Anxiety, plus a nice man named Geert, and the complexity of grief.

(CW/TW Suicide and mental illness.)

I launched this newsletter with much (for me, which is not much) fanfare last week, and immediately smashed head first into the worst stretch of anxiety I’ve had in a long time, rendering me incapable of writing, or doing much of anything.

I got a diagnosis of Generalized Anxiety Disorder with a sprinkling of Panic Disorder some years back, and it’s a chronic situation, with occasional acute flareups. This means that some times are better than others, basically. I have had stretches that I call “remission”, because that’s what it feels like—I’m relatively panic- and mostly acute anxiety-free, don’t have to check in with my adrenaline on a regular basis. It’s rad.

Then there are times, like right now, for instance, of significant not-remission, what I fondly call Laurie Panic! at the Disco, and other fun names I make up to cope. These are times when I feel the symptoms acutely in my body—restless legs, racing heart, a general sense of agitation and a quickfire tendency to pop off and/or cry. I am more prone also to rants about capitalism, loud noises, and, most charmingly, other peoples’ flaws that are 100 percent none of my business. I have to be really careful about the impact of my condition on my work, relationships, and quality of life, at a time when being careful about anything is dicey. As an old boss and friend of mine says often when it’s decidedly not a party, “It’s a party.”

It should be noted that I have no baggage stating that I am a person living with generalized anxiety, or a person who has panic attacks. because I just am. My therapist says “trauma person”, which I weirdly love. I answer to all of them, it’s fine.

You can look up the bells and whistles of GAD on any reputable internet website, like this one. Way pre-diagnosis, I knew I was anxious for many years, but in what I can consider a “my higher power’s got jokes” situation, it became much, much worse when I got sober. Some funny guys might say (also, please don’t) “OH DAMN WHY’D YOU STOP DRINKING THEN? HAVE A DRINK LOL!” But when the a. option is “continue to mask anxiety with a substance that is destroying your organs and your ability to form sentences of more than three words” and b. is “learn how to live with anxiety and get most of your faculties back, and don’t die” the choices narrow.

I have worked very, very hard over the past decade to integrate the anxiety situation into my life. Given that I have the type of panic attacks that feel very much like a serious cardiac event, that will send me to the emergency room in a severe ice storm despite terrible fear of driving in ice (true story), this has not always been the easiest order. For the first year or so sober—when reality suddenly felt at all times like that moment when Dorothy opened the door of her crunched up house and went from sepia-toned, dusty Kansas to the acid trip-technicolor of Oz—this was unbearable. I liked getting things back—like my ability to speak English, stop drinking shower beer, and some level of basic self-respect—but the never-ending awareness of all things in the observable universe that came along with it was rough. (This said, please stop listening to videos and calls on speaker on your phone in restaurants without headphones. This level of stimulation is unnecessary for everyone in existence everywhere, what are you doing?)

Unsedated reality was an unexpected shock. A drink simply wasn’t an option because of the aforementioned organ disintegration and impending death thing, but what to do, what to do when the brain waves won’t cooperate?

What I did was

  • Try anxiety relief hacks as diverse as the standard “Identify things you can see/hear/taste/see/feel” and box breathing, literally stopping at any moment I felt like I was going to kirk out to count inhales and exhales, which for some reason made me feel worse?

  • This was way pre-COVID, and once I even drove into the emergency room of a local hospital, ran cold water over my wrists in the restroom until I calmed down, and left. Triage nurses have seen way weirder, it turns out.

  • Walk aggressively. Walk a lot. Walk until I felt like I could walk off the edge of the earth.

  • Counted steps on an abusive step counter app, which counteracted the calming effect of the aggressive walking with compulsive exercise problem. (Again, party.)

  • Obsessively search the internet, in the days before every other post was from a PTSD coach (which I also need, hello, call me!) for tips, any tips, tips and/or tricks.

  • Browse Petfinder “just to look.” (This is never, ever true.) Get a decidedly indoorsy dog who was forced to live in a yard for the first year and a half of his life and embark on life as a two-feral-creature-with-severe-anxiety household.


Somewhere in that internet searching, I stumbled across an app from a Belgian man named Geert, proprietor of the descriptively named ILovePanicAttacks.com. (I am not making this up. Click it. It’s totally real, and also spectacular.) Geert had a video that walks the watcher/listener/me through a panic attack experience, with the requisite comparison to the anxious mind’s inability to distinguish between encountering a tiger in the jungle, and, say, opening an email from an editor to whom you have owed a post for, perhaps, one and three-quarters months.

This is that video:

I am not vouching for his clinical experience, because I don’t know if he has any. (I intend to buy his book—Badass Ways to End Anxiety and Stop Panic Attacks—which I just discovered, and find out.) What I do know is that when I was in one of those internet death search spirals, I found his lilting voice and calming demeanor helpful. So I put his app in my “Sober stuff” iPhone folder, and whenever I got a little bit tweaky in the car, which was, at the time, my favorite tweaky place, I’d play it, and it helped me. Geert would chat me up about the tiger and the jungle and what was going on in my body during a panic attack while I sat in rush hour Beltway traffic, and somehow I’d resist the urge to walk to Nebraska or drive to the ER, or—and this is the biggest score—drink to knock out this godforsaken anxiety.

Why this above other meditations and yoga nidras (also awesome) and what have yous? No idea. But anyone who struggles with anxiety and panic on the level that I do might tell you, that if it helps, and it’s accessible, it is gold.

I forgot about Geert until I sat down to write this post, honestly. I don’t know why I left him behind, when for a couple of years he was my first best defense from going down the path that usually ended at an emergency room, where they’d chat me up, satisfy themselves and me that it wasn’t a heart attack, probably give me some PRN benzos (more on that later!) and send me on my way.

