In Praise of Panic

Abstract

In Praise of Panic Stephanie Danler (bio) During graduate school, one of my professors periodically fell asleep at his desk. He also took calls mid-lecture and excused himself to the hallway to have conversations with his fiancée about their upcoming travel. He was annoyed when a student wanted to talk about racism in Absalom, Absalom!, and after making us read Swann's Way, the first volume of Proust's In Search of Lost Time, we spent a total of twenty minutes talking about it. Still, in spite of his erratic tendencies, the reading list was worth the price of admission. His class on "Shadow Narration"—a study of parallelism, repetition, and story development outside of traditional plot—introduced me to Kojo Laing, César Aira, Thomas Bernhard. It ended up being the most important course I took in my MFA for two reasons. First, he had us read William Gass's "In the Heart of the Heart of the Country" and then, in the style of that magnificent story, had us do a writing exercise, which became the beginning of my first novel. The second reason is he gave a salient piece of craft advice amid a sea of well-intentioned cheerleading: "You want advice on how to become a writer? Marry someone rich." [End Page 743] ________ Back in the spring of 2022, my anxiety got to the point that I couldn't even grocery shop. We were supposed to be out of a pandemic, and nothing in my life was where I left it. I had an eighteen-month-old and a three-year-old. I was working on four scripts at the same time, three pilots and one feature. It made progress on my third book erratic and demoralizing. Every time the glass doors of Whole Foods slid open, I stared into an abyss of air-conditioned, scentless despair. Somewhere between the waste and environmental devastation—the homogeneity of the produce, the plastic balloons of snacks, the prices—my heart rate soared. I sometimes bit back tears while comparing brands of milk. On occasion I abandoned a full cart and drove myself home, crying without reason. Once, while a cashier waited for me to pay, I apologized and ran out of the store. From that day forward, my husband took over the grocery shopping. I decided it was time I tried an SSRI. I had steadfastly refused them since they were first mentioned to me by a psychiatrist at sixteen. What provoked a change of heart? There are people depending on me. My children were having the kind of rich, raucous childhood I craved when I was small. Yet I found myself unable to join them in the sunlight. Or as Wisława Szymborska puts it in her gorgeous poem "Life While-You-Wait," I felt "ill-prepared for the privilege of living." I had tried different therapies; I quit drinking and social media; I put my phone in the other room while I slept. I exercised, I walked around the Silver Lake Reservoir humming mantras about self-compassion. Nothing worked. It seemed time to try these pills that had helped so many of my friends because I was spent otherwise. Sleeping on Prozac was the sleep of the dead—leaden, dreamy, unagitated. When I got up in the middle of the night to pee, I wasn't tiptoeing around ruminative landmines (stupid things I'd [End Page 744] said in interviews, at parties, writing I wish I had polished one more time, financial precarity, my mother's health and finances, time wasted, and so on). Instead, all the shadows in the room were soft, and I sat on the toilet and thought nothing. It was the most profound drug experience of my life. Uncanny, to be living in my body (there is my face in the mirror, there is my coffee, there are the books) without the ticker of self-loathing. I felt like a freshly baked muffin, puffed with contentment. I didn't think about my lists when my lists weren't in front of me. I didn't suffer envy in friends' beautiful houses, at the news of someone else's book...