A shadorma that I feel better about. Earlier this week, a woman named Deborah Danner was killed by New York police responding to a 911 call from her neighbors. Ms. Danner had schizophrenia; it seems likely she was having some sort of episode related to her illness. Yesterday, the New York Times ran an editorial about her, in which they linked to an essay (shared by her lawyer) that she wrote four years ago. Many of the things she wrote about in the essay are familiar to me—I have lived with anxiety and panic attacks since 1989.

The stanzas in this poem roughly correspond to the paragraphs in Ms. Danner’s essay, but they also reflect my own experience.

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