Today I woke up with the feeling that something was terribly wrong and I should not go to work. Since I had the sick time available, I decided to go with that feeling and call out for the day. The anxiety has abated somewhat, but only because I know I made the right decision. The alarm bells that were screeching in my head this morning are satisfied.
It wasn't a panic attack, exactly, because I've had one of those. The best way to describe that experience is to say it's a kind of existential claustrophobia, where it's not the walls boxing you in but space and time itself closing in to crush you. Your heart races and spasms and aches and you struggle to breathe and you know you are about to die, because that's the only escape you can fathom in that moment. But if you're lucky like I was, you will quietly tell a friend who knows all about these sort of things and she will lead you outside; the distraction of her voice and the rhythm of walking will push the weight back from your soul and you'll be able to breathe again.
No, today this was a Vague Unease with Aggressive Tendencies. I know these, and I try to listen even when I don't know what they're trying to say. Sometimes they don't say anything at all except that Something Is Wrong, or something is about to be wrong. I suppose I could call it intuition, but I've never had any evidence that my intuition was correct. If I feel the Vague Unease nudging me to cross this street, or not to walk down that one, or to stay home as it did today, I listen and don't try to rationalize. Sometimes the Vague Unease will grip me with such force I have to go for a walk until I feel the release and know that its OK Now.
But I never know the source or the cause of the Vague Unease, nor do I know why it departs when it does. If I've avoided some misfortune, I never know what. If someone I deeply care about has avoided some misfortune, I also don't know it. A bit of a falling tree in the forest type of a mystery; was there really ever any calamity to be avoided at all? Will I ever know, since it appears to have been avoided?
It reminds me of stories about foolish superstitious types; like a man who throws salt over his shoulder every time before he gets on a plane and claims it protects him from crashing. And when someone points out the obvious lack of correlation, he retorts that he has never crashed yet.
And on some level he knows there cannot be anything to it, but the salt still gets thrown over his shoulder. And I may be avoiding nothing at all by listening to the voice telling me to avoid. But here I am.