stop-gasp measure

While driving up Divisadero this morning, something happened to me that hasn’t happened in a good long while: I had a reeling, dizzying sensation and was suddenly out of breath.

Huh, weird, I thought. That felt like a panic attack.

No, it wasn’t a panic attack, because I’m done with those. But it was definitely claustrophobia, and though my car is a bit small, it wasn’t the physical kind.

Mentally, I have not been taking very good care of myself. Although I’m glad I read Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, grief and loss are not things I should be mulling over right now. I say “right now” because I haven’t created anything lately, aside from a few photographs, and thus there is no balance.

Sometimes I feel like the world is getting too small, like there’s nowhere I can go where I won’t be talked to, asked for directions, poked or prodded in some way. This is a theme I have written about here many times over the past eight years, and I have no one to blame but myself for its recurrence.  It’s a foolish feeling, I realize; I can easily go wherever I please, for the most part, and do whatever I want.  Yet consistently I have this feeling of being trapped by circumstance, by time or money or lack thereof, by inevitability.

And they grow, those sickly brambles of circular thought, choking off sunlight.  I want to write, but on the subject of suffocating, I have only gasps.