Last week, I took the ferry to Rockaway Beach. The water was reasonably warm and the waves were high and it was a perfect day. On the way back, the ferry was delayed and a long line of people stretched down the sidewalk, waiting for the next boat by the hundreds. I sat on the ground and noticed that a young woman was sitting next to me, dressed in bright colors and writing in a journal. She was the only person I could see who was not looking at her smartphone. She seemed contented, and somehow not of this world.
I chatted a bit with the older women who were in line in front of me. They were clucking about the day’s news; some protesters had glued themselves to a desk at Rockefeller Center. I mentioned to them that I had worked in the fashion industry.
On the way towards the ferry, when it finally arrived, the younger woman turned to me and said, “You worked in fashion? So did I!” And we began a conversation that lasted the rest of the ride back to Wall Street. She said that she had recently begun a career change toward a form of healing work; I told her that I had similar experiences, and spent several years in mental health reform.
She asked what had brought about my work in mental health and I told her about my panic attacks. I told her that over the years I had learned to think of them as different from what the mental health system and various professionals led me to believe. By this point in the ride, the sun had set and black night had settled in. We could barely hear each other over the roar of the waves and the wind, as we sat on the upper deck in masks and tried to shout things that people usually whisper about.
The lights of Manhattan had become visible by the time I told her that a psychiatrist once told me there was no point in letting a panic attack run its course; Klonopin was the immediate solution. “There’s nothing to be learned there,” he said.
But I also told her of how after 11 years in New York I had moved to a farm in Europe. It was there that I started to think of myself as part of nature. I saw my body as similar to a tree or a patch of earth. And when a panic attack came over me, I thought of it as a thunderstorm. After about fifteen minutes it usually passed. I let it wash over me. And then it was done.
By this point I had thrown the pills away— flushed them down the toilet. And when I came back to the United States and got involved in mental health activism, I met people who thought about their experiences in even more radical ways. I became open to the thought of my panic attacks having a spiritual dimension. I experimented with thinking of them as a visitation from an angel— someone who had a message for me. And by the time a panic attack was over, I usually had become aware of a thought or revelation— something I was aware of on a deep level that needed to surface.
There are spiritual and emotional realities that science cannot explain. As a child my father introduced me to the work of William Blake, a mystical Christian and Romantic artist who often spoke of phenomena like visitations from angels. Blake was a prophet, a kind of seer— and though he is often lumped together with other Romantics like Shelley and Keats, he is in a category of his own.
It is in part due to Blake’s work that I feel particularly free in my Christianity. Through Blake’s vision, I can be wild and non-fundamentalist. Through his embrace of sexuality and even his celebration of the genius of Satan, I can be a nonconformist person of faith and never afraid of my own contradictions.
As the ferry neared the pier, my conversation with my fellow fashion industry staffer turned to Jesus. She told me that she believed in Him and loved Him. It is always a relevation— especially in downtown New York— to meet someone I can talk about Christ with. Working in creative industries and growing up in queer spaces, I have at times felt alienated. To speak of things like patriotism and God can feel forbidden.
I learned through my rejection of conventional mental health that there is healing in taking a condition into one’s own hands. But I learned through subsequent ordeals that even more is to be gained by placing my burdens in the hands of the One who can carry so much more than I can.
I remember a time when I had moved back to my parents’ house and saw no way out of it. I couldn’t find a job and had no money of my own. I did not see a way forward. Still, I was connected at that time to a counselor who changed my life, a young black woman who had been raised in the Baptist tradition. She encouraged me to spend time with God and one of the ways I did this was by taking long walks in a field near my hometown. One day when I felt particularly hopeless, I walked deep into the woods and sat by a stream. I can barely express the burden I felt that day. It was as though several heavy packages were strapped to my shoulders and back, and there was no way I could emerge from their weight. I sat by the river for a long time, expecting nothing. I simply didn’t know what else to do. And after a while, maybe twenty minutes, I felt the distinct sensation of the weight being lifted. Someone else had taken all of the heavy packages off my shoulders, and decided to carry them Himself. I could feel that that presence was Christ.
I do not know if I will ever see the young woman from the ferry again, but I will remember her conversation. Healing is possible. It always is. And I do not exclude from my thinking that she may not have been a woman at all, but an angel.