I wake up Sunday morning, just past 2 AM. Careful what you wish for is the first, forceful thought that occurs to me.
I looked at the yod I have. Read about it. Wrote about it. Now, I am pulled out of sleep with a start; the yod is activated in its most fearsome form, and my whole inner cosmos is on fire.
You remember what happened, some part of me thinks. You forgot how it felt, until now.
Because I do feel it now. Every neuron on fire.
There were built-in prompts and parallels I should have seen coming. A time of significant stress in my mundane life – roughly the same kind of stress, too. A big event to plan. Never my forte, but a part of my job. Sun blazing too hard and hot for my nervous system, too much to do and too little time to do it, and the prospect of facing big crowds to whom I am professionally accountable, in a context where I’m not very confident.
Even down to problems with my teeth, the link is there. More than 10 years ago, impacted and infected wisdom teeth froze my jaw shut in the middle of a fundraiser I was running, and that set off the chain of events that shut me down for months. This time, less dramatic but still worrisome; a back molar where my vaping has eaten away much of the enamel.
Stupid, I’d thought when that infection was discovered. You knew you should have had those teeth out years ago. The refrain now is much the same. Stupid. Did you think there’d be no consequences, picking up that habit? Do you think exposed dentine will be the worst of it if you don’t stop?
The antics of my wisdom teeth turned out to go beyond the infection. One of them was straddling a nerve with its roots, the trigeminal nerve that gives feeling to the face and controls the muscles used for chewing. The tooth couldn’t stay there, but getting it out posed a risk of permanent nerve damage too.
The worst case scenario was trigeminal neuralgia. A hard-to-treat condition that feels like the sufferer’s face is tearing and burning, wracking them with bouts of intolerable, uncontrollable pain. There’s no obvious connection between hellfire and dental work, but coming to terms with this possibility introduced one, and what started as a dental emergency became an existential crisis.
I’d thought I would have time to make peace with the divine. I was young. I was healthy. Then I learned I might not be.
This time it’s not an external lake of fire I’m concerned with. It’s the personal hell I know my mind can make all on its own.
If you haven’t lived through serious mental health problems, I think it would be hard to imagine the terror of your own mind turning its full faculties against you. Severe anxiety, panic attacks, autistic meltdowns, and psychosis will all do that in their own way, and I have at least a little experience of all of those.
If you’ve ever wondered why I say “psych witch” – why the practical focus of my craft is what it is – that’s why. “Start with what you need most” is good starter advice for a witch, and often what I need most is to manage the darker depths of my own psyche.
Now – 2 AM on a Sunday morning – I am not coping for the first time in a long time, and that terrifies me. I can’t go back there. I can’t do this again.
What if you’ve done irreparable damage to your lungs already? Not being able to breathe freely is a one-way ticket to meltdown, you know. Also, someday your mother will die. Also, you didn’t think you were psychotic when you were psychotic, so you could be having a psychotic break right now and just not know it – it does almost feel like we could go that way from here, doesn’t it? Remember when you used to feel at least a little bit like this all the time? You couldn’t control it then, what if you can’t control it now?
What if, what if, what if, amplified to ungovernable proportions. That was the problem before, and here it is again.
For once, I am trying not to think about witchcraft, or my birth chart, or anything in that vein at all. The one time I experienced psychosis, briefly, was a little while after I first dipped my toes into all that, and I learned then not to mix a magical worldview with the kind of overwrought state my mind is currently in.
All the same, unbidden, it swims in my mind’s eye. The chart. The yod. I try to force it from my mind, along with all the synchronicities of the past week. That’s the sort of thing that gets blown right out of proportion in psychosis, and I don’t think I’m psychotic again, but what if?
Trying not to think about this stuff isn’t working.
I am standing at the centre of my chart, of my zodiacal temple, and the whole system is in nuclear meltdown. On every side of me I see the lines of the yod, screaming like a broken siren as they surge with apocalyptic gouts of crackling hellfire.
The well that is my Pluto in Scorpio is a geyser now, spewing an endless eruption of horrors from the unconscious that are usually handled with great care for good reason. All the mystical visionary power of my Neptune – strong, directed, focused through the filter of Capricorn – is caught in the same power surge, eroding firm boundaries between past and present that should stay.
