Panic Attack Buying Cat Food

Originally posted August 9th 2023

1.

I went to get cat food one morning. I felt the anticipation as I tell myself “Just put on your shoes”. Like a child, begrudgingly grabbing my tote bag, the weight of it helps keep me grounded. I put on rings to fidget with. Lately, I’ve been holding my keys, looping my fingers around the chain holding them together. The cat watches me, vaguely curious but maybe just bored.

The stairs out the building go on forever, like in movies when the hallway stretches out. To my horror, the path outside seems much the same. Am I going to throw up? I’m going to throw up, throw up now, do it do it, disgusting freak.

I make it past the “new” coffee shop. It looks exactly the same as the coffee shop that was there last week. A woman in a highvis vest sits outside the laundromat as always. The park is full of dogs. Throw up, humiliate yourself, throw up.

The Korean restaurant is already busy, the hair salon next door is empty. An older woman smokes outside her front door. People are carrying grocery bags. Why do I feel like something terrible is about to happen to me?

I can see the pet shop now, next to another coffee shop full of hot baristas, Just make it across the road, all we need to do is get across the road. I realise I’d been squeezing my keys into my hand, leaving indents.

Narrow aisle, grab four cans of fish chunks. The cashier is busy talking to another customer, I have to wait. Puke now, do it, you’re going to be sick because you deserve to be sick. They move aside and I check out.

Back outside and suddenly the alarms stop. I go buy more La Croix. Decide against coffee to avoid the alarms starting up again. Call Ethan. Don’t mention the alarms. Put my keys in my bag. Walk into the park and sit on a bench. We talk for awhile. Go home and think about going outside again.

2.

Sometimes when I’m talking it feel like there’s a plug in my brain that’s got lose, some electricity is still getting through but it’s not right. I don’t feel like a robot but like a piece of machinery that’s lost its relevance. Like an old bread slicer. You ever watch those youtube videos where someone restores old bits like that? What happens to them after? Is there that much of a market for out of date contraptions? Do you think the bread slicer misses its job? Now, without purpose, it’s just a hunk of metal, taking up space. Don’t you think it’s weird how something that was commonplace, just a thing in the kitchen, now is being restore on a youtube video with 28 million views? The person who made it will never see that video. There’s a whole youtube genre of people fixing old rusty machines and cleaning dirty rugs. I can’t tell you what it is exactly, but it’s must be some kind of craving for mundanity. There’s a satifying element, yes, but there’s something else. Something about fixing things that don’t need to be fixed.

3.

I don’t have anything to say this week. I hope by saying that I’ll kick something into gear and this will be a marvelous essay about…something. I have a few essays set aside, none of them seem quite right. Notes on Songwriting Part 2 is floating around, but it’s mainly a repeat of the same ideas of the last one. Bad Art Part 2 is a bunch of bullet notes and not much else. I fear I’m repeating myself, making the same sentiments over and over again with little new illumination.

I do a lot of nothing. My days tend to be sitting on my computer, going between staring into the abyss of social media and writing. I deleted instagram off my phone last week, couldn’t redownload it even if I wanted to until yesterday because Apple needed a verification code sent to my old phone despite me knowing my own damn password. And for some reason it takes a week to switch numbers.

I wanted to stop scrolling. Looking at videos designed to piss me off in between ones of cats, bears (probably due to googling so much about them at the beginning of July), music (the algorythm thinks I’m really into New Wave) and the usual film clips. I wondered what the point was. It doesn’t make me feel good, I do enjoy a video of a cute animal but why are they showing me clips from some conservative raging about transgender people? Well, they want me to engage. They go “She’s a leftist so she’ll argue in the comments about why they’re wrong” ENGAGEMENT! I’m not an idiot. I just keep scrolling. Yet they insist on showing me more and more of this. And I’m not going to lie, it upsets me greatly. So I took a break. Checked only on desktop to reply to messages. I took a break from Tumblr and cut down on Youtube, which tends to just play in the background anyway. It would be nice to say my life totally changed but it didn’t. But I did feel better, I felt more myself.

