Unspoken Voices
1989 A voice. I’m sure it’ll speak soon. Just penetrate the night to accost me. I lie in bed, this worry growing into an obsession. My anxiety has escalated. Clusters of panic attacks have ambushed me repeatedly. In the last session I had with my psychiatrist, he asked me if I’d heard voices. I told him no. Then, terrified, I asked him if I would. He said he didn’t know. So it’s a possibility. Of course it’s a possibility. If it wasn’t, he would’ve told me, No! You won’t hear my voices! He would’ve laughed and dismissed it. He would’ve assured me. But I saw the concern in his face…
Twenty
Back in the 1980s when I was just a teen, I had a lot of mental health issues before I even knew what they were. They were my normal – being agitated, or having unexplainable bouts of melancholy, or feeling a disconnect from everybody else. It wasn’t until they exploded into panic attacks that the public hospital psychiatrist was able to give me some muddy clarity. But the worst of those mental health issues, the meltdowns, came at important times developmentally – when I should’ve been making my way out into the world, I was dealing with anxiety, cluster panic attacks, and OCD; when friends were marrying and working steadily,…