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I’m learning how to quilt now.

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I painted this for an illustration competition eight years ago. The theme was fairy tales. I picked the fabled unicorn hunt, because I had the urge to shred the modern interpretation of unicorns as being the sort of pink and fluffy thing that little girls are supposed to like. If you haven’t figured it out by the image alone: trigger warning.

Have you read the Once and Future King? There is a scene where a bunch of kids go out into the woods on a unicorn hunt, all skippy-happy and innocent, and then return covered in blood, dragging the mangled head of the unicorn behind them. It is the only honestly grisly rendition of a unicorn hunt I’ve ever read.

The basic premise of a unicorn hunt drips with awful sexual undertones. So a girl sits in the woods and waits for a unicorn to come along and fall asleep with its head in her lap. She’s supposed to be a virgin. I imagined that the huntsman would have suggested she strip her clothes because maybe her magical virginity would be more effective that way. Being naive enough to get lured into a unicorn-murder, she would have fallen for that, too.

Those who do poke into the unicorn myth tend to get all giggly and distracted by the animal with the Freudian object on its head that is sleeping with its head in her lap. Tee hee hee, look at the amusing metaphor. But what’s really creepy about the unicorn-hunt story is the huntsman. Not only is he out to kill this defenseless symbol of beauty, and not only is he about to do the deed right there on the lap of some naive young woman, but how did he get her to go along with this business to begin with? He sure as blazes didn’t tell her she was about to take a bath in unicorn blood. He didn’t tell her she’d be the one impaled if he missed, or that she might take a unicorn-horn to the eye as the dying animal flailed.

And sure as hell he didn’t tell her parents. Because they would know what he might do to her, alone in the woods, once her virginity was no longer necessary.

Yeah. I was squigged out by my own fascination with the subject matter, so I shoved this thing under the bed as soon as the paint dried. And I’m still squigged. Maybe even more so now that I can see my archetypes. There’s Emotion, realizing too late what she’s been talked into. There’s me, Reason, as the unicorn, asleep on the job and about to get ganked by memories of my own sexual coercion coming out of the Jungian shadows. It’s a painting of my own PTSD.

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This is the unfinished version of a watercolor piece I did a few years ago. I would show you the painted version, but it’s still in a box somewhere. All you’re missing is that the final painting is very dark, with the lantern just barely revealing the monster. Feel free to print it out and color it yourself.

I knew nothing about Jungian archetypes when I made this. My goal was to make a picture that told some self-contained story suitable for children’s picture books. It wasn’t meant to be personal, but it got personal in spite of myself.

For those of you not in the know, Jung arrived at pretty much the same conclusion that I have, which is that the mind can be divided into a cast of characters, or archetypes. I have yet to read more than the Wikipedia entry on Jung, but I tell you what: having the archetype framework in place made me immediately aware of where the problems in my mind were coming from, and gave me a way to start addressing those problems.

Anyway, archetypes are by definition fluid, but there is just enough cultural similarity between one person’s archetypes and the next that you could, say, look at the work of an artist who knew nothing about Jung and say, “look, there’s the Shadow archetype, and there’s the Child.”

More recently I’d been thinking of Emotion charging through the shadows of my mind with a flashlight and a toy sword and a paper hat. By the time that idea had sat around a while it turned into Emotion holding up a lamp, and leading me, Reason, through the dark. By the time I drew it I realized it was just this same image, recycled, only in this version Emotion is a little boy and I’m the unicorn. I think Emotion was trying to tell me that I needed to find her first if I wanted to face the monsters in my head.

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I haven’t done a whole lot of personal work over the years. But there was one time shortly after college when a teen in my online gaming group decided to confide in me that he was suicidal.

His family had been having all sorts of trouble. Financial issues, a pet that needed surgery, plus I don’t remember what all else. Bad stuff, and it just kept coming at his life like a god damned wrecking ball. I know at some point he and his family were living out of a motel, so we’re talking homelessness bad.

I spent that week compulsively hitting the refresh button on my computer, trying to be there for him. It was an awful burden to bear, but he’d picked me to confide in and I couldn’t abandon him.

When I started to wear thin I called up my mom to talk. My sister ended up on the phone telling me I was stupid to waste my time on some brat who just needed to get off of the computer. This, she had decided, after knowing only that he was suicidal and that he played the same game that I did.

