When I was finishing my bachelor's, I was starting to look at maybe going to graduate school. SUNY Albany had a sociology program that looked appealing, and I had friends up there. For the first time in my life, I bought a set of airline tickets -- all by myself! with my own debit card! -- arranged for accommodations, and emailed my professors . One of my friends happened to have family on Long Island, so we bought some train tickets and made plans to bounce around Manhattan for a while before catching the LIRR.
About two weeks before I got on the plane, I had a nightmare. I dreamt that New York was obliterated. I vividly remember standing alone in the hollow canyon between skyscrapers, and looking up. There was a blinding flash of light and I woke in a dead panic.
As much as I think symbolism is a useful tool for self-exploration, I do not believe in literal, concrete prophetic dreams. But I could not shake the feeling of impending doom. I was going to go to New York City, and Death would detour on his way to Samara to get me, and eight million other people.
I have a colossal anxiety disorder, which was at that point undiagnosed. I also had a shitty childhood. I have many reasons to be critical of my parents, but one of the few that still makes me very angry was the later realization that my mother also has a colossal undiagnosed anxiety disorder, and instead of giving me support and sympathy, she outright raged at me whenever I showed any symptoms.
I tried to get help once in college, but I had to go through my parents, who were holding my insurance card hostage. My mother screamed at me that everyone feels this way, which is probably an accurate reflection of her worldview, and I just needed to suck it up. She eventually, resentfully, broke down and made me an appointment with a psychiatrist two miles from campus in a town with no useful public transportation. The psychiatrist spent about fifteen minutes not listening to anything I said, and sent me home with a sample box of Wellbutrin, which I threw away.
I walked around for two weeks, irrationally convinced that I was going to die in New York. I couldn't tell anyone. I couldn't even let anyone guess that anything was wrong. Terror, isolation, and shame are an insidious combination.
It was entirely possible to cancel my trip. Nothing in the dream suggested the danger would dog me outside of the city. I would have lost money, and not visited my friends, but that would've been the extent of the consequences. Oddly, it didn't occur to me that if it were only NYC at risk, I could have just canceled the Manhattan part of the trip and stayed in Albany. Panic and logic go together like napalm and ice cubes.
Turns out that when I think I'm going to die, what I actually do is go to class. Which was a little surprising, since at that point I was having such a problem with anxiety that I had casually incorporated "shake violently and dry heave into the sink for a while" into my morning routine, between "check email" and "brush teeth". I woke up in a dead panic every day because my alarm clock set me off, and one of my friends had taken to scratching at my dorm room door like a cat because knocking for some reason sent me into a sobbing meltdown.
All I could think of was an article I had read sometime in the late '90s, where some soldiers in a civil war -- I don't know which one, Bosnia, maybe? -- talked about a woman they saw crossing their street every day. She woke up every morning, dressed, did her hair and makeup, and walked to work. The soldiers had guns, and were very much on active duty; fighting could have broken out again at any moment. She just refused to let the chaos swallow up her entire life. She decided she wanted to keep running her shop, and she did.
I felt a little bit like that. I wanted to be in college. I wanted to see New York before it was wiped out. Anything that took out NYC in one fell swoop was going to take everything else sooner or later, and all humans die will someday no matter what.
And, to be frank, I am personally of very little consequence to the human race. I know that's going to bring people out of the woodwork going, "Noooo! You're important to me!" and that's great, but if I had a tsunami bearing down on my head, and a guardian angel granted me the chance to message exactly one person before I died, I would have no one to send it to. Everyone else would agonize over whether to contact their partner or their kids or their parents or their bestest friend in the whole wide world, but I'd be all 'nah, I'm not essential to any humans, and the rats can't read'.
The realization that you don't matter to the world in any meaningful way is devastating, but also freeing. If everything I do is met with the same indifference, then I might as well do as I like. I feel much the same way about being in pain all the time, and about masking up and wading into the indubitably plague-ridden subway.
So I went to my classes, and got on a plane to New York. And two decades later, I'm going to my classes, and penciling in dates for rehearsals and performances. If the world doesn't last that long, it's not going to matter. But if it does, I'm going to be sad and angry if I just lock myself away and rot, waiting for the end.
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