By the way, I believe that you should always go to the ER if you’re doing the “Is it anxiety or a heart attack?” mental dance, particularly if you have no experience with this, or if you feel at all different than you usually do. First of all, during either of those times we are typically not in top form to be making nuanced decisions, and I don’t know about you, but I’m not a cardiologist, an ER doc, or a therapist—the best trio to be doing that triage plan. Cardiac problems get blown off as anxiety all the time, and one time I went and it was an actual real live pulmonary embolism. More on that later ALSO.)

(And I realize I say this from a place in my life today where I have health insurance. There are times when I might not have gone for that reason, but looking back, I’d still rather have a bill than be dead. And that’s growth.)

The recent anxiety spiked when blog friend and colleague Heather Armstrong died a few weeks ago. The news was devastating, and raw, and a yank back into a world and a community that is no longer part of my day to day, but will clearly always be an indelible part of my life. If I doubted that, Heather’s death confirmed it. I hadn’t seen her in a long time, but she was woven with my entire experience online from jump—early internet writing, and learning how to be a human in community, even from behind a screen. She was at the first event I ever attended with her close group of early internet friends, all people I read daily and admired, where I spotted her from the other side of the pool, and wished I were the type not to go fully awkward in simply saying “I appreciate how your writing reaches and touches so many people, including me, every day. Also you are very funny when a lot of people on this earth are simply not, so thanks.”

Over the years, as I evolved into a survivor of severe depression and substance abuse, I learned that I had much in common with Heather in this regard, despite the stark differences in our lives and ideologies. Plus I never did love Radiohead. She loved Radiohead, like really really loved Radiohead. I knew, however, that we both loved Bourbon, and taking pretty photos, and very long sentences. It was also clear that we both struggled to be alive in our bodies, no matter how much good or even indifferent was happening in our lives, which was the most frustrating part. It’s one thing to be fucked up over and during the bad, but the inability to touch grass during the neutral and, especially, the good is a special kind of hell.

More relevant to my purposes here on this site, and something that I want to mention because her writing and images about Chuck, and later Coco, brought so much joy across the internet universe, is Heather’s dogs and their obvious value to her. I know that feeling—that when the actual world and people with words and needs and devil’s advocacy and sheer sheer terror are too much, that dogs are—while sometimes annoying and needy and prone to costing entire paychecks at the vet—pure love, and even mirrors of the best things we can hope to be. People are crucial; we need our people like breathing, and this is not an either/or by any means. Dogs are simply, for some of us, a crucial tether to the earth. A delightful, what often feels like undeserved, bonus prize. And I get that, hard.

When my internet blew up with Heather’s face and countless in memoria this month, I concurrently tripped and fell into this anxiety jag, and I’m not sure why it took me sitting down to write this to realize that. When a person in my circles ends their life, and also happens to suffers from substance abuse problems and complex mental illness, it makes sense that it knocks me over a little. This was always true, but when I lost my best friend to a heroin-induced suicide seven years ago, my general orientation to the world changed significantly, and despite a ton of recovery since that time, the ripples live in me still. I suspect they might, always.

It is also very typical for suicide witnesses and survivors who are not close family or friends to minimize their grief, or any reaction at all—to think we do not deserve one, in this weird bootstrappy, gatekept culture where we’re supposed to hear about horrific things—either personal to our lives or not—and still sign in for the next Zoom or fill the gas tank or whatever task is set up next in our supposed-to-be-superhero lives. It took me years to speak out loud exactly how sad and mad I was about my friend’s death, in a therapist’s office whom I trusted, when he suggested that as a person who took one of my friend’s last phone calls on her way to end her life, that I was perhaps entitled to a certain range of emotions about that experience.

We are entitled to that range, from anxiety to indifference to rage and perhaps some hard-won moments of peace, and back again. We are so worthy of recovery—a tall order on a path that for me looked like ERs and cross-country road trips and hard won sobriety and Geert, and looks really different for other people.

And when one of us doesn’t make it, one of us who tried hard, and didn’t fail by any means, or lose a battle—I hate that terminology so much—but simply reached the end of an overwhelming and unbearable effort, we can feel however we want. Because we’re going to anyway.

My dear friends at Mom2.0 are arranging funds for Heather’s children—Leta and Marlo’s—education. These are the only funds approved by her family. Please support if you can.

Some good dog news from around the web, because that’s what we do around here:

The occasional deal:

  • I legit love Chewy for food and supplies (slow food bowls, holla!) Hoover eats Royal Canin GastroIntestinal support, which requires a prescription, and I can’t just pick it up anywhere. (He has better health care than I do, I swear.) I can’t even buy it at PetSmart because he doesn’t see their in-store vet, and it’s too expensive at my vet, whom I love but they already get enough (so much!) of my money. I get a 5% break on every Chewy auto-ship order because I have a subscription, and they drop it on my doorstep at an interval I can pick, and adjust as needed. I have never had a delivery problem with them, and their customer service, if you ever need it, is fantastic. This little link will get you $35 off your first delivery, plus that 5% off in the future. It’s totally worth it to me, and perhaps to you.

*Note that I shall not ever share junk I don’t use, and this deal is def not-junk that I do use all the time. So satisfying.

  • That said, we love Bark Box around here, too, and you can get your dog a Bark Box treat for spring, if you’re into it. A double box! Super score if you’d like to take that extra and donate some toys to your local humane society or rescue. They always need stuff, and there are so many surrendered dogs and cats right now—it’s a common side effect of an economic downturn, and the staff need lots of help, plus the animals need the love.

See you next time! Meantime, write me a note and tell me how you’re doing. I would really like to hear it.

Laurie WhiteComment