On Panic Attacks

And the Story of an Imaginary Sloth

When my grandmother passed away, I took the news well. She’d had another in a series of strokes at her long-term care facility. There were months of lead-up and preamble from the first to the last. She was old. Death was to be expected. My aunt called me before they pulled the plug and even though it was likely she couldn’t hear me I told her how much she’d meant to me, how I owed everything to her and my grandfather, and I wanted her to know above all that she was deeply loved.

I didn’t cry.

I finished my lunch, clocked back into my job at the call center, and finished out my shift.

Fine. Totally fine. No complaints.

The following story is about how I am generally the last person to know when I am deeply upset.

A month or two later, what seemed to me at the time a long while after the funeral, I went out for a walk along a dirt path by an irrigation canal. It was isolated, pretty, and I walked there a lot. A man with one arm happened to be walking by there at the same time. He waved to me with his one good hand. I waved back. Nothing at all remarkable apart from the arm.

Except slowly, slowly the dread started to creep up on me.

What had happened to his arm? Could that happen to me? What was it like to only have one arm? What would he say if he knew I was wondering about his missing arm? Could he read my mind and was he finding all of these thoughts rude? Here I was thinking of myself when he’s the one who is actually missing an arm. Did that thought seem insincere since I only had it after worrying that he could read my mind? Hello? Hey, guy with one arm! Can you read my mind?

My throat seized up and then my whole body seized up. I wanted to lay down on the dirt path and just not move. It felt like drowning except I was on land. I forced one foot in front of the other and kept going.

When it subsided I felt like a total loser. Just the most absolute and complete waste of flesh that had ever been spit out by evolution. Writing has always been my hobby. I hadn’t written anything good in ages. My job was a dead end. I’d wasted all kinds of academic resources that people had foisted on me to try and get me to succeed and had nothing to show for it. However high my potential, I certainly wasn’t achieving it. I had no friends, no girlfriend, and was financially supporting my mother and my dipshit step-father. She would tell people it was the other way around and I wouldn’t even have the heart to stick up for myself.

At that point in my life I had dedicated myself to seeing my little brother and sister grow up with some degree of stability but they were getting older and I didn’t know what my purpose was anymore. Soon, I would have no one to need me who was worth helping. With my grandmother gone the last person who loved me and didn’t want anything from me had also gone.

I decided, after some thought, that I should get a pet. Something that would love me for me. Might help. Better than moping around at least.

Not a cat. Too independent. I’d probably end up feeling needy and emotionally fragile compared to its cool arrogance. Definitely not a dog. Too high energy and then I’d just be consumed by guilt for not taking it out often enough.

What I really needed, deep in my soul, was a pet sloth.

It is important to remember for everything that follows that I am still walking by a canal as all of this is happening in my head.

I could see my whole life play out. I’d come home from work. The sloth would have barely moved even a few inches since that morning. Immediately, I would feel like a winner. I’d spend a few minutes taking care of it. Then get to writing. The deep down hard writing where there’s nothing but you and the page and all that white space is a grateful recipient of your work instead of a daunting challenge. No interruptions, the sloth needed quiet and everyone would understand that.

Of course, my novel would be finished shortly. I’d always been too chickenshit to finish a novel, instead leaving a bunch of first and second acts unfinished in my google drive. Too scared either to fail or succeed. But with the sloth to lift my esteem that would no longer be a challenge. I’d sell my book in one of those crazy once in a lifetime seven figure deals. I would become immediately famous.

Media interviews would follow. Jon Stewart would sob and tell me that he’d never been so moved in his life. Oprah would tell me that I was the next Mark Twain and I would gently correct here that she was wrong and that I was really the first me. The audience would gasp and then cheer. Oprah would look upon me with awe. All the while, the sloth would be watching me from the green room, emotionally supporting my success.

Soon, I’d have to leave the sloth at home. Too much happening. Too much success. Lots of interviews to attend. It’s easier to be a celebrity author than a working author. I’d leave the written word behind for a series of reality television show guest spots. I’d chop onions and carrots with Gordon Ramsay and trade all kinds of barbs. Both our fan bases would love it. The sloth would be at home, awaiting my return.

It’s easy to take care of a sloth. Just put out a bit of food, surely. They’re so slow. No one else needs to be there at all.

Then it had to happen, didn’t it? I should have seen it coming. I came home. Said hello to the sloth. Put out some food. Went to the bathroom. That’s when I found it. Goddamnit. That’s when I found it.

There were several dingy Polaroid pictures on the bathroom counter. I didn’t take these pictures. Confused, I sorted through them one by one trying to understand. There was a picture of the sloth on a Ferris Wheel eating an ice cream cone with another writer. Someone I thought was a friend. A picture of the sloth laying on the beach, topless, with cucumbers slices over its eyes. The sloth getting out of the shower with the towel not even all the way over her waist. All I could think about was that other writer spending so much time with her, writing all the words that I should have been writing, living that life that I should have lived. I hadn’t realized before that moment that the sloth was female and that we were basically married.

I flew into a rage. I saw red. I probably even frowned in real life.

I demanded to know why she’d done it. Didn’t I do enough? Didn’t I provide enough? Wasn’t I enough?

I threw things all over our shared New York brownstone. Wasn’t it enough that we lived in this expensive house in New York because we certainly didn’t live in the city because of my preferences? I picked up her food and up-ended it right in front of her, asking her if that was all I was good for.

Then I said it. I couldn’t not say it. I was too angry. One of those angers where you know you’ll regret it for the rest of your life but you still let it drive you anyway. I looked directly at the sloth and savored each hurtful world.

“You fucking cunt,” I hissed.

