When I graduated from CofC in 2015, I hadn’t ever considered what I would do after college or how I would try to apply my English degree. I had been comfortable there— smoking weed all day, getting drunk every night, having as much meaningless sex as possible, and hanging with most of the same friends I’d made freshman year— and so when I graduated and moved back home to New Orleans I felt like a fish out of water. Not only had I been taken prematurely from the environment in which I had grown comfortable, but I also realized that I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and that I had squandered much of my potential. In college, your future seems spread out before you like a bunch of open doors and forking paths. You can do anything you want as long as you put your mind to it, but I hadn’t put my mind to anything, and now all of those open doors were closed. Even if my grades hadn’t been shit, it didn’t seem like my English degree would be opening any of the doors for me career-wise, and I couldn’t see myself working another two years to become a public school teacher making shit pay to teach kids grammar and read The Scarlet Letter year after year.
My uncertainty about my life-direction and my guilt about failing to live up to my potential both manifested themselves in anxiety in my day to day habits. I met up with a few girls from Tinder— always at their houses because I lived with my parents— and in each encounter I was so overwhelmed with anxiety that I couldn’t get an erection, or, if I did, I came in under a minute. I left each time in disgrace. I normally modulated my mood with marijuana, but none of my usual dealers were in town so it took me almost two weeks to find some, the longest break I’d taken in more than six years. When I finally did find some, I got far higher than I expected, and I had a horrific panic attack.
I was at the house of a Tulane guy named Zeke, and I took several hits off of his G-pen and a couple rips of a bong, and a few minutes later I was pacing around the house with my socks and shoes off, drinking ice water with one hand on my drumming heart, hoping it wouldn’t explode and leave me dead on this stranger’s uneven wood floor. I drove home with my embarrassment eclipsed by an indescribable dread, the certitude of imminent death, and when my mom saw me holding my heart in the kitchen she insisted, in her characteristically naive and wholesome way, that I come with her to walk the dogs to the park. I wanted to drive to the hospital, but that would have made it all seem more real, so I went along with her and the corgis to the fountain near the zoo in Audubon park, and I spent the whole time standing ankle-deep in the fountain, avoiding conversation with the other dog-walkers, hyper-ventilating, and expecting to die of heart failure at any given moment.
The next few times I smoked weed were no different, but I felt like I had to smoke in order to get back to the sense of normalcy I had lost when I left Charleston. It was impossible, though, because weed was directly associated in my mind with the guilt and anxiety I felt for wasting the most important years of my life. It was a Catch-22— I couldn’t relax when I was high and I couldn’t relax when I was sober. I kept trying to find a Goldilocks zone— just get a little high— but it was impossible. Even the smallest amount would spark an hour or more of horrifying heart palpitations, and so I eventually resigned myself to just smoking cigarettes, which I had started smoking regularly in my senior year.
After a month of doing virtually nothing, I took a job as a house painter and the anxiety subsided somewhat, but I never lost the feeling that I should have stayed in Charleston, that it was my true home, and that I had unfinished business there. I had long, vivid dreams every night during this time. For the last six years I had gone to bed high every night, and I would never remember my dreams when I went to bed high. Now that I was sleeping sober, I not only remembered my dreams but lived in them, so that sometimes it seemed I spent more of my time in the dream world than in the real one. My dreams also became strangely prophetic. I initially assumed that these coincidences were merely the result of selective attention or memory bias— if I see a monarch butterfly in my dream, obviously I’ll be more likely to notice a monarch butterfly if I encounter one the following day— but the coincidences quickly became too significant to dismiss.
TO BE CONTINUED TOMORROW
