Thirty-five minutes until practice starts. I wish I could crawl into a hole.
Saturday, we have a bout against Red Stick Roller Derby. The thought makes me nervous in ways that playing against Greenville, a relative unknown to me, did not. Greenville handed us our asses in ways I'm pretty sure that Red Stick will not. But still, there's a lingering memory associated with Baton Rouge, one that I know my teammates don't share. They were never in that position to have it in the first place.
C'mon, Mary, that was right in front of your face! You're not gonna call that?! What the hell is wrong with you?
I remember wincing, maybe visibly. FFE, Red Stick's coach (whose full name is perhaps best not spelled out for impressionable eyes), had been on my case for this entire bout.
By half-time, my eyes were brimming with tears. Back in the ref room, I bitched bitterly about how disrespectful he was, and how I couldn't concentrate with him riding my ass every time I did (or didn't) make a call.
Come to think of it, I'm not actually sure I made any calls in that game. I'm not sure that I raised that whistle to my lips even once to call a skater off, or even to call off a jam.
The first time I ever reffed a bout was one of the worst experiences of my derby career. It certainly wasn't as bad as the second bout I ever reffed, but that's another story for another time. I hadn't transitioned from rollergirl to ref that long ago, and I knew without a doubt that I was not ready to ref a bout. I kept telling myself that.
I'm pretty sure my lack of confidence showed. For a ref, that's a deadly disability, and rollergirls will prey on it. I didn't understand the interplay between teams and referees, the way that during a game, rollergirls will not only cuss you out but curse your entire family line, and then be totally fine at the after party. It takes a while for refs to get to the point where those insults roll off their shoulders. Some refs never get there. I imagine that plenty quit under the strain of that load.
When I think about Red Stick Roller Derby, that's what I remember. Being absolutely terrified of skating as a ref, but being forced to do it because (surprise!) they hadn't brought any refs with them, and hadn't thought fit to tell us until they set foot in the Skate Center. I'm at least Facebook friends with many of their skaters now. Meeting them face to face, I understand now that they're not the ten foot ogres they seemed when I reffed that bout.
But, I know that this weekend will be no walk in the park. Red Stick is a WFTDA Apprentice League now. They've been trained by some of the smartest and best in the sport.
***
Thirty-five minutes after practice, and I'm not sure what to make of what just happened to me.
When practice started, I felt short of breath. I figured that had a lot to do with me, you know, missing about a week of skating due to tornadoes or the mass of papers sprawled all over my office floor, one or the other. No big deal, right?
Uh, wrong.
During our warmup (our damn warmup, for gods' sakes), I sat down, panting for breath. During our second drill, I practically collapsed on the sidelines. My breath sounded like a noisy hacksaw, I was dizzy, my knees were weak, and a steady tattoo of I can't, I can't, I can't was pounding against my forehead.
That same summer, the one I described above, the one of that disastrous Red Stick bout (and my second disastrous bout), I started having panic attacks.
They were frequent. My thoughts raced, one after the other, taunting me because no matter how hard I focused on calming them, they wouldn't slow down. My hands trembled, my heart pounded, my breaths were shallow and quick. I felt like I was dying. The way the terror rose up in my throat and exploded into my brain was like nothing I had ever known before.
I couldn't do anything. Watching TV made me have panic attacks. Reading made me have panic attacks. Playing World of Warcraft (which was one of my only outlets that long summer) made me have panic attacks. It was literally impossible some days for me to get out of bed. I couldn't sleep, but being awake was torture.
More than ten times a day, I'd feel them coming on, and my body would start to tremble. Endless fear, endless overreaction to things that shouldn't have mattered. I couldn't make them not matter.
When I skated, I'd forget about those things for as long as I was at the rink. Reffing isn't for me, I know that now, but without it, I don't know that I would have left the house that summer. In a very real way, roller derby (and BCR) held me together at a time when all the seams were popping apart and nothing made sense.
That anxiety was crippling, and I doubt I will ever forget what it felt like. It reared its ugly head inside my chest tonight. It leapt up from what I thought was certain death like some perverse black phoenix and said hey jackass, remember me?
It's like some fated movie showdown between good and evil, only I'm not really sure I'm either one of those things, but just me, my surname being entirely appropriate for someone who's somewhere in between most things, content to be neither this nor that, but to exist unlabeled and unquantified.
One drill I sat out because it was a race. I knew my heartrate would get up again, and I didn't trust myself not to freak out. But halfway through it, when it was my scrimmage team's turn to go do burpees while the other team sprinted back and forth, I just said the hell with it and went and did burpees with my team.
It was like flipping a breaker into the off position. Once the current quit flowing into those neurons at breakneck speed, I just skated. I skated and I hit people and yeah, I definitely nailed some people in the wrong places, and yeah I definitely didn't always pay attention when I should have, but it was about more than that for me tonight.
Panic Disorder (if that's what I even have - maybe it's just what they call "Generalized Anxiety Disorder," which never seemed like a very helpful label to me) isn't something that just goes away. You can treat it, but it's more along the lines of managing than it is disappearing it completely.
I knew someday I'd have to face it again. It's ironic that it's rearing its ugly head right before our bout with Red Stick, the very bout at which I started to discover that something inside of me was going very wrong.
I take a low dose anti-depressant every day, and I have for almost two years now. If things get bad, I have a mild anti-anxiety pill that I can take to stave off the panic attacks. Usually, I only take one a day, with my anti-depressant, but either way, I'm tethered to those little orange bottles because sometimes even with them, I don't manage the condition well.
One of my greatest fears once that summer was over and I'd finally gotten some relief from it all was that it would come back one day. It's not realistic for me to expect to never have issues with anxiety again, or even to expect that I'll never have a panic attack again. Tonight was a jolt that reminded me of that fact.
There's one thing I've learned since 2009, though, and much, if not most, of the lesson came to me from starting to skate derby, which I didn't even have the courage to pursue until long after my knee had healed.
It's perhaps best phrased with the tag line from Treme: "Won't bow, don't know how."
If there's anything that I know about myself, it's that I'm a resilient person. I've been through far too much bullshit (there's really no other way to phrase it) than is worth recounting in this blog, but I'm still here, "bloody but unbowed," as it were.
I've been apprehensive about playing Red Stick ever since I saw our season schedule way back in December. Maybe, though, it wasn't Red Stick that I was anxious about. I had a sneaking suspicion, and after tonight, it's becoming a certainty: the monster in the closet may actually look a lot like me.
