic necessitates containment, competence, and control.

Especially control. Because we know what happens to people, to women especially, when they/we are out of control.

 

Scene II: Chicago, Illinois, 1975

My mother was awarded full custody of Lucy and me in the divorce in 1973, but Leo still had visitation rights. He would occasionally show up in Chicago, sometimes without warning. One lazy Saturday I looked out our front window to see if anything was happening in the schoolyard, and there on the street below was my father staring fiercely up at our apartment.

He had not rung the bell or otherwise made his presence known, and I found it more than a little creepy that he was just lurking outside, watching us. I quickly closed the curtains and told Mom that we had a visitor. “Holy shit,” she muttered, obviously disturbed by Leo’s
unexpected arrival.

On another occasion a few weeks later, he was invited into the apartment to spend some time with Lucy and me. We played checkers, ate lunch, talked a bit, and everything seemed to be going along swimmingly. Until, that is, the hour grew later and my mother asked him to leave. They began arguing loudly, or rather Leo began yelling at Mom, and he yanked the phone out of the wall socket when she tried to call somebody for help. I thought he was going
to hit her, but instead he stormed out of the apartment muttering profanities under his breath.

I cried myself to sleep that night, and I’m pretty sure that Mom did, too, sad and lonely and afraid on the cheap, lumpy sofa bed.

In July, Mom agreed to let us travel to Southern Illinois to visit with Leo and other relatives. So on a crackling hot day with a thick yellow haze hanging in the air, we piled into Mom’s friend Kookie’s car, a butter-colored Mustang that later blew up, and headed south.

Several hours later, about halfway between Chicago and Galatia, Mom tearfully left us with Grandma who had driven north to meet us. I suspect turning around and heading back to Chicago without us was one of the hardest and bravest things my mother has ever done—the most courageous, of course, being walking out on my father in the first place.

Grandma drove us to the run-down mustard-colored house my Grandpa Ernest had built many years earlier. Leo now lived there with his parents.

For a few days, we enjoyed a normal summer vacation. We picked and ate ripe persimmons and gooseberries, played with our cousins Casey and Annie in their backyard, tramped through the woods looking for snakes, and basically behaved like kids on break from school. Aunt Betty made peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for us and we ate them outside under the Black walnut tree.

At Grandma’s house, we drank lemonade and Coke in a bottle, swatted sweat bees away from our necks and armpits, and smashed fat ticks in the driveway with sharp rocks. At night we tried to catch the whimsical lightening bugs while avoiding the bloodthirsty mosquitoes. I imprisoned more than my fair share of singing frogs, stroking their clammy skin with my fingers before releasing them into the field of cattails and milkweeds near the house.

It was an idyllic time being surrounded by family in the heat of summer in the country.

But that all ended when my father argued with my grandmother. I have no idea what the fight was about, but by the time it was over, Grandma was left crying in the gravel driveway with blood gushing out of her hand, the result of a heavy glass ashtray thrown at her by Leo, and we were barreling down the road like a bat out of hell. We had only a few things with us and there was barely any gas in the car.

Bye-bye lightening bugs and frogs.

Hello to life on the run with a madman.

Did I mention that my father is schizophrenic?

 

Conceptual Interlude II

My friend Jackie Orr (2006:9) writes in Panic Diaries, “Does terror have its own archive? Is panic indexed in the annals of history? Are those of us who symptomatically share heartracing attacks of floating terror—what ‘normality,’ in a stunning dispossession of its own fears, will call our ‘pathology’—documented in those densely stocked shelves? If, as performer Laurie Anderson writes, ‘history is stories that we half-remember, and most of them never get written down,’ then what kind of panic stories could be written out of the selective textual memories of the archival brain?”

Jackie also states (2006:1), “It is the workings of this mad reason and its relations to contemporary power with which I am somewhat compulsively concerned here, in the stammered hallucinations that follow. In a society of unspeakable madness, how does a mad woman tell a history of what has come to be called a ‘mental disorder’? And, immersed in a merciless language of non-madness, how will we ever hear her?”

And yet we do hear her.

In her fascinating, insightful genealogy of panic disorder, we learn about the history of psychiatry and neuroscience, about narratives of trauma, about cultural spectacle and collective behavior, about terrorized bodies that speak and are made to speak, about PSYCHOpower and the complexities of what we might call PSYCHOcitizenship, and about how one frightened, brave, curious sociologist drew from her own descent into the underworld of panic to tell a “cutting-edge" story about the social amplification of anxiety and its simultaneous internalization.

I have listened.

 

A Statement of Psychosocial Fact

When I was nine years old, my father kidnapped my sister and me.

We lived in the car for six weeks.

Eventually we came home.

Only many years later did I seek psychotherapeutic care for my condition.

And what condition is that, exactly?

When I turned 25, I breathed a sigh of relief that schizophrenia had bypassed me.

I was “merely” stricken with panic and the relentless, mundane hum of anxiety.

As my friend Jackie says, “Are you still listening?”

 

Scene III: Nashville, Tennessee, Just After Christmas 2004

A recent dislocation: from the West Coast to the New South. Still getting used to my altered states.

