Dimes Square Anxiety Attack

I posted and distributed the wrong draft of this essay a half hour ago because I am a professional.

Home in New York, on a Tuesday afternoon, I ate an edible and had an anxiety attack at an upscale vegan Mexican restaurant. My friend, who I’ll call Rock because she shares a hairstyle with Charlotte’s kid on the Sex and the City reboot gave me a 30 mg gummy. “They say it’s 30 but I hardly feel it,” Rock said. She passed me an orange cube covered in granulated sugar and citric acid.

“Should I try half?” I asked, hardly pausing before putting the whole thing in my mouth. I wanted to feel very stoned.

“I think you’ll be fine with the whole,” Rock said.

Being home was stressing me out. I’d returned for the Passover seders. For the last two years, since the pandemic began and my dad developed symptoms and received a diagnosis, home has felt not completely alien but altered in a bad way. My parents no longer have the same capacity to care for me. And soho, the neighborhood I grew up in, keeps morphing into new, increasingly disturbing, hyper-capitalist versions of itself. There was no space on the sidewalk and nowhere normal to eat.

Rock and I wandered to the the Lower East Side, struggling to find a restaurant. When the gummy hit, it was subtle at first. I hadn’t eaten all day and I felt vaguely sick, as I’ve felt all spring. Like, chilled and on the verge of catching a flu that thankfully never goes full-blown, but not panicked yet. Just hungry.

Every restaurant seemed too fancy, or it had a concept. We encountered waitlists and $25 tuna salads. We walked in and out of Dimes, put off by a crowd of couples in matching beanies.

Desperate for food, Rock and I stopped to split a Korean corn dog that was stuffed half with hot dog, half with mozzarella, and rolled in cinnamon sugar. We dipped it in cheese-mustard and curry mayo sauce. Even stoned, it felt like it had too much going on. And everything was downhill from there.

Eventually, we found the vegan Mexican restaurant where I would have the worst anxiety attack of my life. It looked safe because it was mostly empty but that was an illusion. A cute waiter sat us in the corner and I sank back into the booth, shaky and suddenly very self-conscious. Rock had to order for both of us. I wondered if the cute waiter knew I was stoned. Did he wonder why I wasn’t at work? I kept thinking of the different judgmental assumptions he could’ve made about me: a mute, 33-year-old, childless woman, blitzed out of her mind on a Tuesday afternoon.

And then I worried: why am I never fun on drugs? Am I a miserable person?

The last time I tried to do Molly at a club in Berlin, I had to rest inside a metal cage on a stage, curling up against the bars, breathing heavily. Later, a friend informed me, “you were anxious about not getting high enough, then you were anxious about the come up, then you were anxious because you were too high. That’s just too much anxiety for one night, love.”

When the tacos came, the stir-fried tofu approximating ground meat looked truly disgusting to me. Rock told me to eat it anyway. She was looking up “how to get less stoned,” on her phone, refilling my glass of water. “Food and water,” she said. I went to the bathroom and peed, thinking about how eventually, I’d have to return to the restaurant’s dining room and walk past the waiter, who was obviously judging me for not being productive or knowing how to order for myself. He definitely thought I was weird like everyone in my life must think I’m weird and not fun. How is it possible to be so irresponsible yet still not fun?

Hovering over the toilet, zipping up my pants, I wondered if this was the moment when reality would break, and I’d become fully insane. What if the paranoia never subsided?

I needed a bed. I needed to get under the covers and cry alone. But I couldn’t go home to be alone because my parents were at home and my dad probably needed something like a walk or another blanket or help standing up. And meanwhile, I was glued to this restaurant booth, gaging on my $14 blue corn taco.

I skulked quietly back to the table without making eye contact with the waiter. Rock apologized for “drugging you within an inch of your life.” I told her we needed to sit in a dark movie theater. Or we needed to go to her apartment. Or the emergency room, which is funny because my dad always wants to go to the emergency room. At least once a day, but we don’t let him.

“You don’t need to go to the emergency room,” Rock told me.

I imagined her calling my parents from Cornell West, telling them, “She’s fine, they’re just giving her some benzos and some fluids,” and how terrified and confused my dad would be—how exhausted my mom would feel. I had supposedly come home to New York to help.

Something was wrong with the payment method linked to my Uber account, so Rock had to call us a cab back to her apartment and pay for it. I spent the 30-minute cab ride in an anxious loop. Sometimes I thought I was going to die and sometimes I thought about my writing and how much it sucks.

About two months ago, I received an email from my long-term ex, who I’ve referred to in this newsletter as “X” (this among everything else I’ve ever written, makes me cringe now). In his email, X complained about the “cruel and unfair” narrative I had written about him and his “wife.”  He said he had to “protect” his “wife and child,” which enraged me. I wanted to write back “Lol, that’s not your child, you fucking loser” but I felt too ashamed and hurt to be so cavalier.

