Lailaps and the Teumesian Fox
On the way back from a totally pointless meeting with a financial "advisor" who wanted to charge me $500 a year to tell me how to spend my money, I had a mini-revelation:
This panic attack business isn't sudden or unexpected at all. It's tied to all the stress that I'm feeling due to dissatisfaction at work, worry about my citizenship, unhappiness about my life in the US, concern about money, inability to maintain a relationship and a host of other things that are pretty substantial. When you couple those things with my almost oppressive introversion, I start to buckle under the weight of handling these things alone, and my brain acts up.
So why do I find it difficult to see a panic attack as an extension of my lifestyle, and not as a 'lightening bolt out of a clear blue sky'?
The fault, dear Brutus, lies not in the stars, but in ourselves: I like to think of myself as a tough guy. Not tough as in I'll walk into a bar and kick your ass if you look at me funny. No, tough as in I-can-take-life's-kickin'-(loneliness, disappointment, rejection, uncertainty and despair)-and keep-on-tickin'. I've had to be, from a bad relationship with my parents, growing up to an adulthood marked by a lot of turmoil. Part of the problem is that showing weakness makes me feel like even more of a fuck-up. Even admitting it to myself is deeply troubling, which, in turn, fuels my anxiety. It's the way I grew up: show weakness and someone will use it against you-usually people you're close to. I'm wired that way and my instinct is to get angry at myself if I don't feel well. Deeply pathological but it's who I am: someone with lots of issues.
Secondly, admitting that part of my struggle is tied to choices I've made to do things my way casts major aspersions on major decisions I've made during the course of my life. In other words, if I've defined my success by rebelling against the rules and norms that parents and society stuck in my head, all those years ago, then admitting that this rebellion is the source of my problems, is tantamount to saying that my sole source of pride and achievement was a mistake and should never have happened. Just typing this is giving me a stomach ache.
Lastly, and this is important: problems are something we all have in common. What raises them above the level of tolerance (into the realm of the panic attack, you could say) is more than that. It has to be since I can't imagine that I have more problems than anyone else. The simple fact of the matter is that the convergence of these problems also serves to confirm to me, something that I've always felt in private but have always fought in public AND in private: that I am, without mincing words, a fuck-up. Sure, there's no scientific evidence of this, but since this is something I've felt as long back as I can go, it's real to ME.
Sure, I hate my mother and resent my father and all the other cliches that psycotherapy introduces (except that I've probably saved $9000) but the other side of the coin, which I haven't been able to face and which is probably the source of all this bullshit (and endless soliloquay, I might add) is that I just can't deal with the motherfuckin' pressure. Maybe my parent weren't supportive enough, maybe I'm missing a genome or maybe I've been behaviorally reinforced to accept failure as something inevitable in my life, the bottom line is I can't fucking hack it and I can't fucking admit to myself that I can't fucking hack it. All I can do is freeze at the mounting pressure and wait it out, all the time believing that a breakdown like this can only have happened because I am what I've always though I am: a fuck-up.
It's not true, of course, I'm not any more of a fuck-up than any of you. But it's like hitting the gas and not getting the power you expect which convinces you that the car you're driving must be a piece of shit. Caught between a fight to show that I can compete as a race car and a semi-reality that I'm a plain old Ford Taurus, the engine just...decided...to...stall.
There's a tale from Greek mythology about a tireless fox, known as the Teumesian Fox, which had been sent to punish the descendants of the house of Kadmos. An Athenian named Kephalos, had accidentally killed his wife and had been purified of the homicide by the Kadmeans. To repay them, he set about to catch the Teumesian Fox with his hound, Lailaps, "from whom no prey had ever escaped". For days and days, the Kephalos and his hound chased the fox with neither gaining an advantage to the point that the Gods on Olympus couldn't bear to witness their savage pursuit "while mortals shuddered with great fear".
In the end, the Gods took pity on them and turned Kephalos, Lailaps and the Fox into stone.
This panic attack business isn't sudden or unexpected at all. It's tied to all the stress that I'm feeling due to dissatisfaction at work, worry about my citizenship, unhappiness about my life in the US, concern about money, inability to maintain a relationship and a host of other things that are pretty substantial. When you couple those things with my almost oppressive introversion, I start to buckle under the weight of handling these things alone, and my brain acts up.
So why do I find it difficult to see a panic attack as an extension of my lifestyle, and not as a 'lightening bolt out of a clear blue sky'?
The fault, dear Brutus, lies not in the stars, but in ourselves: I like to think of myself as a tough guy. Not tough as in I'll walk into a bar and kick your ass if you look at me funny. No, tough as in I-can-take-life's-kickin'-(loneliness, disappointment, rejection, uncertainty and despair)-and keep-on-tickin'. I've had to be, from a bad relationship with my parents, growing up to an adulthood marked by a lot of turmoil. Part of the problem is that showing weakness makes me feel like even more of a fuck-up. Even admitting it to myself is deeply troubling, which, in turn, fuels my anxiety. It's the way I grew up: show weakness and someone will use it against you-usually people you're close to. I'm wired that way and my instinct is to get angry at myself if I don't feel well. Deeply pathological but it's who I am: someone with lots of issues.
Secondly, admitting that part of my struggle is tied to choices I've made to do things my way casts major aspersions on major decisions I've made during the course of my life. In other words, if I've defined my success by rebelling against the rules and norms that parents and society stuck in my head, all those years ago, then admitting that this rebellion is the source of my problems, is tantamount to saying that my sole source of pride and achievement was a mistake and should never have happened. Just typing this is giving me a stomach ache.
Lastly, and this is important: problems are something we all have in common. What raises them above the level of tolerance (into the realm of the panic attack, you could say) is more than that. It has to be since I can't imagine that I have more problems than anyone else. The simple fact of the matter is that the convergence of these problems also serves to confirm to me, something that I've always felt in private but have always fought in public AND in private: that I am, without mincing words, a fuck-up. Sure, there's no scientific evidence of this, but since this is something I've felt as long back as I can go, it's real to ME.
Sure, I hate my mother and resent my father and all the other cliches that psycotherapy introduces (except that I've probably saved $9000) but the other side of the coin, which I haven't been able to face and which is probably the source of all this bullshit (and endless soliloquay, I might add) is that I just can't deal with the motherfuckin' pressure. Maybe my parent weren't supportive enough, maybe I'm missing a genome or maybe I've been behaviorally reinforced to accept failure as something inevitable in my life, the bottom line is I can't fucking hack it and I can't fucking admit to myself that I can't fucking hack it. All I can do is freeze at the mounting pressure and wait it out, all the time believing that a breakdown like this can only have happened because I am what I've always though I am: a fuck-up.
It's not true, of course, I'm not any more of a fuck-up than any of you. But it's like hitting the gas and not getting the power you expect which convinces you that the car you're driving must be a piece of shit. Caught between a fight to show that I can compete as a race car and a semi-reality that I'm a plain old Ford Taurus, the engine just...decided...to...stall.
There's a tale from Greek mythology about a tireless fox, known as the Teumesian Fox, which had been sent to punish the descendants of the house of Kadmos. An Athenian named Kephalos, had accidentally killed his wife and had been purified of the homicide by the Kadmeans. To repay them, he set about to catch the Teumesian Fox with his hound, Lailaps, "from whom no prey had ever escaped". For days and days, the Kephalos and his hound chased the fox with neither gaining an advantage to the point that the Gods on Olympus couldn't bear to witness their savage pursuit "while mortals shuddered with great fear".
In the end, the Gods took pity on them and turned Kephalos, Lailaps and the Fox into stone.
posted by Basil Epicurus at 4:51 PM
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