In which I babble on about nothing, then get down to the point, which is – and I’m sorry if it’s overly pedestrian – to thine own self be true. Or something.

I’m pretty much obsessed with my current read, Imajica. It’s occupying most of my attention. God how I love a good book. I’m in love with the mystif, Pie ‘oh’ Pah.

I haven’t failed to notice that we’ve bypassed Spring and gone straight into air-conditioning season, though.

Tonight I have to do laundry for my Vail trip, which begins right after work on Thursday. I’ll be hopping into a van with two musicians and heading Colorado-wards. We’ll be stopping after 5 or 6 hours of driving and overnighting in some random motel. Friday we’ll be picking another band member up at the airport in Denver and then continuing up to Vail. The gig itself is Saturday night. I’m wondering if there will be enough room in the van for me to bring my knitting bag.

I had an IM conversation this morning with someone about panic attacks, and then promptly started having one myself. It’s a mild one, but annoying. (They’ve been decreasing in frequency and intensity since I left The Ex, and I can now go weeks and weeks without having any symptoms at all.) I think today’s little episode is a combination of thinking about it too much and my recent fairly high caffeine intake.

I had a mini-episode yesterday or the day before that consisted of having a fleeting strange sensation in my chest followed by a whole-body heating rush of adrenaline, and then an hour or so of The Fear. As soon as I get occupied with something I forget I’m having an attack and it goes away, but when I’m sitting at a desk, hardly moving, they linger because I can keep a portion of my awareness too focused on my symptoms.

I’ll be glad to get out of town this weekend. I guess need a bit of a head change.

~+~+~
A couple of readers have mentioned in comments or emails that I haven’t posted about panic in awhile. They did the math and came up with the same thing I did: the end of the marriage appeared to correspond with the end of the panic disorder.

Well, yes and no. Mainly yes. It seems one trains the body for a new set of responses in the depths of a panic disorder, and the symptoms do linger, but I haven’t suffered the kinds of multi-hour horrors I once did. I would characterize myself these days as being pretty much panic-free.

I am a glass-is-half-full person, and I also take my commitments seriously. (Which is why it’s often hard to get me to commit to anything.) It seems that I wasn’t able to look at the life I thought I’d wanted and admit that I’d been wrong. I had wanted to marry, I had wanted to buy the farm property, I had committed to years of living in a remodel and driving a 13-mile commute. I had thought these things would make me happy.

They didn’t. I couldn’t deal. I developed a panic disorder… I mean, I was utterly miserable and it had to come out somewhere.

I thought I had a hormone imbalance, a thyroid disorder, a heart condition. I took inventory and reaffirmed to myself over and over that I was, indeed, a happy person: I had a husband who loved me, my own house out in the country, all my basic needs met and even enough wealth left over to buy books and the occasional PPC or iPod or something. I was happy, damn it, and there was no way a self-reflective, intelligent person like myself could be causing myself such anguish.

Then, on a trip to Manhattan, I sat on a balcony with an old girlfriend from high school and she said that she was contemplating getting a divorce.

And something astonishing happened. A glimmer of something… an idea. People get divorces. I could… I could change my life. I could, if I were willing to, have something other than what I had. By the time I got back to Batavia, I’d had a few revelations. One, I was fucking miserable. Two, it was okay to change one’s mind. Three, I had to change my life.

Four, I owed The Ex one last college try, though. Didn’t I?

Previous and subsequent conversations with The Ex showed that he wasn’t miserable about our lifestyle in general, and revealed not much interest on his part to move. It also became clear that while he was willing to make mild behavior modifications to please me, he’d waited too long to do so and I was no longer capable of taking him back. Our last year together was shit, basically, but he was still surprised when I finally owned up to the reality that I had been wrong: I did not want the things I had, and that it was if not okay then at least it was human to make mistakes. I simply was not capable of being happy under the circumstances available to me. I didn’t want the marriage I had, I didn’t want the house I had, I didn’t want the life I had.

I left. And the panic went away, because I was no longer lying to myself. No longer trying to be happy with and grateful for things that made me miserable. It was just really hard for me to own up to loathing a life that so many would envy.

I guess it just took me a long time to reject a lifestyle that I thought was so desirable.

~+~+~
So now I’m single. I have no one to care for but Bindu. I have no one to demand anything of me. I don’t have to check in with anyone, I don’t owe anyone anything, no one can claim any part of me.

I live in town. I never have grime under my nails. I am rarely confronted with dirt and bugs. The utilities always work. Every place I need to go is less than a dozen blocks away.

I am a rock; I am an island? No, I have more human interaction than I did before. I am sometimes interrupted in my solitude, even!