Panic attacks and unpacking my bedroom.

I’d apologize, but I can’t afford to pay someone to listen to all this stuff, so I might as well just try to get it off my chest and hope that I feel better later.

In the eight months that I lived in the last house I was in, I could never bring myself to unpack the boxes that held most of my belongings in them. Some of it, stuff that I had kept stored because I meant to throw it away before I moved out of my old apartment but had been in too much of a hurry to pack up to go through all of it. Most of it. Pieces of my life from two years ago or more, kept in a few small cardboard boxes, tucked away from light.

The fear never left. The worry that at any moment, it was all going to come to an end, and I would have to pack it all up again and find somewhere new to keep it. After a year of bouncing around from living room to living room, working freelance, constantly moving my stuff around, I’m having a hard time believing the idea of occupying the same space, or feeling comfortable in it. Like it’s only a matter of time before it disintegrates and I’m back where I started.


I remember on one summer night a few years ago, someone asked me if I wanted to explore an abandoned house.

The air was thick and muggy and so hot that my flannel shirt clung to my back. It felt like swimming. Trash littered every floor, from abandoned belongings and remnants of months of squatters taking residence in the vacant rooms. Pitch black and wet, our flashlights cutting in sharp angles in the darkness, it seemed like attending to the wreckage of a sunken ship on the ocean floor. Decaying pieces of a place formerly inhabited, frozen in the last moments as people scrambled to evacuate. Panic in a still life.

I left so much of my shitty, broken old stuff spread across the city, holding ransom little corners of other people’s space.

It took me over a month in my new house to convince myself to make more than a little pathway to the bed through all the stuff piled up by the door to my closet, and try to arrange it like an actual person lives inside the space. I wouldn’t have done it if I hadn’t made a commitment to shoot a short film in my house.

A script I wrote almost two years ago, and kept sitting on, occasionally prodding people again and again with the same, unchanging idea. In notebooks and folders, I have finished and unproduced scripts all stacked up, notes after notes of jokes for comics I never even got around to drawing, most of them don’t even mean anything any more. Random gibberish of ideas I’ve forgotten because I sat on them and stifled them and now all I can think about is memories of a person I used to be, or at least, have convinced myself I once was.

It’s all compacted and buried under crap. Everything shoved into the smallest amount of space, until the boxes start to give out, flimsy cardboard ripping open.


I think about being passed out on the side of the road and waking up in an MRI machine and being told that I could have died if they hadn’t found me when they did. I remember being so fucking ashamed and afraid that I couldn’t tell anyone that it happened. Most people still don’t know that it happened. I still can’t talk about it without a lot of difficulty.

There are so many things I want to say to people, but when I try, all I can manage is terrified silence.

I feel desperate and drained. I feel afraid of talking to anyone unless I’ve been drinking, and when I drink, I wake up in the morning unable to shake a horrified feeling that I’ve said or done something terribly wrong that I should regret, but which is stuck somewhere down where I can’t tell what it is. I want to tell people what I’m thinking or feeling, but I’m afraid they won’t listen.

Someone will talk over me and when I blurt it out, inarticulate and confused, get told I talk too much.

I’m too embarrassed to open my mouth, even if it’s because something is wrong and I need help.

I don’t go out because I feel certain that everyone either already dreads my company or will by the time I leave.

And down it goes, packed away tightly on top of everything else.

I still have all the grudges I did when I was 21 and 22, though some of them have shifted to a new target, every stupid old resentment I could have broken if I just spoke up and was honest.

I’m almost 25. That used to seem like being an adult. I don’t feel like an adult.

In tidal waves of fear my stomach turns and bounces turbulently. I’m feeling more fully than I’ve really felt anything in a while - the low, buzzing dread and anger in the back of my thoughts washed out and spinning in a storm of overwhelming terror.

I can’t stop it from coming on, but maybe, at least, I can put it into words, and get it out of myself.

It’s almost morning and I can hear the train going by half a block down the road. I remember riding my bike down to the tracks and watching a train go by and wanting desperately to grab it and go where ever it took me.

I’m listening to the same song on repeat for probably the 20th time tonight, and I don’t even know if I even like it or just want to have something be constant.