At the apex of this circuit, Jupiter does its job and amplifies. With every frantic heartbeat it adds psychospiritual fuel to the fire; its instinct is to increase, and in this short-circuit state it can do nothing else.
Not thinking about this really isn’t working. That’s alright. Think again, what can you do here?
I thought Saturn was completely offline, but it’s not. In the distance, through the smog and the storm, I see a flicker.
Shift this current so it has to run through me, not Neptune. A difference of less than two degrees would do it, and it worked before.
This time, I want limits on the limits. I don’t want to turn anything permanently and unequivocally off, but I do need a hard system reboot. Shut all this down while I fix the breakers.
I can do that.
I know the corrections that doused these flames last time. As I focus on the flicker, I picture my Saturn in Capricorn – vintage black pencil dress, black brocade corset – emerging from the smog, spelling out limitations, tracing interlocking circles with her footsteps.
If magic is only a metaphor, we can still explain everything that’s happened, and what happened is still magical. Some things we’re not meant to know for sure; that’s what faith is.
One sparking fault line from Neptune to Jupiter goes still, and with that, I gain back the first thread of control.
By the time I’m writing this, everything is fine. The event I was stressed out about is over, and it went well. The anxiety attacks on the weekend were the worst bout of mental health symptoms I’ve had in a long time, but that’s all they were. A familiar foe, hellish, but brief if managed well.
Naturally I didn’t write this in real time, and for clarity’s sake, I absolutely did not just wave my magic wand and call on the power of Saturn and thereby magically fix what was happening. There was a whole series of mundane self-regulation strategies involved that I didn’t describe because they just wouldn’t be that exciting to read about, so please bear that in mind if you’re learning to manage your own anxiety.
But here, in my usual, not-panicking state of mind, I can safely look through my spiritual lens again, and I do see some stuff there that stands out. I did gain some new insights that feel meaningful, which is often the silver lining of episodes like this.
The one that might stand out most is realizing that I really did used to feel a little bit like that all of the time, and that’s how I used to end up in psych emergency so often. Panic was kind of the default setting, and there were pretty long stretches of time where I was waking up with an attack like that pretty much every night. When it gets bad enough, you just can’t function anymore.
The details were different, but the pattern was always the same. The uncontrollable catastrophizing around whatever specific worries were most salient at the time. At the most extreme end of that pattern is the kind of months-long breakdown I had in 2013, where we jumped from oral surgery to fear of eternal damnation, but the same pattern comes in different degrees. It isn’t always that florid, and I think I had forgotten how close to outright panic my old “normal” was.
I think the real fear lying at the core of this weekend’s episode was suddenly remembering that, and instantly becoming fixated on the fear that I’d get stuck in that state permanently again. I started feeling the echoes of all my very worst psychospiritual experiences at once. Everything felt intimately familiar – a sort of full body-mind-and-spirit deja vu – and all I could think was “anything but going back to this.“
Which, now that the panic is over, says something about the big changes I’ve made in the last few years. The road will be lifelong, but this seems like the right track.
P.S./EPILOGUE
As one way to connect with them, I’ve tried in the recent past to picture all of my natal planets personified – the way I did with Mercury. Up to and including Mars, it was fairly easy, but beyond that things got murkier; now, I see a couple of more distant planets more clearly.
My Capricorn Saturn, in her black dress and corset, has the long-suffering diplomatic air that is common to retail workers, nurses, receptionists, people who care for small children, and anyone else who has to reason often with unreasonable people. More than the domineering taskmaster I used to imagine, she is the unlucky messenger who sometimes gets shot. The voice in the room trying to explain – calmly and kindly – what is possible, what is simply not possible, and what the likely consequences will be if we don’t maintain at least a passing acquaintance with reality.
And Jupiter, who I struggled to picture at all before, emerged from the rubble very clearly.
In another sign, I expect she would look more… dignified. But I don’t have that; I’ve got Jupiter in Gemini, and at least at the moment, she is less serene sage than mad scientist.
She stands at her alchemical station, wild hair blown back and goggles askew, coughing hard into her badly singed velvet sleeve. All the same, she’s beaming with pride as she waves me down.
“Come look! I think we’re making progress!”
At least she’s a benevolent mad scientist.
ALIMAY'S LABYRINTH 
Leave a comment