Panic Rat

“Clay felt a panic-rat inside his mind, ready to burst free of the flimsy cage that held it and start gnawing anything it could get at with its sharp little teeth. If he could make sure Johnny and Sharon were okay, he could keep the rat in its cage and plan what to do next. But if he did something stupid, he wouldn’t be able to help anyone. In fact, he would make things worse for the people here.”

– Stephen King, Cell

I think I mention this one a lot, particularly as of late, so I thought I might give some insight into where it’s from. It comes from Cell, and also a bit from Gerald’s Game, both by Stephen King. Honestly, I wasn’t as big a fan of Cell as I was of his other works – it was a good read, but it didn’t capture me the way It or The Stand did. I did particularly like the metaphor of the Panic-Rat though, it seems to fit so well.

See, rats are intelligent creatures and they can get through just about anything, given the time and motivation. They get what they want. What the Panic-Rat (Rattus Solicitudo) wants, generally all the time, in anxiety: it feeds on not just the negative, but the overwhelming self-destruction of the mind. Once you have one and it gets loose, rationality and any amount of common sense tend to give way to the worst thoughts, spinning in a loop at breakneck speeds. You go from calm or generally alright to a wreck in seconds.

This is the metaphorical animal that I’ve been dealing with and I was thinking about it a lot today. The little bastard has a tendency to leave you severely drained and feeling often entirely remorseful, stupid or shamed. That pretty much sums it up. I figured if I was going to use the little bastard to explain things over and over again I should explain it – not as though you probably couldn’t glean it by context.

The real truth of the matter is, I let the little bastard drive the other day and, as I might have guessed, he wrapped be right around a tree. He always drives angry, after all. I was doing relatively alright, working on things, learning music theory, modes, triads and tons of stuff I never thought I would understand and the next thing I know I’m acting like a loony freaking out. To some degree I suppose I can be defended, but all-in-all I’m not particularly happy, to say the least, when I act that way. I can’t defend myself, I’ve made a point to attempt not to act in such a way. For those of you who read this and think that Cassie is strung out with a new guy every night and heroin needles hanging out of her arm, it isn’t so. I overreacted to a massive degree as I am oft wont to do. I wish I could say I don’t get like that, but I do. So she has my apologies if she still reads this at all – this is the perfect example really of why I cut things off: I try to avoid situations where I am likely to act like a crazy off the meds.

It sort of came into perspective to a massive degree this morning when I woke up, half-asleep and happened to have a look at her livejournal, where she had posted a poem written for her Creative writing class about lovers, which, in the end, refers to authors and books – it’s an amazing poem worthy of praise and with gorgeous emotion, especially if you’re a bibliophile like a lot of us. This, or course, coming from a girl who swears up and down she possesses no skill for creative writing other than enough understanding of literature to formulate a proper story. If you still believe you have no skill, I think you’ve proved yourself wrong. At any rate, reading the poem I became panicky, jealous and otherwise idiotic – until I realized what it was about, at which point I felt quite the fool. I read it over a bit more and loved it deeply.

I won’t post the poem here – it’s not my work, but (without apologies – this deserves to be read) – I’ll link you to it:

Love is at its truest…when?

If she really wants it off this page I’ll remove it, but, as I said, it deserves to be read. Good poetry just doesn’t come around often anymore. I’m a fan of Yeats, Eliot, Browning and the like, but a lot of the stuff in my age range too often resembles the lyrics to an Emo song.

So there it is, the panic rat. I’ll lock the little bastard back in his cage and refrain from the psychosis for a while, I think. Enough is enough, after all. Perhaps I’ll try to record that song I keep talking about.