No sooner had I said it before it was all over the internet. Somehow. Didn’t need an explanation for it. The scandal. The shame. Jezebel.crom, a website for feminist barbarians, ran a full series of articles about how I had always been a misogynist piece of shit. It was clear to anyone who had ever read my book. It was clear just to look at me. How creepy I was. What a loser I was. How selfish. How cruel. So many unflattering pictures. How unfaithful I was to the sloth, who clearly deserved better. Weird DM’s to various female fans. Really, it all had to do with my relationship with my mother and what seemed like hundreds of thousands random commenters agreed.

I never felt more gray or dead then the next week —which I imagined over the course of a few seconds— when I emerged from my bedroom to tell the sloth that it wasn’t working anymore. I didn’t know who I was. I didn’t know how we could be together. Clearly, I wasn’t enough and she felt she deserved better. There was still food in the pile. I’d make sure there was more before it ran out, but I needed to get away. Find myself again. I wouldn’t blame her if she ran away with that other writer.

So I went to Bermuda, or somewhere tropical. I don’t know. It was an island. The important part is that I was gone for a while. Maybe a month. Long enough to see clearly, see how I’d been emotionally neglectful, and decide to go back and make things right. Maybe we couldn’t be together anymore but at least I wouldn’t be a piece of shit in her eyes.

When I opened the door to our brownstone the sloth was nowhere to be found. I called out her name, which I hadn’t known before then and have since forgotten. I checked her habitat, under every little stick and rock. The food pile was completely untouched. The other rooms were empty. Until I got to the bedroom and her body was laying there, totally stiff and emaciated. She was dead.

I went crazy. My imaginary body felt like my real body had only moments ago. frozen. Pain everywhere. Like I couldn’t breathe. Drowning in grief. I grabbed her and tried to give her CPR. I took a palm full of water from the bathroom sink and tried to get her to drink. No matter how hard I tried I couldn’t get the heart in that furry chest to beat or that little snout to breathe. In hysterics, I called the veterinary ambulance, which in my imagination was just a thing that existed for pet emergencies and I didn’t question it.

They took her away in a sloth-sized body bag.

I was numb during the funeral at the Sloth Catholic Church. I looked up at the stained-glass window of Sloth Jesus, where he sat on a branch surrounded by a renaissance style halo, eating a leaf, wanting to know why it had to be this way, why did it always have to be this way? Couldn’t something beautiful be allowed to exist? Why couldn’t what was good be protected from what was evil? Why did there have to be so much pain?

And it was as if I saw the same story play out from the perspective of the sloth.

To the Sloth, the world was a crazy series of blurs as everything around her moved in fast forward. Her motions were regular. Normal. It was the world that was crazy.

She was born in a dark and terrifying place. Sloths like her moved at the normal, correct, beautiful speed. They savored all the world around them. Then sometimes the dangerous dark blurs would come and snatch one of them away, devouring them whole. The Amazon Rain Forest might have been natural but it was hell. A truly terrifying existence.

One day, a giant hairless sloth appeared. The Hairless One. Me.

The Hairless One was still fast but slower than the others. More like a sloth than a man. He picked her up and carried her away to somewhere safe and warm with plenty of food and water. Long were the hours that he would sit still in front of his computer where she could watch, luxuriating in the pleasure of his company, or else look at him laying still in the bed. It was so easy to see him. So easy to spot him out of all the blurs. They were together. Always.

Then one day it was as if he disappeared. There was a blur running all around. She could hardly even see it.

It became lonely. Even sloths wish to do more than eat, drink, and sleep. Even sloths need friendship. Some other blur saw her and took her out and pet her but even this ones face was too quick to see. It was not the Hairless One.

She needed the Hairless One, she decided. Needed him desperately. So great was her need she didn’t even notice the apartment fly apart or her food appear in a giant mountain. She was hungry for something more than food. For a moment in all that explosion, for a single instant, she thought she saw the face of the Hairless One.

So bit by bit, day by day, even as she grew hungry she clawed her way toward the bedroom. He would appear there, as he had always appeared, eventually. The most essential appetite would be sated when he picked her up and smiled at her. He would hold her and they would be together. Her loneliness would end, and even if, yes, she was starving, then he would simply pick her up and bring her back to the food.

It was all her strength to climb into the bed. She could barely manage it and when she was at the top she did not have the strength left to make it back down. The bed was soft and it smelled of the Hairless One. He would come back. He would arrive. She would be saved.

And even as she died there, even as death came, she never stopped believing he would return.

In the middle of a dirt road, by a canal, where it is both isolated and beautiful, I promptly burst into tears. I began to sob inconsolably. How could I be so callous? So self-involved? How could I not have seen what she needed? This was soul-rending grief for a creature that had not even been imaginary thirty minutes prior. Yet I cried for her as I had been unable to cry for my grandmother. Cried for her like she had been my grandmother because of course that’s what all this actually was even though I didn’t realize it at the time.

I have PTSD. The non twitter version where an actual therapist has diagnosed it and it actually limits the number of things I allow myself to do in my life. If you want to know why I post anonymously, or I suppose anonym-ishly since that damn AI face app, that’s why. For whatever reason, I just can’t stomach the thought of people knowing who I am and reading my stuff. I’ve always kept those worlds separate. Until recently, I hadn’t had a panic attack for ten years. I felt like I was completely done with that part of my life.

Then they came back.

This time I know that they can go away and if I work at it hard enough they will. I’m doing the smart thing and I’ve schedule a half dozen appointments to go do things to help. I’m not a sloth and I don’t have to lay there and just die. In case you need to hear it, neither are you.