Fern Frost, Shape-Shifting, and Meaning-Making
My medical anxiety helps me get things done. Except when it doesn’t. Usually it’s a kind of hum at the back of my mind, a soundtrack urging me to make a list, to do the next item on the list. It has helped me cross off many items, on many lists, throughout my life.
But sometimes, the hum becomes so loud and distracting that I can’t focus. My thoughts cloud like a window pressed by humidity—or they crystalize and multiply rapidly, like fern frost crawling across glass, intricate but fleeting. The lists become overwhelming, and decision-making becomes less possible.
At other, various times in my life, my body has been so precious with my anxiety that I’ve held on to it for months, hoarding it within my nervous system. When I’m too busy for the anxiety, with too many lists that have too many action items with too much importance to be paying attention to its thrum, my body houses it deep within me until my body becomes too small to contain it.
The anxiety bursts forth in waves of wholly unreasonable, engulfing panic and for minutes that seem like hours, I believe I’m going to die, or that I am dying, right in that moment.
The first time I experienced this overwhelming panic was in graduate school, but alone in my living room. There was no particular trigger. I felt dread, impending doom, like the end was imminent. I watched an analog clock’s second hand jerk and cycle through the numbers, repeating to myself: you’re alive, you’ve survived another minute. And eventually, I had survived a series of minutes, and within an hour the panic was gone, leaving behind its attendant exhaustion, confusion, and grief.
Sometimes persistent anxiety produces a grief that’s unmanageable, and that’s depression. The second time I experienced depression was postpartum, after the birth of my first daughter. Of course, I didn’t recognize my Depressed Self until she was suddenly gone: my infant daughter smiled at me and all at once I felt recognizable, ardent love. The love felt like sun breaking through the clouds at sunrise: blinding. And when I could see again, I felt buoyed in a way that wasn’t possible literal seconds before.
The biology of the brain, the circuitry of the nervous system, the tyranny of hormones, are all weird, unfathomable things.
Medicine tells us that anxiety and a flight-or-fight response is the body’s natural way of encountering and responding to extreme stressors, and that constant triggering of this response—get out, avoid death—or, square up, and face death—takes its toll on the body. It pushes us further towards the body’s breakdown.
Of course, in a biological, scientific sense, I’ve been breaking down since the minute I was born: I’m never not dying. These cells grow older and become less efficient every day. In an existential sense, I am dying, we are all dying, because we are a part of the cycles we witness all around us, no greater than a plant or an animal that lacks the language to feel or express dread, and we lack any real control over that.
I lack any control over that; it’s a reminder that serves.
And not only that, I’m dying with an anxiety-producing paradox. On the one hand, a sudden, nausea-inducing realization, described by Jean-Paul Sartre’s character Antoine Roquentin, that this is all there is—contemporary society’s arbitrary rules and ambitions, its banal and sickening evils, the endless chases after knowledge or money or fame or sex or spiritual satisfaction that all conclude in the same vacuum of meaning. On the other hand, Mary Oliver’s beautiful, simple truth and charge: we have one wild and precious life—so what will we do with it, and why would we waste it?
What I’ve done with it is to write poems that embody this paradox and catalog its effects. Of course, I don’t write them while I’m living in the dark heart of the paradox—no writer that I’ve encountered has ever written poems worth publishing while they’re experiencing an all-encompassing bout of depression or surrounded by a hurricane of anxiety-inducing circumstances. This is evident from The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, and specifically, from her therapy notebooks therein. She was happiest when writing poems, but she couldn’t write those poems when her brain teemed with despair. “It is the hate, the paralyzing fear, that gets in my way and stops me,” she wrote. “Once that is worked clear of, I will flow. My life may at last get into my writing.” When one is stupefied by anxiety or benumbed by depression, acts like showering or eating can feel impossible, let alone picking up a pen to write about, and process, that impossibility. Fear and despair are antithetical to poem-writing.
Surviving fear and despair, however—even momentarily—makes poems possible. And necessary.
Poems come with quiet—as Wordsworth wrote, during moments of “emotion recollected in tranquility”—the despair must dissipate, but also its polar twin, elation, must be absent, too. Then, we can take a steady look at what we experienced and try to get it down, precisely and with care, on the page. We may, as Plath said, get our life into our writing—and look at it with clarity and honesty, even if what we’re writing is figment or fiction.
My poems are fabulist poems, which means they incorporate elements of the unnatural and magical alongside realism: in this way, through the shape-shifting mother-pig in my first book, or the characters of my second book, my conflicted Ordinary and Extraordinary Selves, who battle each other and send a household into chaos, I am able to more easily speak about my biological anxiety, my existential anxiety, and any resulting depression or despair that I’ve experienced over time.
I’m writing, as Simone de Beauvoir put it in The Second Sex, about “the passive object affected by fate… an-other [my emphasis]: I am not the one run over by a car. I am not the old woman the mirror shows me.”
It’s a hat-trick, a bait-and-switch, a craft-element sleight of hand that works, continues to work, when I need to express, as poet Nikky Finney termed it in a Writer’s Chronicle interview, “the hard to say thing and the beautiful thing.” In this way, I can create meaning out of the otherwise senseless chaos of my life. And when I show the fern frost tentacles of my anxiety to another mind—another mother-mind, another worker-bee mind, another despairing-mind— and they feel seen, and represented, and strangely comforted—that feels meaningful, too.
