I’m asthmatic, I declared.
The GP raised a brow.
He tested, then explained,
“No. You’re having panic attacks.”
I didn’t understand.
They came at night,
when I was relaxed—
not when I was anxious.
I was twenty-one when they started.
They’ve never left.
—
Twenty years later,
I explained to my therapist
(because we all need therapy, right?).
I panic after the event—
shame for what I’ve said,
what I’ve done.
And it feels like an electric shock.
Like being plugged into the mains.
I gasp—
just one breath of air.
“Any family history of electric shock therapy?”
she asked—casually, curiously.
“I’m not sure,” I said.
“I’ll find out.”
—
Jimmy was my father’s uncle.
Twenty-one, just a boy.
A sailor in the merchant navy,
on his way home.
His family wait at the docks.
But Jimmy doesn’t appear.
He’s been badly, badly beaten,
and taken into police care.
Jimmy never came home.
He was traumatised by the event—
admitted to a psychiatric hospital.
They tried to rehabilitate him,
but he would always require full care.
My grandfather couldn’t take him.
No one could.
So Jimmy was never released.
—
Forty years later,
my dad found him—
institutionalised,
lost in the system for years.
Jimmy spoke very little,
and only repeated:
“You better watch yourself…
the Newcastle lads,”
he said when they met.
—
I knew little of Jimmy,
but my sister knew more.
I asked her:
“Did Jimmy receive electrotherapy?”
“Almost certainly,” she said.
“His records were lost—
but they said
he’d had all the top treatment.”
Then she paused.
“I never knew what to make of that.”
I thought long and hard about Jimmy.
What had he seen?
What had he done?
“I think he may have been gay,”
I said.
The merchant navy—
a decoy of the time.
—
My aunt,
a medium,
said the same
when she channelled him—
twenty years ago.
Marginalia
Jimmy was institutionalised at the same age I started having panic attacks: twenty-one. They’ve never fully left me, and now I wonder—are they mine, or his?
When I began using AI in my ancestral research, I learned more about Jimmy through his natal chart. It helped me understand why he may have been institutionalised, and how he might have coped.
I don’t take everything AI says as gospel, but it gave me a sense of him—and how his experience might echo in my own chart.
Ancestral trauma wasn’t something I’d ever considered until my therapist asked about it. I never expected astrology or AI to help, but out of curiosity, I uploaded my chart to see if it might offer direction. At the time, I was just trying to make sense of it all.
