Where I've Been

Maybe it started with the twitch. Or maybe it started way back with the twisting of my double helix. Maybe the moon was in the seventh house, Scorpio was rising, maybe somewhere in the Amazon a butterfly landed on a branch causing a brittle leaf to fall to the ground and the world was forever changed. It was small, that much I know. The twitching of my eye. Pulsating. Fluttering. A moth against a bare light bulb on a porch at night. Can you see it? I'd say to people, leaning my face in close enough to kiss, my breath fogging up every mirror with my scrutiny. And me being me I went home and Googled "eye twitching" and what was small became large, freakish, what was inconsequential became everything.

Because when you Google "eye twitch" you are likely to find websites about stress, yes, anxiety, but also websites dedicated to all of the dread diseases best known by initials, diseases made popular by Alex P. Keaton, diseases that send me spiraling into letters I cannot bring myself to put together. I mean, I fancy myself a feminist, but still, I insist on Miss or Mrs., never the other, no fucking way. Letters have power, thoughts are loaded, e=mc2 but there is still so much we don't know so I do everything I can to fool the foggy gods of my phobia, however silly it may seem. Don't believe everything you think, people tell me. So honestly? I don't know what to believe most of the time. I walk around believing in grocery lists, in the days of the week. Today is Monday and I hold on to the knowledge that my ferns need watering, that I have to fill up my car with gas. Some days it seems I exist on fumes.

I hate this about myself. That might be the worst part. How I hate myself for having panic attacks. How something happens, my eye twitches maybe, and then suddenly my world shrinks down to survival, as if someone has poured salt on a newt, and I lie there quivering on the floor full of hatred that I am weak, that I am fragile, that I am me looking through a thick opaque window at my daughter dancing in a princess dress, at my family, at the rest of the world rotating on its axis and I am still with the fear. It's harder to admit that than it is the panic attacks. Hating myself for them is my biggest shame.

Bryan has diabetes. My brother has asthma. Maybe you have something wrong with you, a bum knee, allergies, astigmatism. I don't judge you, only myself. There is something about panic attacks, phobias, depression, whatever. Something unspoken, broken, whispered about, snickered. Something less. And I think that the reason I hate myself is just a big clusterfuck of what I imagine people say about me, whether they do or not. She's crazy. She's weak. She's weird. I see these faceless people doing that little thing, twirling one finger around their ear to indicate that I am cuckoo, a third-grade taunt reserved for the playground. And I hate it.

I'm taking magnesium now. I heard that helps with muscle spasms. And B vitamins. I've been eating a lot of bananas for the potassium. My eye, it still twitches, and the corner of my mouth, too, when I think too much about it. But it's twitching less; I'm getting better. I watched a video yesterday of Barbara Walters interviewing Obama, and in it, his eye is twitching. Poor guy. He's under a lot of stress in that he has to find me employment. But my main job right now is to forgive myself. For being human. For the way my double helix connected, for the way the planets were lined up in the moment of my conception, for the butterfly in the Amazon, for the leaf, for the smallness of things that go bump in the night. Yes, I am weird, but I am also strong, and I am me, crazy legs and all.

*Images of sculptures by Ron Mueck. Click on images for source.