If I ate fewer vegetables, would I panic less?



South American foam finger



To get this blog back on track, let me tell you about my day, which was Lowery-free and panic-fraught, and therefore relevant to this forum, whose purpose is to talk about anxiety, not David Lowery. (Unless I happen to panic about David Lowery, which so far hasn't happened, but I won't rule it out.) I'll keep the post short, though, because I have a lot of other work to do, you have a lot of better work to do than read this, and, god knows, eventually it would just end up being about David Lowery anyway.

I've had a bad day. Although it started as a good day. Which generally makes a bad day even worse.

Sometime early this morning, which means sometime around noon, probably, I had one of those very vivid dreams that, on reflection, makes you wonder how asleep you actually were when you dreamed it. Were you half-conscious and filling in details with bits of radio news filtering down from the apartment above yours? Often vivid dreams make a nasty impression; why else would they bother to be vivid? But this one was wholly charming, until two or three hours passed, at which point the bizarre mish-mash began to poke at my rational mind. Here's the fix: my son (I had a son), who was a baby and therefore incapable of walking, was walking: in the room, which was the park, which was a dozen other places as the dream-spider in my brain spun its dislocations. I was walking too and having a wonderful time at it. The rest I can't remember, because my son was a ten-inch monkey. Not a complete monkey, though. More like a try at one, a sketch of a draft of a monkey, from memory. So call it a son-monkey. In the dream, in real time, that detail didn't matter; I didn't even notice it. He was just my tiny son, and I loved him. To be honest, it was one of the best dreams I've had in months. I've since ruined it, of course, by refusing to let go of the reasoned demand that people be people and tiny monkeys be tiny monkeys. I should take a lesson from my dream-spider and let it be.

Every day I drink at least one pulverized hodgepodge of vegetables. Day to day the contents of the "shake" vary, but spinach, broccoli, collard greens, and kale are staples, as are a couple of scoops of a high-octane, raw, alkaline powder. To those I add rice milk and water, and chug. (As the flavor of blended greens, milk, water, and powder excites all the wrong taste buds, the ones that stipulate "food" and not "other," sipping the shake is not an option.) Then, as my body does its healthy best to make sense of what I've just put inside it, I feel, unpredictably, calm, unwell, frantic, or charged and happy. Sometimes, though, I feel damn anxious. Which makes me wonder, if I ate fewer vegetables, would I panic less? Perhaps the blender is the culprit and not the plants.

Finally, I've had a bad day. Woke up from my tiny monkey dream feeling fine, with a slight headache. Did about an hour of diligent deep-breathing and meditation, followed by some yoga poses. Then depression broke in. Fear soon followed, and restlessness. Tried to exorcise the discomfort but none of the standard palliatives helped. Anxiety grew into agitation, and then into low-grade panic, which, if you ever experienced it (I hope you haven't) is actually worse in some ways than full panic, because although the latter ends, the former can go on indefinitely. Took a tranquilizer and walked. Didn't help much. Plan to take another and breathe, and expect a better day tomorrow.

Nothing wry or sententious to write about it. Just looking forward to a break, if it comes.