Heart Attack
2000 That Other Me is a series that explores the immediacy and intimacy of various mental health episodes I’ve experienced throughout my life. A small cramp in my left bicep. That’s unusual. I’ve never had a cramp there. It sharpens, spider-webbing into my shoulder. I flex my arm and try to work it out, but my left arm feels uncoordinated. Once, when I was seventeen, I was sprinting in a social game of football when both my calves cramped so badly I fell to the ground. But I’d been sprinting. And I’d been at a party the previous night and had drank, so I was likely dehydrated. Those cramps had…
Panic City
1989 That Other Me is a series that explores the immediacy and intimacy of various mental health episodes I’ve experienced throughout my life. I sit in the lobby, waiting to see my psychiatrist. Since that initial panic episode that introduced me to the public health system, these appointments have been little more than check-ins to say, the occasional anxiety aside, I’m doing okay. That’s what I expect this afternoon. I felt good in the morning. And then, it’s nothing but the fear, terror, and panic that instantaneously immerses me until that’s all I am, and my conscious self is sinking right out of it, squeezed out to a place where…