[originally published on September 5, 2012]
It may come as a surprise to you, but I was a very nervous child. I lived in constant dread that each day would be my last, a fear largely spurred on by the apocalyptic nut-jobs whose end-of-the-world delusions were gaining ground in light of current events at the time. Some cases in point:
In December 1973, as Comet Kohoutek was about to attain perihelion, a religious whacko named David Berg was given too much media space when he announced that Jesus had come to his home to warn him that Kohoutek would destroy the earth on Christmas Day. Because this story was in the newspaper and on TV, I assumed that it was real news, which meant that it had to be true. As such, I did not sleep all night on Christmas Eve, listening not for Santa's reindeer on our roof but for the thunderous boom of global destruction.
In March of 1975, a local church sponsored a TV broadcast of A Thief In the Night, a terrifying low-budget thriller about the Rapture and subsequent tribulation. The story follows a free-spirit non-Christian named Patty who is left behind after Jesus raptures his followers, including her husband, into heaven. The rest of the film follows Patty as she flees from a global fascist government called UNITE, overseen by The Beast, or anti-Christ. The film could have easily been dismissed as a dime store potboiler had not the round-faced minister whose church had sponsored the film come on-screen afterwards to assure us that, yes, these horrors were "very real" and would "soon come to pass!" Not even sleeping with the light on helped me through that one.
In the summer of 1979, I was at church camp when I had a really unsettling conversation with a camp counselor who had read Hal Lindsay's The Late Great Planet Earth. According to this sadist, I would not graduate from high school in 1981 as I had hoped because that was the year the Rapture was going to occur. According to Hal Lindsay, Jesus had said that the generation that “witnessed the budding of the fig tree” would be the generation to see the Lord’s return. The budding of the fig tree was the birth of the nation Israel, which happened in 1948. According to the Bible, a generation of judgment is 40 years, but within that time, Jesus will come back and call up his church, leaving the rest of mankind in Tribulation for another seven years. So, 1948 plus 40 equals 1988. But subtract the seven-year Tribulation, and what do you have? 1981. I didn't get much sleep at church camp that summer.
I know it sounds pathetic that I grew up in a constant state of panic, but the end of the world was everywhere, and if it wasn’t being touted by religious fanatics, it was being advanced as an inevitable outcome of the Cold War, with films like Threads and The Day After (filmed in Kansas) offering us a terrifying vision of life after nuclear holocaust. When I was a kid, I lay awake in bed praying. In the late 1970s, after my older brothers had moved out of the house, I would stay up until all hours of the night in the loft bedroom we three had once shared. Over and over I pleaded with God, almost tearfully, "Please don't destroy the world! Surely you've got other ideas?"
I used to be terrified of other things too, that something bad would happen to my parents or my brothers. I used to have nightmares about one or both of my parents dying. Once I had a bad dream about a girl I had a crush on in junior high poisoning my brother Doug, and I had to watch Doug writhing on the floor choking. I had a recurring nightmare about standing in the driveway of our house with my Dad and watching the streams of nuclear missiles being launched from the silo north of El Dorado. When I got to high school, that dream shifted to the parking lot of the newly opened Wal-Mart, and instead of Dad standing next to me, it would be my high school buddy Paul.
I finally got over these fears, of course. It took a while, but I did. Many of the fears washed away in the 1980s when I began drinking. That decade was a weird time for the party crowd anyway. In hindsight, I wonder if others of my generation didn’t grow up with the same mortal dreads. Maybe those others, like me, came to terms with said fears in their mid-20s by drinking life to the lees. I think that's where my mind was in the 1980s. Those years were lived in the shadow of nuclear holocaust, and drinking was the only thing that made sense to me at the time. After all, if any day could be my last, why not spend that day in full party mode? I even had a special mix tape I would play on my Sony Walkman should the nuclear warning sirens ever blare.
After the drinking, of course, the 1990s brought sobriety. It was here that I got in touch with Spirit and learned to meditate. By that time, the Cold War had ended, and all of the ETAs for the Christian Apocalypse had come and gone. I was cool with it either way, more or less, and I lived life one day at a time, trying to be grateful for all that I had. I learned how to live with acceptance and without expectation, and I think I found some modicum of peace. This has been the state of mine I've striven for since I took my last drink, and every day it gets a little better.
Imagine, then, my disorientation this morning when I woke up at 3:00 a.m. with a panic attack. A panic attack! Me! I never have panic attacks. I'm one of the least panicky people I know, so where the hell is this coming from?
Well, a lot of things have contributed. As the Democratic National Convention is going on right now, hot on the heels of the Republican National Convention last week, a lot scary predictions are flying around the Internet. These predictions have little to do with how I should vote and more to do with the inevitability of a financial apocalypse regardless of who's in office. Some of the blogs online are the stuff of horror movies, positing frightening predictions of 50% unemployment, $15/gallon gas, collapse of all banks, thus rendering access to our earnings impossible, and a global illuminati that will seek to control us, having immunized itself from the economic threat.