This led to the single worst fight I’d ever had with my sister -- we hardly spoke for years after that. Anyway, I left that phone call in a worse state than I had been before.

Then came the suicide note.

It was posted to our gaming group’s message board, like a time-bomb not ten minutes old, in view of thirty-some people, most of whom were not currently online. I must have been the first to see it. I was at work. I was in tears, frantic, desperate.

There had been a Christmas gift-swap in the group. The kid had shared his address. I guess he wasn’t in the motel at that point. So I looked up his town, found the number for the police -- and then I stood there with the phone in my hand. I couldn’t make a god damned phone call to save someone’s life, because the terror of making a phone call held me there in agonizing, frozen paralysis.

I don’t know what I would have done if my boyfriend Chris hadn’t made that call. But he did. The police went to the kid’s house. He was still alive.

His parents were finally clued in to his distressed state, and he got some help.

I moved in with Chris, and then shortly before I married him I painted the first draft of this thing.

And I continued to live with that same social anxiety that prevented me from picking up the phone. The same anxiety that had put me in the pit of depression so many times, and had made me suicidal once, too.

So when I painted this -- it’s still not finished, by the way, despite three attempts -- I was thinking of what it takes to pull someone back from the edge of suicide. Because that’s what’s at the bottom of the pit. And I was thinking of myself as the rescuer, and how dangerous it was to be that rescuer, because you have to go down in that pit, too, and if you aren’t lucky it’ll be both of you will be stuck there in depression.

But I’ve also been the one who needed rescue. Only I had to rescue myself because I couldn’t talk about it, because, like making that phone call, talking about it was too terrifying to go through with.

I know that pit well.

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So a couple of weeks ago, when I had a string of days where the anxiety bear was rampaging in my mind, I was trying and trying to make it stop by watching my own emotional state, by being mindful. It wasn’t really working. I had a constant knot in my back. I couldn’t focus, because every overdue library book and toilet-paper shortage was an enemy in the eyes of the bear. And every noise of fear or despair from Emotion was an enemy for the bear to chase, too.

But noticing this, and choosing to be non-judgmental in my observation, kept the anxiety-causing-more-anxiety feedback loop from escalating further.

And by observing my own emotional state, I also saw myself heading into depression. Usually when I get depressed, I only notice after I’m there -- or have been there for quite some time.

This time I saw the pit open up in the floor, and I saw Emotion’s reaction to it: that there was nowhere else safe to hide in the living-room of my mind any more, because of the damn bear. Depression looked like a refuge. I could take a break from all of the fear down in that dark pit.

I’m not saying that depression-sufferers should ever be treated as if their depression is a choice. Because usually it’s not. But just this once, I saw it coming, and just this once with my mishmash of exercise and mindfulness and self-compassion and metaphors I was able to stop myself from going there, even though it meant Emotion had to endure more time sealed in a room with an angry bear.

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Eh. This isn’t my best drawing. But it’ll have to do for now. And I choose to be indifferent to my displeasure with my drawing.

You don’t get to decide how you feel about things. But you do get to decide how you feel about how you feel.

This is another tidbit that I’ve more or less wandered to on my own and then had confirmed by the book Come As You Are by Emily Nagoski. And it really is brilliant. To put it another way you can’t decide not to be angry or sad or whatever, but you can step back from that emotion and name it, and then you can choose to be mad about the fact that you are mad, or you can choose to be okay with yourself being mad. And guess which option is healthier?

How you feel about how you feel is a meta-emotion, and it seems there is some research out there showing that those who are the most emotionally stable are those who are the most non-judgmental in their meta emotions. Meaning they observe their own thoughts and emotions without being critical of those thoughts and emotions. They acknowledge their emotions and allow them to exist. Mindfulness.

I long ago threw out perfectionism as a good quality, because I could see it was a barrier to finishing creative projects. But I couldn’t see how deep the perfectionism went in myself, or how damaging it really was. It hid inside of me, making me critical of my own emotional states. Ultimately it made me hate myself, in particular when I was stressed. Some external thing would set off my anxiety bear, the bear would chase Emotion. The more Emotion screamed and ran, the more the bear saw her as the threat . . . And the more I would hate myself for being crippled with this unnamed inner turmoil. And around and around the cycle went.

