The Stop Sign
It all started with a panic attack. An intense and sudden fear that was induced by social anxiety. A normal adolescent desire to connect with others and meet new friends while simultaneously fighting a debilitating anxious mind. A false narrative replaying in your brain, that fights you and the moments you try to push through and live life free from the albatross of anxiety. While the ongoing battle of anxiety may be invisible to the rest of the world, it is intertwined in every part of a person’s life who is in conflict with it.
Life was anything but normal in the summer of 2020. No one was coping well with the unpredictability of the pandemic, nor did anyone understand the magnitude of the chaos it would continue to bring. No one knew what changes to normalcy would affect our lives or when this nightmare would end. The daily lives we had once taken for granted had changed for the foreseeable future. We were all feeling uncertain, living in fear, and dealing with life as we never had imagined. All of these “worried thoughts” are a part of the definition of anxiety. Everyone had their own unique personal circumstances that contributed to how the pandemic affected them, their family, and their community.
For this particular story, imagine being a 19-year-old teenager struggling with anxiety, depression, PTSD, and having an addiction starting to take hold of you and your life. A back and forth of isolation from the pandemic and the normal teenage longing to hang out with friends, only leading you to a “friend” who unexpectedly introduces you to a drug so potent that neither you nor I could resist. Imagine anyone, of any age, dealing with that. All of that and a lockdown making it impossible to live your life or get the help you need in a therapeutic setting. The rules were different. That is to say…if there truly were any rules at all. The year 2020 was chaotic, a mess. Lockdowns, curfews, masks, quarantines, and other restrictions. That year, my son, Jack, was navigating his own unique nightmare that was beginning to unfold.
If you remember back to that time, you could not get toilet paper, certain foods, or other household staples. Think about if you were addicted to drugs. Yes, that supply was disrupted as well, and as a result became that much more unpredictable and dangerous. Illicit drugs were being adulterated in the basements of homes all over our country. With more idle time for many, supply and demand for these drugs started to become even more corrupted and greater.
It was a beautiful Saturday morning in August 2020 when a police officer knocked on my door to inform me that a neighbor had found the front end of my car by a street sign just a block away. I had not gone anywhere the night before, but my son had taken my car and driven to attend an AA meeting where he had a panic attack.
Logic is not what takes precedence when you are navigating a panic attack or fighting the demons of addiction. I don’t know what my son was thinking (or not thinking) that night. What I do know is that the fallout from that panic attack led to the destruction of city property, failure to control a vehicle, damage to my car, neighborhood gossip, shame, judgment, and anxiety.
It also led to a dilemma. Jack had no money to pay for the stop sign (restitution to the city) and needed professional help to deal with the anxiety that instigated this crisis. Two-fold, the anxiety of the predicament only added more anxiety, knowing that he could be sent to jail for not making restitution for the charges.
I did, what seemed to me at the time, the most appropriate and constructive, which was to pay the fee for him and support Jack in getting the help he needed. I don’t regret my decision as I knew the complexity of my son’s mental health and addiction better than anyone else, and there was no ideal solution. Every decision comes with its own fallout, judgment, and consequences. As someone caring for a loved one navigating mental health and/or addiction, you do what you can live with and make the best decisions you can, given the circumstances.
I now own one stop/street sign in my neighborhood. In truth, the street sign could have been angled back upright and used for many more years. In reality, when you damage city property, they are going to make sure that you replace it with the fancy newer model that they were already replacing throughout our city with our taxpayer money. Interestingly enough, my neighborhood street signs had not been switched over yet in 2020. It is now 2026, and this particular street sign is still the only upgraded one in my neighborhood.
Oh, the irony, I paid for that sign in multiple ways. Perhaps one could say I double-paid for that sign. You can be darn sure that I allowed my dog to relieve himself on that street sign every time we walked that way. Driving/walking by that sign is a reminder to me of how fragile life is and how it can change in any given moment. I also want to be clear that I fully understand the magnitude of a person driving impaired mentally and/or chemically. I am grateful that no one was physically hurt by this event.
Some may think as they travel through my neighborhood, “it is just a stop sign, a street sign, a corner you pass every day”. To me, it is so much more. I have so many flashbacks tied to that corner, that sign, the aftermath of that encounter, event, and mistake.
Was it a foreshadowing of what more devastation was to come? What happened that night? I will never fully understand. What I do know is that it all started with a panic attack.