There’s another element of instagram that I didn’t think about too much until I stopped checking which was FOMO (fear of missing out). I didn’t realise how bad I had it until I began to worry things like “What if someone announces an engagement? Pregnancy?”. In an email to a friend last week I even joked ‘Do I really need to message every friend and say “I’m off instagram, if anything life changing happens to you please message me directly”. It seems ridiculous to have to do that. But that might just be the case.’ Nothing big did get announced from what I can tell, but the fear was there. Social media is an easy shortcut to big announcements rather than calling or texting individually. It makes sense. But I will also never get over finding out my brother was engaged via facebook status (sorry, Kill). It feels weird, like this isn’t how things are meant to be.

The FOMO thing is funny to think about actually, because as I’m writing this I realise none of my friends are the type of people to post big announcements on the internet. Those who would, I’m not particularly close to. So why do I care? It’s that nosy small village mentality. I want to know what everyone is up to at all times because. Well. I’m bored. I feel bad saying I’m bored. Because of my anxiety and agoraphobic tendencies it feels like I should be suffering horribly at all times to justify it. But most of the time, if not having a panic attack or a bout of depression, I’m pretty okay. I’m goofy and chatty and a fairly cheery individual. But it’s hard to just allow myself to be that person when I’m also bored because I’m not working, not going out to see friends. There’s a lack of social life, so I resort to scrolling. I know things like instagram prey on lonely people, which I am, but I no longer want to give it the satisfaction. I’ve been making more of an effort with the people I have rather than looking on at those I don’t. I don’t think any internet guru is going to help me, no self-help influencer will tell me anything I don’t already know, knowing what some person I knew when I was 22 and haven’t spoken to since is up to isn’t particularly helpful.

Yesterday, I archived most of my posts, changed my username to something close to my name after nearly 8 years of being bramstokerrr. Maybe it has to do with turning 29 soon, but I wanted to tidy it all up. I didn’t want old selfies, pictures I don’t have any fondness for or moments I’d rather forget. Not everything needs to be a captured memory. I want to move on from whatever person I was trying to portray myself as. I’ve been using the internet so long there’s a thousand different Enya’s out there. There’s the Enya who posted waaayyyyy too many lyrics as status updates on facebook. Enya who was covering her left eye with her fringe on myspace. Bad art on Deviantart. Being cringe on Bebo. She existed but not for a long time now. I like to see it as proof that people change drastically. I know the popular sentiment is that people never change, but I’ve never really believed that. There’s a similar elements but they are not interacted with in the same way.

It makes me think about how in therapy we’re trying to do “inner child work”. Which, I think because of how it’s discussed online, is a term I hate. A lot of it is trying to forgive myself for not knowing better. I did what I did with the information I had at the time or trying to convince that voice in my head that being in my body is not a bad thing. Ruminating on options X, Y and Z will do you no good. I think the internet holds a constant reminder of who I used to be, which is rarely a person I liked. I don’t even like who I was a year ago let alone 15. I suppose it gets into this self-hating part of myself. Which, I know isn’t helpful, but it’s there. It’s a part of me that doesn’t want to be forgiven, doesn’t want me or anyone to forget how terrible I am. It throws in intrusive thoughts of how I’ve hurt people, to maintain that I am unforgivable. Even if I’ve been forgiven by those I’ve hurt, this part of me wont accept it. And these old bits of myself online is fuel to the fire.

I know this goes beyond my presence online, more so to do with another term I dislike...self love. In therapy I once said I wanted to be like The Dude in The Big Lebowski, someone at ease with themselves (although as we talked about it we realised a man who would go through so much for a rug might not actually be that chill). In an essay I wrote earlier this week, which may or may not ever be published, I said I wanted to be someone who does what they love and have a “the rest is up to god” mentality. To relinquish control because I only have so much, to stop being so concerned with how people see me, to let go of this self-hating ego.

My reliance on things like instagram is because, for as long as I can remember, I have had a hard time believing people think about me when I’m not there. Like some kind of lack of object permanence. By updating a story I’m saying “I’m still here!” but I don’t know if it’s helping me get away from that line of thinking. It’s in conflict with a side of me that also just really loves taking and sharing pictures. If you come into my house and ask to look through the photo albums I am as delighted as an old lady and will tell you stories about each one.

It’s always about balance. It’s always about insecurity. I think it’s evident that I am chronically online. I hope one day I can make a part two of this essay and be like “worked on my problems and now no longer have a weird relationship with the internet” but until then…..

I said I had nothing to say and here we are.

4.

I might be overthinking all this.

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Thank you for reading,

Enya xx