I received this email just before the lease was up for the sublet I’ve rented the last six months in Nuekolln. I spent all winter in that apartment and it came to feel like a home. Even its fabric moths are dear to me now—even the strange chemical smell a friend described as “that smell when you try to smoke cocaine.”

“Who tries to smoke cocaine?” I asked.

From the apartment balcony, I could see Tempelhoferfeld, the streetlamps lining the way to the horizon. I enjoyed the nights alone inside this apartment, curled up in the hard bed, watching Peep Show or cooking for myself, and feeling soothed. But after this fucking email, I lost my ability to self-soothe. The wound re-opened, and all these feelings of abandonment were present once again. I haven’t felt like anything is worth writing since. I haven’t known where to go to feel at home.

I’m embarrassed about what I put online and how I did it—that could be a whole other post. In the last weeks, I’ve returned to the content I wrote six months after the end of this relationship. Now the dialogue feels fake, the tone is snarky and resentful. I didn’t have an editor or publisher to legitimize the mess I created. (Not that I’ll stop posting and continuing to create it.) So many authors I’ve admired have said writing their memoirs nearly killed them. I get it now. A thought I’ve had over the last few years: there’s a thin line between survival and self-destruction. The edible, for example.

Sometimes it helps to remember what Anne Lamott wrote: “You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.” In my classes, I encourage students to adopt this fearless approach. But stoned out of my mind, any writing wisdom I’d ever tried to impart seemed completely absurd. I urge students to reveal more of themselves while privately, I’ve grown tired of feeling so exposed. I keep exposing myself in service of “emotional honesty” as Mary Karr calls it. But maybe it’s time to put it away.

“Put it back in your pants, you know?” I told Rock.

The cab climbed the Williamsburg Bridge, windows down letting in a soft, polluted breeze. I wanted my Berlin sublet. I wanted get in that hard bed, where I’d peacefully swat away the moths away from my laptop screen. But I had asked my other ex, Lefteris, to give the keys to a Ukrainian refugee. So, the Ukrainian had my bed now, as she should. And I said half-seriously to Rock, “Did I tell you I helped a refugee?” and then, “I was thinking, if I could write fiction I would.”

“I know same” Rock said. She rubbed my back (because I instructed her to). Outside of the safe environment Rock created for me in the taxi, New York felt both bullying and disappointing. The restaurants were always crowded, the waiters always asking if it was your first time there, threatening to explain the menu to you as if providing instructions for a colonoscopy.

Earlier that afternoon, before meeting Rock, I took my dad on a walk around the neighborhood, his body perpetually stooped to the right, laboriously weaving past tourists and impatient men in really nice sweatpants on break from their work at design firms or something. They were using their deep, authoritative voices to order mochas with oat milk and “just” half a Splenda “thank you so much.” They were annoyed by how slowly my dad and I moved up Sullivan Street. I could hear one man sighing in exasperation.

I stink-eyed a table full of kids in matching crop top-legging outfits, picking at a seafood tower outside The Dutch. I wanted to remind this myopic crowd of baby professionals and heiresses they were not immune to the indignities of aging etc. “They all look pleased with themselves” my dad said.

My parents and I are now the old neighborhood characters who appear out of place. Growing up in soho, I saw many anxious locals lose their minds. The hypochondriac who owned the copy store died young of cancer. A Portuguese woman with clown-like makeup used to wander the children’s playground screaming. And then there was the woman who would pick nearly empty coffee cups out of the trash and walk up and down Thompson Street sipping delicately from the second-hand lipstick-printed straw, muttering to herself. “Unbelievable, right?!” she’d ask if you mistakenly made eye contact. One day she was run over by a truck. She was gone. Just gone.

At Rock’s apartment, she gave me half a Xanax and I put my head between my legs, struggling to breathe. “It happens to all of us sometimes,” Rock’s boyfriend said sympathetically. I felt waves of stiff, freezing pain down my spine, and thought of how my dad suffers from perpetual cold. I could imagine what it was like to be in his body; to feel the indignity and confusion of living solely for temporary relief from pain, only vaguely aware of how you appear to others and rightfully suspicious you are putting them off.

“It’s just really hard to be home,” I told Rock. “Everything feels too intense here.”

“You’re just really stoned,” Rock said.

“But what if the problem is actually that I’m dying,” I replied.

“You’re not dying,” she said.

“You’re not dying, you’re just stoned.”

She played a meditation app for me. A female voice guided me through my panic. “I promise you this feeling will end,” the voice said, “your body literally cannot sustain this level of anxiety for very long.”

“What if my body is the exception? I asked.

But eventually the feeling did pass, and I took the subway home to my parents in Soho, tingling out from the high, desperate for their comfort. My mom made turkey meatballs that night. She changed my sheets. It was nice to be home.