If I'm going to cry, it tends to be in the evening or at night. Which makes sense because usually it’s about events of the day, a symptom of exhaustion, or from a more general reflection on life at a late and more reflective hour. What makes less sense, is to cry in the morning, before anything has happened. If a person finds themselves crying in the morning, before they’ve even started the day, then I suspect there is something more complicated, more all-encompassing that is troubling them. It's from something they have carried over from one day to the next; it is too heavy for their subconscious to keep to itself, and so it passes it on to the conscious mind which, probably unprepared, does not have a handle on the situation.
This is what I found happened to me, on a park bench at 9.30am, in the centre of Madrid, on a Tuesday. And I cried my eyes out. I don't know if you have ever found yourself crying on a park bench early in the morning, but if you have you will know what happens. Firstly, all of the dogs who are being walked, bound up to you. They sense you are upset and, as chief cheerer-uppers of the globe, see this as their duty and their moment to shine! And you pat their quivering little zig-zagging backs appreciatively, and for a moment it's really, really, lovely… until the owners arrive. The owners arrive and, not being a chief cheerer-upper of the globe, they aren’t quite sure what to do. Mostly they approach hesitantly, side-stepping and side-smiling, in an awkward, apologetic sand-dance towards you, pick their bemused little canine up and then trot off sideways again. You give them your best watery humble smile, and watch their eyes dart about your appearance, looking for clues, wondering why.
Which, incidentally, is also what I was wondering. If one of them had actually asked me why, I would have had nothing to say. I didn't have a bloody clue what I was doing and what had happened or why I was crying.
Everything had been going so well. In the previous couple of days, I had successfully secured employment with six new English students, ready for when I finished Spanish lessons and started the next phase of life in Madrid. (You know, the phase where I would earn my own money; live in the centre, spend my free time writing in cutesy cafés, and partying in a stylishly uncouth manner; aesthetically somewhere half-way between prohibition glam and heroine chíc.)
I had been making my way to Spanish school, enjoying the haphazard experience of listening to my iPod on shuffle, trying to avoid making eye contact with that waiter who seems to think I fancy him, when, out of nowhere, it happened. An overwhelming feeling of impending doom billowed out from the clouds and surged down towards me, and at the same time the earth I was walking on dislodged itself and disloyally raced up to meet it. Feeling like a wavering computer glitch, or how Alice probably did when she ate those mushroom: except I was throbbing between the big Alice and the little Alice and then back to the big Alice again, I veered off towards the park.
And thus I found myself where we started – weeping on a park bench, friendly dogs, sand-dancing owners ...etc. This was very perplexing. I couldn't decipher what it was that this emotional response was interacting with. Everything was going to well, wasn't it? Apparently not.
That impending-doom, billowing, Alice’s mushrooms thing, could probably also be called a panic-attack. It's textbook; feelings of entrapment and death, volatile and uncontrollable in nature, an intense emotional spasm seemingly disconnected from its trigger. But what isn't in the textbook, is the positive result I gained from it. It forced me to properly observe the details of my situation and, like a dense lump of icing being squeezed through the pin-hole of a piping bag, I came out the other end lighter and under control, my life feeling like nice pink squiggles, instead of an indistinguishable, heavy lump. I realised (with some hindsight) that what I need at the moment, post-graduation, is to feel tangible progress. I need to see evidence that I am beginning to build the future I want for myself; and that future is not in Madrid.
The next day I booked a flight back to London.
Of course for many people there is no positive result of a panic-attack. Clinical, perpetual panic-attacks are debilitating, and suggesting that they should simply find the deeper meaning, would be ridiculous, offensive. However I suspect there are many people who, like me, do not suffer from a panic disorder, but do experience the occasional one in times of stress or confusion. In which case, it’s a fantastic thing that your sub-conscious forced you through the piping bag, when your conscious mind was stubbornly lugging your indistinguishable lump-life around. Thank god I had a melt-down in a park, or else I'd be struggling on with the plan that looked so good on paper, trying to suppress my discontent.
And so next time I feel Alice hovering ominously with those magic mushrooms of hers, rest assured, I’ll be grabbing that trip by its furry rabbit ears.
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