If you haven’t listened Part 1 yet, go ahead and do that first, HERE.
______________________________
While my memories from the night of the panic attack are sparse, the ones from the following morning are vividly clear.
I woke up thinking I had Covid. I felt like I had been hit by a truck ten times over in my sleep.
I tried to shake it off and get ready for work, but my body made it very clear that that wasn’t going to happen. Calling in sick felt humiliating and unprofessional (although it is neither of those things, and I would never make anyone else feel that way).
But I did it. I relayed detailed notes for an important delivery that afternoon. I profusely apologized. I hung up the phone.
Before going back to sleep, I stumbled to the kitchen to grab some water. Why I didn’t go to the bathroom like I often do, I don’t know. That day, my feet carried me to the kitchen.
I thought about making coffee and then decided against it. I saw the dishes in my sink and decided to wash some. For what reason, I don’t know.
While sorting through the sink to discern which dishes would go in the dishwasher and which would be hand-washed, I came across one of my favorite mugs.
And I broke it. I somehow broke my mug while pulling it out of the sink.
My perfect, “pretty girl avenue”, gorgeous glass mug with a bronze/gold Barbie dream house on the front, and a pink handle. The mug I drank out of nearly every day from my waterfront patio when I lived in San Diego.
Broken. Gone.
I love my mugs. They’re the first thing I unpacked in both my New York and San Diego apartments. I dream of displaying them on a big, elaborate shelf one day. I should have been devastated that this mug was broken.
But I wasn’t, I was too tired to be devastated. I haphazardly placed the broken pieces of the mug on my counter and went back to bed.
I woke up at noon feeling much better, even better than I felt the day before, pre - panic attack.
In fact, I felt better than I’d felt in a long time. I felt so good that I now understood just how far down in the trenches I’d been.
When I tried my first dose of Lexapro years prior, I remember saying to my psychiatrist, “Wow, I had no idea that everyone wasn’t miserable all the time! I thought everyone woke up feeling horrible and trying to get through the day, and just wanting to die inside all the time, and that no one talked about it. I thought that was normal. This is so great!”
10mg of Lexapro was all it took to realize just how depressed I was.
(The psychiatrist upped my dose after that session, and then later added in my best buddy welbutrin. The golden trio was complete. Thank God for medicine.)
When we think about feeling ‘better’, we often imagine a certain stillness; waves, sunsets, and the gentle breeze of it all.
But sometimes when really good things happen, people get anxious – people like me.
I’ll never know exactly what triggered that panic attack, but my working theory is that a lot of good things happened in a relatively short amount of time after a truly shitty year, and my brain couldn’t compute it all.
It’s like my whole being literally short-circuited from the radical shift from A Series of Unfortunate Events to “girl who is going to be okay.”
So there I am, feeling better, feeling rested. I get out of bed and decide to go for a walk.
I walk out of my bedroom and immediately spot the broken mug.
And now that I’m feeling better, I have the energy to be sad that it’s broken.
I’m about to do what I usually do with broken glass, and put it in a plastic bag with a piece of paper taped on top that says “broken broken broken broken” so that no one gets hurt in my recycling room.
But as I go to do that, I’m drawn in by how the mug has broken, and also not broken.
It’s far easier to explain through the videos and photos I took that day.
CLICK HERE to see!
So it was just one layer. I thought it was just a thick piece of glass. But now that it broke, there’s this inner part that’s whole outside of the glass. And now it exists on its own, because it broke away from the outer shell part. How does something break so perfectly? That’s insane to me.
It’s all still pretty insane to me.
You have to remember that at the time that this is all happening, I don’t have the fifty-foot view. I don’t have the gifts of hindsight and a really wide lens.
I’m just a girl marveling at her broken yet beautiful mug.
In that moment, I was immediately reminded of the Japanese art of kintsugi, which involves repairing broken pottery with gold lacquer to highlight the cracks instead of hiding them.
A week later, when I told my therapist about this whole ordeal, she asked if I had seen K-POP Demon Hunters, the widely acclaimed, academy award winning (!!!!!) animated feature film.
I immediately responded, “We broke into a million pieces, and we can’t go back/ But now we’re seeing all the beauty in the broken glass?”
She smiled and nodded.
Here I was, literally seeing beauty in the broken glass.
This precious thing I was trying to hold onto broke in an inexplicably beautiful way.
It’s not what I planned. It’s not what I wanted.
But here I was with my own tangible proof of the beauty in broken things, right when I needed it most. Right after the most painful chapters of my life so far.
Here I was, on my way to my broken hallelujah.
Wondering how we’re only halfway through?
We’re on the way to the broken hallelujah, but not there just yet.
Subscribe so that you don’t miss Part III!
How To Connect With Me
Readmy bookThe Start of It All
Download my workbook, Authentic by Alexa
How to Support My Work
Become a Paid Subscriber| Leave A Tip