I finally got to watch this cycle unfold from a mindful perspective. Over several days my anxiety stayed at a high level. And although it was distinctly not enjoyable, I found the experience to be far more tolerable from a mindful perspective in which I stood back and acknowledged that, yup, I was having anxiety, and yup, I was angry that I was having anxiety, and oh yup indeed, I was really scared that it wasn’t ever going to stop.

And then things got interesting before they got better, but that will have to wait until tomorrow.

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So this is what the future looks like. I have a bear in my mind, just like everybody else. Only thanks to PTSD mine is a little less tame. I’ve been living with the bear for most of my life, only I didn’t know it, and when you don’t know you’re living with a bear it’s hard to live well with the bear. So, that’s what we’re learning to do now. Emotion is practicing not being afraid, and I’m running around with a dustpan and broom and sofa-mending tools. There’s still a bear, and that’s okay.

We’re feeling pretty good about this right now.

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Last night I tried clonazepam for the first time. It’s an anti-anxiety medication that you take on an as-needed basis, and it comes with giant warnings and a terrifying list of side-effects. Among other things it’s habit-forming, and when you stop taking it, you can get hit pretty hard with -- you guessed it -- anxiety.

This may make you wonder why anyone would want to take it, since it effectively just postpones the inevitable. From my point of view, it would allow me to choose when and where my anxiety happens. I could in theory shut it off to endure volunteering at my child’s school, and then cope with the anxiety on the weekend.

Anyway, I tried the clonazepam last night not because I was having any record-breaking levels of anxiety, but because I wanted to experience the side-effects in a safe setting with my husband on hand. And the results were encouraging. What little anxiety I had evaporated. I felt very mildly loose, like I’d had a half a glass of wine. It didn’t make me sleepy, or feel different in any other way. I had a nice cuddle with Chris and went to sleep next to him without any insomnia -- and that’s a pretty big thing for me, because even the mirtazapine that I’m still taking doesn’t stop me from getting insomnia when attempting to sleep next to someone who is also attempting to sleep. It’s a social anxiety thing: I can’t stop wondering if I’m keeping the other person awake.

To put it in internet slang, the clonazepam allowed me to give zero fucks. That’s not normally something I am capable of doing.

In the pantheon of my mind, the clonazepam put my fight-or-flight bear to sleep and muted the negative self-talk that comes from my super-ego. Emotion and I (Reason) remained our normal selves.

I look forward to having this medication as a backup for when all else fails, or in the event that I have a bad spell of anxiety when I urgently need to be fully functional.

There was a follow-up anxiety waiting for me this morning. I don’t know if the single dose of the clonazepam caused it, or if it was an anxiety spike that I would have had regardless. I was tempted to take more of the clonazepam to deal with it. But. . . my priority is to learn how to manage my anxiety without drugs, and I can’t do that if I throw on a medicine band-aid on every emotional boo-boo. So I kicked the soccer ball instead. And within five minutes the anxiety let up a bit. I had a productive morning, I kicked the ball around a bit more at the playground, and the anxiety has left me alone.

Now I just need to wait for the caffeine withdrawal to run its course so I can be properly be giddy over this.

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I averted a panic attack yesterday. The bear was in full rampage in my mind because of my big scary to-do list. But this time I saw that desperately trying to accomplish those to-do items was the equivalent of Emotion running away from the bear. If she runs, the bear chases, and that’s a panic attack. Emotion has had quite enough of that, so she held her ground, and I embarked on a day of doing nothing.

At that point I had to face an avalanche of negative thinking: that I was lazy or broken for doing nothing, that I should be sledding with my daughter, not just walking with her in the snow, that I should be doing other things, not napping. . . I addressed each negative thought as it came, and the potential to panic passed.

I never nap, but I slept for three hours, and had almost no anxiety after.

I would be more excited about this all, but I think the second cup of coffee contributed to my mental state yesterday, so now I’m finally eliminating the caffeine variable. I’m about to take my third nap in three days.

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Drawing my different aspects has been key to understanding myself. Everything in here is a part of me, and like it or not, there are no monsters. There is no part of me that I can defeat or banish. The bear, my fight/flight/freeze mechanism, may be problematically over-excited -- that’s PTSD at work -- but he’s still a part of me, and always was.

I need to understand my bear. I need to stop pretending that he doesn’t exist, and figure out how we can fairly coexist.

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Every time I get out from the therapist’s office, I sit in the car and shake. It’s hilarious. My body thinks I’ve just escaped from a bear, even though all I did was have a couple of productive, cheerful conversations with the receptionist and the physician’s assistant. It’s no wonder people are surprised when I tell them I have social anxiety.

