Jed Wolf

The sun glints amber through our east-facing screen porch, but something’s wrong. “It looks like it’s setting,” I tell Dave, moving only my lips while he flips through “New Scientist.” We wear dark glasses in the September dawn, watching our North Florida backyard jungle and our cats weaving between us. I sit motionless as an anchor, riding waves of vertigo while the earth reverses direction.

Last night’s dreams were a carnival of horrors: skulls, rotting flesh, a colorful snake with a padlock around its neck, coiled on flotsam in a foggy lake. I grabbed it, threw it toward my bathroom, only to slip into a sweeter dream – singing “Somewhere” from West Side Story, showered with healing love. I woke dizzier than ever.

Back in Connecticut, September winds would clear the shellshocked feeling left by August’s humidity. But Florida holds onto its addlebrainedness longer after her summer temperatures, like a stubborn fever. I’ve tried exercises, anti-vert medications, convincing myself it’s seasonal. This year, as hurricane Helene approached, Google suggested a link to stress, so I checked in with my nerves.

My acting teacher – now gone – whispers to me at 3 AM as my imagination yanks me through night terrors. “Just as cynics are heart-broken romantics, demons are abandoned angels,” she says. “After being forsaken by our parents, our neglected inner children will do anything for attention, including making us very ill.” We shared an understanding, keeping everyone at arm’s length – what shrinks called liability, we knew as wisdom. When I told her I couldn’t fake love that was never modeled, she passed me another hit of pot, and we laughed at our shared brokenness.

In my sleepless hours, I return to that remote cabin near Elizabethton, Tennessee, where I spent one transformative summer at eighteen. The Switzerland-like pastures, gumdrop mountains, the distant baying of coonhounds, trailers fumigated with autumn leaves – Dave and I had planned to visit until Helene changed our course. Unlike how their once pristine verdance affected me, construction’s echos will have disturb those hollows beyond recognition, so there’s no point.

My mother had vertigo before her dementia set in. She broke things – furniture, a tooth, a hip – and broke into song at Trump’s first election. I wish I’d done more than hand her watercolors when she needed to lash out. Unlike her, I have my food forest, where I reach for fistfuls of greens, masticating them like a Mountain Gorilla while thinking, “Imbalance is the new balance.”

My inner child welcomes Prednisone effectively masking the whirl. “What do you want?” I ask in the dark, trying not to sound adversarial. “Nothing,” comes the reply, exactly as I used to answer my parents. I lie in my mental casket or cradle – lately, I can’t tell the difference.

Studies link vertigo to prolonged stress, but being told to relax makes me spin harder. Like our cats rolling for attention, it seems to appreciate being described. It’s not tied to negativity – it feels like the wobble of the earth itself. Even Mountain Gorillas, before encroaching farmland altered their perspective, huddled among elders sharing mushrooms and medicines, grunting about scary things.

As my hair, nails, and gums recede into a Neanderthal grimace at seventy, I resist blaming my lack of faith or the explosion of smug liars for throwing the world off its axis. But can’t you feel the destabilization? Mules are packing food into western North Carolina. Rather than doing nothing, I let my bundle of nerves frolic and express itself while I sit absolutely still, a little less wobbly for talking about my fears.

Thirty days until the election. Though we dodged Helene this time, I’m not the only one feeling whacked. I refuse to buckle a seatbelt of positivity for this roller coaster future. My body does what it wants now, but at least I can write about it, risking the assault of well-meaning advice to maybe help others wondering what’s wrong with them in these tumultuous times.