My husband is at sea, physically and metaphorically. He is a ship captain who is now geographically land-bound in Music City. (There is a river here, but it doesn’t count.) He is in the Gulf of Mexico, generating profits for the multinational oil industry despite our political distaste but because it pays the bills, of which there are many.

My girls, my babies, are in Chicago with my parents and my sister, with whom we spent the holiday.

I am holed up alone in our dark rented apartment, which I hate, missing my family, missing my house on Whidbey Island where I felt whole and safe, missing the crisp chill off Puget Sound on Double Bluff Beach.

I am strung out on Dayquil and Nyquil, sick with some sort of Middle Tennessee virus.

I have no Ativan.

I am, frankly, terrified.

I stay up all night, fearing that my husband and children and parents are all dead.

I am out of control.

The next week, I visit my internist, the warm and knowing Dr. Jill, and obtain a prescription for Paxil.

And critical though I may be about Big Pharma, and PSYCHOpower, and our/my psychological and social interpellation into webs of clinical knowledge and practice and multinational capitalism, I devour these potent little pills.

Paxil saves me.

But it also makes me fat, and its sort of messes with my sex life. Which is okay really, because my husband is at sea for weeks at a time, and I am lonely anyway.

It’s a decent tradeoff, all things considered.

Psychosis as a mental state is overrated.

 

Conceptual Interlude III

The study of trauma is becoming institutionalized into a loose and somewhat amorphous amalgamation of scholars, perspectives, journals, conferences, curricula, and publications, such as Panic Diaries and Jackie’s current project on militarized trauma.

While there is no agreement regarding the boundaries, scope, and content of the emergent field of “trauma studies,” there is general consensus that the perspective has been shaped by and encompasses twentieth-century catastrophes such as war and genocide—including the centrality of the Holocaust (see, you all know what I mean)—as well as the everyday experiences of violence, loss, and injury. At the heart of the emergent, interdisciplinary enterprise of trauma studies is a set of tensions between the everyday and the extreme, between individual identity and collective experience, between history and the present, between experience and representation, between facts and memory, and between the “clinical” and the “cultural.”

What I love about Jackie’s book is that she engages these tensions, smartly and provocatively and sometimes chillingly. As she states, “This is a story about panic, and about the techniques developed—in the entangled fields of social science and psychiatry, the U.S. government and the military, the mass media and the transnational drug industry—to make panicked bodies speak, and to manage what they can be heard to say. Stretching across the last century of U.S. history, this is a selective chronicle of the sanctioned communications between a social ‘disorder’ and that which would govern it in the name of a desired order, in the interests of a more effective administration. Survey research, public opinion polls, laboratory experiments, research on mental patients, self-tests in popular magazines, atom bomb tests in the desert, cybernetic models, psychiatric interviews, electric shocks, clinical drug trials, TV talk shows, computerized diagnostics, and genetic research compose one partial, compulsive inventory of the arsenal of techniques aimed at producing potentially useful speech from the tremulous mouth of terror.”

Thus far, clinical and psychological perspectives have dominated trauma studies, and current frameworks are highly biomedicalized. Interventions from literary studies and history have added trauma narratives and cultural spectacle to the mix. But what is missing from trauma studies, and what is sorely needed, is the kind of sociologically rich, dense, multilayered analysis provided by Jackie Orr. The kind of analysis that does not stop with experience and story, but rather incorporates practices, discourses, politics, power, structures, knowledge, science, technologies, actors, conflicts, agendas, consequences, and so on. In this sense, Panic Diaries is not only first-rate sociology; it is a model for how those of us interested in trauma studies might proceed.

 

Scene IV: A few days before an academic conference

I am anxious.

There will be planes, and public speaking, and time alone in a hotel room.

I will be armed with Paxil and Ativan and friends and colleagues and my cell phone and access to cocktails and breathing techniques and a mystery novel and various other tools that will help me get through a routine part of what I do professionally, and a potentially catastrophic event in my “personal” life.

That pesky old condition, I can’t seem to shake it.

But I am now armed with a new tool: Jackie’s book.

Panic is my familiar, but just like my little pills, Panic Diaries can be a kind of talisman.

It tells me that I am not alone.

It tells me that I am caught up in the operations of PSYCHOpower, and that really this is not my/our fault.

It helps me—as sociologist, feminist, daughter, mother, lover, and panic disordered human—to make sense of my condition.

And it reminds me that what we do matters—that even a story about pain and trauma and PSYCHOpower, if told well, can be a beautiful thing.

 

About the Author About Monica Casper:  I have a dream job: I read, write, and teach for a living. I'm a professor and director of Humanities, Arts and Cultural Studies at Arizona State University's New College. I've written several books and articles on gender, bodies, and the politics of reproduction, and I'm currently researching infant mortality in the U.S. for a book tentatively called Phantom Babies and Spectral Women. I've published some of my creative nonfiction and I also write fiction. I've just completed a children's book called Periwinkle and the Purple Poodle and I'm working on a book of short stories about love and war called Shrapnel. I live in Phoenix with my partner and daughters. More information can be found at www.monicajcasper.com.