Okay, phew. Shaking is good. That’s the stress moving through me and going away. I predict I’ll be anxiety-free for a few hours now. My going theory is that when I identify things that upset me and let them upset me properly, then my body doesn’t have unresolved emotions sitting around to fuel the anxiety. In order to test this theory, I’ve given myself permission to feel all the feels whenever they come along. This has resulted in a roller-coaster ride through alternating waves of anxiety, tears, and hey-I’m-great!

So! I talked it all over with the physician’s assistant. She is super excited that I am “figuring this all out for myself,” and at my ability to use a panic attack and high anxiety levels as an opportunity to gather data and find solutions. She loved that I’m thinking of myself as a science project. I love it, too.

I was very torn on what I wanted out of that appointment. At my worst moments these past weeks I’ve craved some new drug to make the awfulness just stop. I was even tempted to use alcohol -- but no, I’m emphatically not going there.

Then at my better moments I’ve been eager to keep going with the current experiment. After all, even though I’ve been having near-daily anxiety, it has been decreasing in intensity -- and without this anxiety, I wouldn’t be learning about how to deal with the anxiety. And that’s what I need in the long run: skills to manage the anxiety on my own, without drugs.

So, I laid this out in front of the physician’s assistant, and she suggested what I thought she might: continue on my current dosage of the mirtazapine, and add to that a second prescription, something that I can use as a short-term fix in the event of future panic attacks. After all, as much as I am determined to science the shit out of this, there may be times when my need to be functional trumps my need to find a long-term solution.

In the mean time, here’s a picture of what happens in my head when I’m having a panic attack. The bear is my flight/fight/freeze response, and he is on a rampage. Emotion is freaked out by the bear. And the bear is getting freaked out by Emotion. So around and around the sofa they go, and it’s all I can do to keep the furniture from getting trashed.

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I knew from what I had read that therapy involves relapses. Well, it happened. The antidepressant I’d been taking either lost its effectiveness, or . . .I don’t know. The anxiety-bear came back, and adjusting the dosage did nothing.

It was a good experiment. As I had hoped I would, I got to experience two months of being normal. Now I have a benchmark against which to compare my mood.

The downside of having that benchmark, though, is that anxiety now feels remarkably external. I can no longer ignore it. It feels like my torso is being squeezed, my spine is being pinched -- and worst, it feels like I’m trapped in my body with this thing that’s going wrong, and layered on this is the dread that it’s never, ever going to stop.

But it does stop. These weeks have been an opportunity for me to explore what triggers the anxiety, what keeps it going, and especially what shuts it off.

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If you've guessed that you can climb across monkey bars like a ladder, you’re right!

Take a step. Reach forward. Repeat. Repeat.

Here’s where you’ll run into trouble, though. When you put too much distance between your hands and your feet, it’ll take more effort from your torso muscles to keep your feet pushed up against the bars. Let loose that pressure from your feet, and your feet will fall off, and you’ll be back to hanging from your hands. Your body will in all likelihood hang in more of a U shape than the straight line Emotion is in, and that’s totally fine. Emotion is showing off her badass core strength. Don’t mind her.

You can also totally make this easier for yourself by using your heels as hooks to hang from, instead of pushing with your feet. Or use the tops of your feet as hooks. Or hook your whole lower leg over. You can totally cross the monkey bars with hooking your feet or legs at every step.

Whichever method of keeping your feet up that you choose, you will need three points of contact with the bars at all times to keep yourself from flapping around like a barn door in the wind. In other words, two feet and one hand on at all times, or two hands and one foot.

And with that, you can tootle your sloth-like way across the monkey bars, nice ‘n’ easy.

And then if you like this you can tootle right on in to your local climbing gym, because this is totally how climbers do it

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Still hanging by your heels and hands from the monkey bars? Good! Now I bet you want to get across the lava. Great. So. Push against the bar with the bottoms of your feet. Go on. Just keep hanging from your arms. Yes, you want to add tension to your arms so that instead of hanging down you are hanging sideways, and yes, it sounds ridiculous to think you would add more pressure to your already-overburdened forearm muscles and those muscles in your torso that aren’t used to being used. But think of it this way: you aren’t using your “pull-up” muscles. Your arms are still straight, which is efficient. You are pushing with the big meaty parts of your legs that you use to stand up, which is also efficient.