I don't know how many of these predictions are true. Fact is, no one does. Sure, they can look at all the trends, and they can consult the great economic minds, but truth be told, none of us know the future until it actually happens. It is easy to look at past history and notice some causal factors and inescapable effects. But who among us really knows what will happen tomorrow?
But here's the crazy thing. If everything they say truly did come to pass, there's nothing I can do. The only advice anyone has ever given is to invest all your money in gold, but when you're recently unemployed and have little to nothing in your bank account, that's not an option. So what am I to do? What are any of us to do? I am absolutely powerless … and that's terrifying.
But I didn't used to have a problem with being powerless. That's one of the first things you must accept when getting sober, that you are powerless over alcohol. As your sobriety evolves, that powerlessness extends to other things. You are powerless over people, powerless over traffic, powerless over what others think of you, and so on. Much like the concept of indifference mentioned in my last essay, the concept of powerlessness can be quite liberating, if you're willing to work on it. I'm not always willing, especially in traffic … but I'm working on it.
The point is, my powerlessness is not my biggest issue. So imagine how unsettling it is to wake up with a panic attack that hearkens back to the primal apocalyptic fears of my youth and is coupled with my blatant inability to do anything about it. I was being gut-punched repeatedly by worry and anxiety, which has not been my baseline state for a long time.
Morning came, I called my wife back in California, and we talked … and a revelation came to me. For the past week, I have been sleeping in the old loft bedroom where I slept as a child and later a teenager. If you haven't been keeping track, I've been staying here at my childhood home with my mother because my father is in the hospital, teetering on the verge of going critical. As such, I am housed in my old bedroom, now the guest room, and trying to look after Mom's needs during this difficult time. At 3:00 a.m. this morning, I was waking up in my old room, the double bed positioned in roughly the same place as the twin bed I slept in as a kid. I was laying on my right side, as I always did, staring across the room to the south, to the windows I used to gaze out of, listening to the sounds of the trains as they circled El Dorado in the distance. How many times had I lay in this very spot, very position, very room, staring out the very same windows, praying over and over to God: "Please don't destroy the world! Surely you've got other ideas?"
Everything around me is a freakish subconscious reminder of my childhood days of terror.
It doesn’t help that there is incredible stress in our lives right now. That recurring bad dream I used to have of losing a parent is possibly coming true as I mark my father's unstable condition in the hospital each day. Basically, I am reliving childhood nightmares. Is it any wonder I'm also having panic attacks?
I have heard stories of war veterans who appear to have moved on from the horrors of war, only to return to Europe or Vietnam and visit the site of a particularly traumatic battle and have a meltdown. Their very geographic presence on this scene of the crime puts them into panic. Likewise, adult victims of childhood abuse who return to the house of their abuse have suffered similar emotional breaks. Geography on this pale blue dot we call earth is a powerful thing. I wonder if it goes beyond the psychological reminders surrounding us to something deeper, something ethereal, some invisible energy that lingers long after we have gone.
Is it possible that that unrelenting fear of my childhood still lingers in my old bedroom? Nothing particularly traumatic happened there, but I did spend a lot of time in that room going to pieces about the future. It's rather scary, actually, how quickly this energy has stolen upon me; I am not that guy anymore, not the man who panics and wrings his hands. I'm more of a "live in the moment" kind of chap, but my time in my old stomping ground has made me emotionally regress.
My wife reminded me that this is not the first time I've had panic attacks. When we were in El Dorado, working on the production of our independent film Baby's Breath, those attacks came for me at regular intervals. I recall how horrible they were, almost like delusional states. I would sit in a room, staring at an open door, certain that something awful was about to walk through it, even if I was in the safest place on earth. At the time, I chalked it up to the stress going through a movie shoot … but it's no coincidence that during that shoot I stayed with my parents, in my old childhood bedroom, to save money.
So I guess we must be careful when returning to the scene of the crime, when we revisit the places where we once were at our worst. As I say in the write-up for my novel Pitch, the past is often never where you think you left it. In my case, a big chunk of my past is in my old bedroom at my parents' house. It was not a place of ordeal, but it was a place where I simmered all of my fears in a big stew of apprehension, perhaps doing prep work for a lot of the negatives I would later manifest in my drinking days.
Who knows? This mortal coil is littered with private war zones. I may have stumbled into one. Perhaps if I had prepared better, been more rigorous in my spiritual program, and taken better care of myself, none of this would be an issue. But the good news is, I can turn it around right now. Hell, any of us can. Every moment is an opportunity to make a better decision than the last.
That's the way I see it, anyway.
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