Serenity Defense

Feeling very good today, Sunday, Father's Day. Friday and Saturday had to defend all day. I could tell as soon as I woke up that I would have anxiety attacks those days. They started small, and were barely perceptible. By the time I was at work they completely dominated me.

It was difficult to concentrate on my tasks. I was running about three-quarters, kind of in a fog. It was very discouraging and difficult to concentrate. I'm not even sure that I was experiencing classic panic attacks. I don't know how else to describe them.

That is why I titled this post, Serenity Defense. I don't want to be trapped in a prison of words. I want to be liberated. No person would be able to live a normal life, going through what I have. So far, the correlation between playing defense against these anxiety attacks and being at work is one hundred percent.

I can't quit my job, though. There is no way that this would be covered under W.C. Stress is part of everyone's job. Some minor abuse at work is probably a fact of life for the majority of us who work for wages.

The other day I had the insight that perhaps these defenses are part of a subconcious post-traumatic stress reaction. Familiar roles are being played by the hostile, abusive waitress (mother figure) and the engaging but virtually absent boss (father figure). The father figure fails to protect his charge from hostility because he is mostly blind to it, since the mother figure is capable of projecting saccharine sweetness when necessary.

Perhaps my issue is just an irregular heartbeat. The challenge would be to figure out whether it is life-threatening or not. It is not fluttering today. Friday after work, I went to the gym and spent twenty-five minutes on the stairs. Even though I warmed up, I never got my heart rate above 140. I repeated the ritual I learned as a teenager running cross-country. Completely expel my lungs with three or four exhalations to each sip of inhalation. Usually doing this once will adjust my blood CO2, reset my heart and allow me to get into a comfortable rythym.

This ritual proved ineffective, no matter how many times I tried it. I never got into a rythym on Friday. The effort did calm me down a bit, and Friday night was a bit more serene. When I arose Saturday, my heart started fluttering right away. I hit the gym and worked out for seventy minutes. Forty-five minutes of weights followed by twenty-five minutes of cardio. Again, I never got into a rythym.

Work was kind of a nightmare. I never have the other classic symptoms, like sweating or dizzyness. Just a heart rate that seems to skip a beat, then make up for it with a second hard beat and a third beat that is harder still. Repeated thousands of times. Dozens of times I tried to exhale completely in a pulsing rythym until I felt a reset, but it never took.

When I got home, I jumped into the pool and floated on a huge innertube, staring at the bottom. The colliding surface waves refracted bright sunshine as intertwined strands and cords of pure light on the bottom of the pool. They crashed against each other violently and I closed my eyes. When I opened them a few moments later, the refracted rays were bouncing a bit more slowly against each other. I closed my eyes again and again, until the bottom was a diffuse pattern of calmly undulating rays. I could see a spider on the bottom of the pool. About two feet below the surface, a single particle of vegetation hung weightless in suspended motion.