On Panic
Not everyone craves a return to “normal.”
I have often said that a panic attack is the inverse of an orgasm. This usually gets a good laugh, because it incorporates the element of surprise — when I start the sentence, nobody sees orgasm coming (you’re welcome). But it also produces a laugh of recognition in anyone who knows that it’s true. And as our society slowly gets moving again, more people are becoming familiar with one of the least pleasurable involuntary responses imaginable.
Since I was a child, I have spent plenty of time with this particular abrupt form of terror. I have felt pained over the past year, knowing that many more people soon would feel its sickening grasp, too. Genetic makeup surely plays a part, as does personality. But trauma can help ready the soil in which panic disorder may sprout like a spiked weed.
Not everybody who has gone through the pandemic will experience panic attacks. In fact, I am sure it will be a minority of the population. But I am equally sure that it will be a sizable minority. In my most selfish and mean moments, I have wished many ills upon others, but I do not think I have ever wished them entry to this particular fellowship.
In the essay “In Bed,” part of her classic collection The White Album, Joan Didion writes of her lifelong struggle with headaches: “The physiological…
