say what you want but say it slant
these past couple of weeks have been a bit of a grinder. i've suffered from anxiety all my adult life. panic attacks hit me so hard when i turned 19 that i nearly became agoraphobic. sometimes i can attribute a source for my fear. most times i cannot.
a panic attack can hit with the force of a category 5 hurricane seemingly from nowhere. other times, you may fret & fret serious small changes of utterly ordinary matters until it hits you. & i've been feeling its vice grip for a couple of weeks.
for reasons that can be articulated such as a writing assignment that i am doing for honor & pleasure but is way overdue, & for the very ordinary personal reasons of being a parent. & yet, when the threat of an attack arrives it makes me reassess my worries. a panic attack is the worst thing in the world. you cannot run from yourself & you cannot slip out of your own skin.
so when it happens i realize that perhaps the factors that have set my mind racing, if factors there be, are not so awful as the horror of an attack. so i fired up the laptop to get out of my own head & found some live performances by julianna barwick, an electronica artist that i heard this afternoon on satellite radio & i was gobsmacked. she is mesmerizing & transcendent.
& i recall something one of my poetry teachers said in an interview, jim mccrary, & here i am paraphrasing, that even the bad shit we write is worthy of a life in poetry. all of it, the whole lot, is dedicated to our beloved art. even the shit that we find awful & embarrassing. like admitting to suffering panic attacks.
some of us demand reasons for things that happen. & there are those of us who come to an understanding that things happens just because. but if you are gonna tell your story do it at a slant. for it makes your art more interesting. what does that mean? i'll be coy here & say that it is your task as a sentient human being to figure it out. as for my anxiety, let's just say i can never live it down.
