Blackholewave (n.)
Part panic, part brilliance, part questionable lunch.
A sudden, full-body pressure system that crashes in like a rogue weather front — part panic attack, part existential freeze — leaving you wondering what just happened and what “life” even is, or what “happen” even means.
Subsequent manifestations include a reflexive cause-hunt, scanning your bank account, calendar, past sins, and future dooms — immediately followed by the formation of a provisional diagnosis of “lack of financial stability,” only to then doubt said diagnosis and watch the cause-hunt dissolve entirely, leaving you in an emotional gravity well with no recollection of the door you fell through to get there.
Typically include eye rolls from your self-proclaimed “seasoned practitioner” part saying: Come on, you’ve trained for this — feel your body. Which you would… if you could remember what a body even is.
Notable shift in presentation includes a sudden flashback to your own latest Substack post — the one insisting that states like these are not signs something’s wrong, but contact with exiled brilliance. Even though a part of you says, “yeah, sure,” the air still shifts at this point, and you find yourself still feeling the panic-freeze but now also… finding it interesting.
Additional symptoms include:
Throwback-sighs for the days you could just switch something like this off — with chocolate, or, further back, clouds of weed so thick a feeling like this couldn’t find you at all.
Remembering something you yourself have named “the pleasant sensation” — which, according to your personal and clinical experience, should exist here somewhere, even in the middle of this pain — which sets off a chain reaction: the usual detour of trying to feel that pleasant sensation instead of the pain, until you remember the point is to feel both at once — the tension and the softness, the ache and the tiny thread of good — which, when you do, terminates in a deeper breath (possibly the first one since the whole Blackholewave began).
With progression of the episode, you start to contemplate the possibility that maybe this isn’t panic or freeze — or even pressure — at all. Maybe it’s something entirely different. Intense, yes, but not malignant. Not “something’s wrong”-intensity.
All of it then culminates in a fascination with the felt sense of the experience, paired with the thought that sure — having this cool felt sense and financial stability would be great — but right now, you wouldn’t trade this aliveness for money, ever. This is followed immediately by the question: Wait… isn’t that exactly what I always do? Trade this aliveness for money? A brief reminder surfaces about the ongoing predicament of food versus aliveness — and then, in the same breath, you gently sink back down from thinking into sensation.
Differential diagnosis:
Gastrointestinal disturbance secondary to questionable lunch choices
Chronic solo-parenting without adequate systemic backup
Filed under:
Somatic Plot Twists
Existential Weather Events
Unscheduled Portals to Nowhere in Particular (with Unexpected Sense of Aliveness)




Ah! Those blackwholewaves! They have been coming thick and fast lately to my shores, even without having to keep little humans alive! And the aliveness that seems to mysteriously bubble up... mmmmmm!!! I wouldn't trade either.