Anxiety and panic attacks

Anxiety and panic attacks in Devorah’s account turn distress into an experience she cannot reliably control through willpower or religious reassurance alone. The symptoms appear amid serious physical-health concerns and increasing strain in her marriage; they affect eating, sleep, and her sense of safety in her own body. Medical explanations and treatment offer practical tools, but do not immediately remove the distress. In the memoir’s later perspective, recovery means not that anxiety never existed, but that its physical symptoms no longer govern her life.

Symptoms and the Search for an Explanation

The crisis develops alongside a sequence of health problems after Devorah and Eli’s wedding. Following an episode of irritation and bleeding, she must wait before trying again to complete the ritual process. During that interval she develops a severe rash on her arm and shoulder and seeks an emergency appointment at a local clinic on Heyward Street, because she cannot obtain a prompt appointment elsewhere. The clinic is run by the Hasidic community, receives government funding, and is open to all patients, but Devorah ordinarily avoids it because it is crowded and dirty. The rash is initially uncertain in origin: Dr. Katz says it may be chicken pox and prescribes antiviral medication as a precaution.

The spots persist, and Devorah later wakes with severe abdominal pain and prolonged vomiting. An emergency-room examination identifies orbital shingles; the specialist suggests that she may have contracted it in the ritual bath. Devorah is disturbed by the possibility that she became ill while fulfilling a religious commandment, since she had been taught that the merit of a mitzvah would protect its practitioner. This episode does not itself establish the cause of her later anxiety, but it marks the bodily uncertainty surrounding the period: religious meaning, medical explanation, and fear do not neatly align.

As the episodes continue, Devorah loses her appetite and finds that attempts to eat can end in vomiting and prolonged dry heaving. She loses weight, which becomes apparent through clothes that no longer fit as they did. Crowds bring a rapid heartbeat and weakness, and she fears that she may have a serious illness. Her doctor orders numerous tests, including X-rays and CAT scans. When he offers her Xanax, he identifies the medication as treatment for anxiety. The diagnosis gives a name to her condition after the physical symptoms have prompted an extended search for answers; it does not make those symptoms feel less real.

Learning to Manage the Episodes

Devorah also attends biofeedback sessions with Jessica. Wires attached to her palms register changing numbers on a small screen, beginning at ninety-eight and rising through one hundred to one hundred five. Jessica explains that the readings reflect stress and that biofeedback is intended to help Devorah notice bodily signals and learn how to respond to them. In weekly sessions, Devorah practices breathing, clearing her mind, and relaxing her muscles until she can watch the numbers fall. The work makes regulation observable: rather than treating anxiety as an invisible failing, the sessions give her a changing measure and a set of actions to practice.

The lesson of control, however, has limits. Devorah continues the exercises at home, including while lying on the couch in the evenings, but Eli’s presence itself brings waves of anxiety that she has to manage. She experiences the effort as a prolonged struggle, and the anxiety does not disappear. The exercises instead help her keep it at a distance. Her account therefore distinguishes learning a technique from being cured: practice creates a measure of space between Devorah and an episode, without guaranteeing that another will not arise.

At night, anxiety can also take the form of a frightening half-awake hallucination. Devorah leaves the bed and goes to the kitchen until the feeling of being under attack eases. The episode gives her a profound sense of having no refuge in her own body. That loss of bodily security contrasts with the promise of biofeedback that she can learn to respond to her body’s signals; at this point in the narrative, that promise remains a difficult practice rather than a settled assurance.

Marriage, Misunderstanding, and Bodily Memory

Eli watches Devorah’s panic attacks but does not understand them. The memoir presents his incomprehension as part of the isolation of the illness: the episodes occur within a marriage, yet witnessing them does not automatically give him access to what she is experiencing. His presence can intensify her anxiety even as she continues trying to use the techniques she has learned. The account does not reduce the attacks to marital conflict, but it shows that the relationship is one setting in which their effects become especially difficult to manage.

The couple’s difficulty with consummating the marriage brings another medical interpretation into view. At a therapist’s recommendation, Devorah consults a sex therapist, who explains that the condition is vaginismus and gives her a book about it. The book describes the condition as common among women raised in repressive religious environments and explains how learned muscular responses can persist even when a person consciously wants a different outcome. This account supplies Devorah with a way to understand bodily reactions as learned and difficult to reverse, rather than as evidence that conscious intention alone should prevail. She obtains a plastic dilator kit online and practices at home, using breathing and muscular exercises; the work is slow and uncomfortable. The memoir places this treatment beside, rather than in place of, the anxiety narrative: both involve learning to respond to bodily reactions that do not simply obey conscious wishes.

Change and Retrospective Meaning

The later account describes a substantial change. Devorah says she no longer manifests the physical symptoms of anxiety; she can recognize her feelings, accept them, and let herself be. This is not presented as proof that the earlier distress was imagined, nor as a claim that every conflict has been resolved. It marks a changed relationship to emotional experience: symptoms no longer stand in for feelings that cannot be understood or acknowledged.

The shift also connects to Devorah’s independence and bodily autonomy. She rejects the idea that intimacy should be an obligation and emphasizes her ability to make her own romantic choices. In that later perspective, recovery is not simply the mastery of breathing exercises or the disappearance of panic. It includes the authority to decide what she wants and to treat her own feelings as meaningful. The memoir’s account of anxiety thus moves from frightening bodily uncertainty, through medical naming and repeated practice, toward a form of self-understanding in which Devorah can experience distress without allowing it to dictate her choices.