Do this ridiculous thing and you’ll be standing perpendicular to gravity. Isn’t that cool?

I bet you can see what I’m getting at, and it has something to do with monkey bars being shaped like a ladder.

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Listen up pancake-arms! If you are trying to get across monkey bars using only your arms, not only are you wasting some perfectly good muscles, but you are in danger of torquing your grip loose.

(”Torquing.” Now there’s a word. Those torquing pancake-flippers!)

So here’s what you do. I know it’s hard when you aren’t used to it, but get your feet up. Hook your heels over a bar. Good, now take a rest. You heard me -- it’s a lot of work getting up there, but do it anyway, and just ignore the fact that your brain is screaming “WTF I’m going to fall on my head!”

Okay, that’s a fair point. If you’re really worried about falling on your head then have someone else stand under your head to spot you. But do understand that “spotting” is not the same as “catching.” Their job, should you unexpectedly fall down, is to delay just the end of you that has a brain. So that, you know, the other end hits the ground first. It will still hurt but you’ll recover.

Anyway with or without a buddy, get those heels up. Then just hang there for a while as limp as you can manage. Arms straight -- you’re hanging, not pulling. Relax every other part of yourself that you can, even if you have to get into a yelling match with your brain to do it.

If that’s too scary, you can use your knees instead. Go on, it’ll remind you of being a kid.

Okay. So now you’re using some of the muscles in your torso to make some tension down through your legs -- that’s what’s keeping your heels in place -- and you’re using the muscles in your forearms to turn your fingers into hooks. And check out how cool that is! You don’t need to squeeze the daylights out of that bar to stay in place. You don’t even need your thumb. Your hands are stronger than you know, and without the swinging of your body threatening to torque your grip loose, you can stay in place until you know you are getting tired, at which point you can choose to safely and carefully get down.

Congratulations! This is how rock-climbers rest. Stay tuned tomorrow to learn how to get across the hot lava.

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Monkey bar shenanigans are fun, and we’ll get back to that tomorrow. But the real reason I’m tossing those out there are to hide the fact that I’m currently playing anxiety whack-a-mole.

Today’s anxiety features recoiling from all commitments and all people and regretting that I ever made anything about myself public, ever, up to and including including sharing my thoughts with friends and family. Days like today make me want to hide everything about myself that stands out, because anything that stands out can’t possibly be anything good. I want to be hidden in a crowd, unconnected to anyone. I want to be anonymous.

This is irrational. I haven’t over-committed myself to anything. I can’t fix this by backing out of commitments or running away from friendships. I won’t live like that. So I need to figure out what specifically is scaring me and deal with it.

Back when I was making games, I wasn’t the one who took the big risks on flashy new things that were prone to breaking and resulted in working evenings and weekends. I made the reliable dungeons, the B dungeons. My boss liked it that I could always be counted on to make predictable work on time and on budget, and I took such pride in being that reliable team workhorse.

I am afraid that I will be seen as flaky. And I do absolutely have days on which I am flaky, and I habitually and automatically hide it from everyone when I am having these days. I am so afraid of being seen as unreliable that I have behaved in sudden spurts of head-turning weirdness. I have fled friendships in shame.

This hiding and retreating has got to stop. I am furious at myself for being like this.

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Emotion wants to show you the right way to use monkey bars.

Step one: pretend there’s a bear on the ground. Or maybe the ground is lava.

And for some reason you can’t climb on top of the bars, and the sides of the monkey bars are on fire, and Emotion is giving me stink-eye for making the playground unsafe. Sorry Emotion. No more bears.

So do you swing? Hah! You are a grown-up, you say. Not only would you have to hold your feet up so that they don’t drag, but in the last decades you’ve montage-trained the relevant muscles in the delicate art of flipping pancakes, and those highly-trained pancake-making muscles are now laughing at you. You’ll dangle there by one arm, feeling your grip slip, while you fail to do a one-armed pull-up to reach the next bar, which as it turns out is just one evil inch too far to reach. So you have to swing to propel yourself forward, which is crazy, because as soon as you get a little twisting motion in there, it’ll torque your spatula-grip right off the bar you are so precariously clinging to, and into the not-so-bear-infested-lava you’ll go.

So what do you do to prevent your horrible playground death? Stay tuned.