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)