That First Panic Attack
That Other Me is a series that explores the immediacy and intimacy of various mental health episodes I’ve experienced throughout my life. 1989 It’s an explosion in my head that shocks me from a restful sleep, a conflagration that engulfs me in anxiety so that I can’t see a way out. I sit up in bed. My brother sleeps obliviously in his own bed opposite me. But I might as well be alone. It’s just me. The night. And this terror. Something’s broken. That’s all I know. Like my right arm, which I broke nearly three years earlier while playing a social game of football. I jumped, was flipped in…
Dr. Fuckwit
Whenever I run workshops on writing memoir, biography, and that sort of thing, I instruct participants to keep us mired in the moment. That means if they’re writing about an experience when they were a twelve-year-old, then all I want to see, all I want to know, is what the narrator saw and knew as that twelve-year-old. Keep the narrative as if it’s unfolding then and there. Don’t let the present-day self butt in with present-day wisdom, opinions, or reflection. That punctures the suspension of disbelief. I also always say (and stress this also in fiction workshops I run) that unless there’s a justification for it, keep events chronological. It’s…