There is a cat that lives in my brain
There is a cat that lives in my brain. Let’s call him Khoshekh.
A couple weeks ago I had a panic attack and a metaphor for it all in the same day.
For the past month, I’ve been busy and stressed, but no more than anybody else who has things to do, really. But specific things had been making the stress and kind-of sadness a little worse, and they started building on each other. To the point where half of my day is telling myself I don’t need to cry over random things and that I will get through it all. And then, to top it all off, I have nightly been watching an intensely sad play about a woman who very calmly explains why she’s going to kill herself. So that added to a general feeling of off-ness.
I kept sweeping all of these feelings off to the side, because I have things to do, and thinking about all of that stuff seemed stupid and I didn’t feel like dealing with it. But all that did was layer everything on top of each other until one day, a couple weeks into this, I started sobbing while doing the dishes, seemingly for no reason. It turned into a panic attack where I sat on my kitchen floor for ten minutes crying, and then sat on the couch and cried for another thirty minutes. I can’t explain all the reasons it happened, part of it was just because that happens to me sometimes. But the rest of it was all that built up stuff in my head, and I started becoming aware of that while it was happening.
The weird part was, my brain suddenly gave me a picture, like I was trying to explain to myself what was going on in there. Metaphor time! My brain is a little room with a cat in it, who likes to have cushions to curl up on and nap, and space to run around and get a little exercise, and enough food to make him happy and purr. But in that moment, the room was too cluttered with stuff, and the brain cat didn’t have anywhere to sleep, or even to step. There were crumpled up balls of paper and unfolded laundry and just stuff all of the place, and nowhere to put his little paws down. And when I saw this little image in my brain, I knew I had to clear out the room to make space for brain cat. So I mentally threw out all the garbage and put the clothes away and whatnot, and Khoshekh the brain cat had room to curl up again. And I was able to calm down.
So what does this mean? It might mean that I should clean my actual room, because that’s basically what it looks like. It also means that I should keep my brain room clean before it gets too cluttered again. And that probably means actually dealing with things when they happen, which I don’t completely know how to do, but I can try. And I’m not even sure it will work-- panic attacks and anxiety happen, and all the brain spring cleaning in the world may not help. But Khoshekh the brain cat just happened to pop into my thoughts at that moment, and I liked him enough to want to write about him, and to want to keep his house clean.