Panic at the Grocery

An anxious mind considers the end of lockdown

Photo by John Cameron on Unsplash

The first time — my first whole body, death-is-a-train-and-I’m-on-the-tracks, drop-to-the-floor-and-pray panic — was in Wegmans. There was a typical market crowd, bland music piping in, a bin of green beans before me. I had been shopping for decades without incident — competently, uneventfully, sometimes even happily. That day, however, was the latest emergency flare of what I slowly, dumbly realized was something larger. The list of warnings sent by my body was getting very long, but I didn’t take them seriously until I found myself sitting wide-eyed and quaking on a grocery store floor.

Maybe something is going on here.

This was more than a decade ago, when I was 45 and perimenopause was knocking emphatically at the door. It was important for me to label and explain the thing. That was a panic attack caused by hormones. Done and done. Now just fix it. But even before — before the upheaval of the middle, the sudden quaking instability — there were moments. There was warning. Over the years, deep in a brightly lit warehouse of food and household goods, deep in dinner thoughts, there were occasional, brief sensations of surreality. Look away from the jam, away from the pears and the detergent, and the eye is drawn up and down tunnel-like aisles of overwhelming choice. Stacks and…