How I Avoid the Panic Trap.

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“Aren’t you panicked?” my friend asks me over bowls of fresh salad, referencing what the public is calling Coronavirus. I eased back in my chair, looking into her deep-set steel grey eyes, collating mental objects. No, in fact I’m not in a panic. I’ve spent the last year-and-a-half battling terminal cancer, I survive–against the odds; my relationship to panic forever modified. All I encounter, lensed through the reality of partial remission, focusing on stability and balance, pursuing as much a return to equilibrium as can be expected form that first tenuous step back from the brink of the abyss. Those around me marinate in media medium anxiety; a school of fish weaving, uncomprehending amidst disruptions from far above on the surface. In the months of radiation and chemo the sole minim within my locus of control was my self; my emotional state.

Panic would not have saved my life. I had to surrender to process; to the degrading and painful effects of radiation, the debilitating discomfort of chemotherapy. There was little else for it: the alternative inexorably unclouded, uncomplicated–death. Instead, I embraced autopsis–the act of seeing clearly with one’s own eyes, preparation and contact; defiance against atomisation. As many strangers helped me fight cancer as did friends; as to my body, I hold the body politic: people will help each other, we always do. Deadliest are the diseases of the mind.

Panic is its own contagion.

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