Gateways: How Oceanator’s Nothing’s Ever Fine Gave Shape to My Anxiety

My wife and I laughed when we saw the EKG printout. It was a Sunday morning in February just like any other, and to prove it, my heart was thumping 72 beats per minute in steady 4/4 time. That’s on the low side of average for a resting heart rate; nothing to worry about, and certainly nothing worth rushing to urgent care for at 7:00 AM. But a few days earlier, I’d had an unexpected heart palpitation followed by what I would later recognize as a panic attack. New sensations started nagging in my chest, and by the weekend, I was barely sleeping, terrified that I was going to die suddenly. At night, I would just lay in bed listening hard to those 72 beats and convincing myself something was wrong with me.

Turns out something was wrong with me: It’s called health anxiety, and I had all the clues to see it coming. First, anxiety runs in the family (much like good taste in music). Second, I’d spent six years writing captions for live TV, which meant spending most of my work days marinating in news stories about death. And third, I’d already spent almost two years procrastinating on booking myself a therapy appointment—more or less ever since I heard “Nightmare Machine” by Oceanator in 2022.

Nightmare machine fires up
first thing when I wake up
So many things that could go wrong
One of em’s bound to happen before too long.

Long breath in, longer breath out. Let’s go back. Captioning, right? Everyone I ever said this to took a beat to process it. Yes—when you’re at the gym watching text scroll up from the bottom of a TV screen, someone could be writing it in real-time. For a while, it could’ve been me. Almost everyone I ever said this to also followed up with something like: “You must be well-informed.”

“Right,” I would say, “whether I like it or not.”

Some nights on the job, you got assigned to watch the San Jose Sharks get the shootout win over Las Vegas, keeping the Golden Knights out of the Stanley Cup playoffs. Some nights, you got national and international news. Mostly, you got local broadcasts from across the country, time zone by time zone. You got wildfires. You got gruesome highway accidents in one hour and police officers shooting people dead in the next. You got senseless tragedy on a constant stream until the context dissolved. One of my very first days on air, I was assigned to emergency coverage of the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. Another night, I got a New Mexico station airing body camera footage of a sheriff’s deputy breaking down after finding an infant dead in a crib from neglect. He just kept asking, “Why? Why? Why?”

I lived in a bubble of hyper-awareness on current events big and small, where nothing was ever fine—a more acute version, I thought, of what we all go through every day just being on Twitter. I kept my head down and powered through because even accounting for the horrors, it was a pretty great way to make a living. I didn’t get any journalism work fresh out of college, but I still got to use my degree in English and media studies. I got to work from home in safety through the height of COVID and beyond, and I had the privilege to deliver a crucial accessibility service to the Deaf and Hard of Hearing. I manned the night shift (6:30 PM to 3:00 AM), which isolated me from friends and family, but which allowed me to wake up every day at noon and spend a good five hours reviewing new albums and interviewing bands before my workday started.

So, like a lot of indie music fans struggling to keep a brave face, I spent 2020 getting into Oceanator. Elise Okusami’s debut album Things I Never Said—a relentlessly catchy garage rock record about getting on with life while the world crumbles around you—hit with uncanny timing. Songs like “A Crack in the World” spoke to the apocalyptic feeling of that summer with disarming directness and stubborn hope. “Who knows if we’ll be here tomorrow,” Okusami sang, just above a speaking voice. “But everything, everything, everything still matters, you know.” (I can’t even type that without crying a little). I couldn’t wait to hear the promotional stream for the follow-up, Nothing’s Ever Fine, as soon as it landed in my inbox; I still remember clocking out one night at 3:00 AM, collapsing on the couch to play a little Sekiro before bed, and pressing play.

I drive the car off of the bridge
I see the simulation glitch
An airplane drops out of the sky
Anything can happen, don’t need a reason why.

“Nightmare Machine” is the first song on the album (after the instrumental “Morning”) and it opens on Okusami alone, playing a bleary chord riff on her guitar like she just got up from a sleepless night and started strumming. Synths and drums come in like a sigh. After a few verses, the song starts to fade out, then circles back for one last intrusive thought of a refrain: “Nightmare machine. I’m a nightmare machine.” When I heard it, I heard the perpetual tension in my jaw. By the end of my first listen-through, I was a complete wreck.

A nightmare machine was what I’d become, little by little, as the news taught me everything that could go wrong in a given day. When I had a migraine, I’d remember a story I’d captioned about a man who went to the hospital with a headache and died of an aneurysm. When I took too long to turn left on a busy D.C. street and got honked at, I’d remember all the stories I’d heard about road rage shootings. Every month or so, I would wake up, heart pounding, from a dream in which I was crouched under a school desk while a gunman stalked by and screams echoed in the halls. Work had taken my brain—already predisposed to worry—and instilled in it an unshakeable thought: Something bad is going to happen. Why? “Anything can happen, don’t need a reason why.”

I’d encountered the same idea in Ecclesiastes and in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things. I didn’t feel how it ate away at me until I heard it from Oceanator. Maybe it’s useless to rationalize this (not least because anxiety is irrational by nature). But in a time when music is saturated with frank discussions of mental illness and therapist shout-outs, there’s something to be said for the metaphorical quality of a song like “Nightmare Machine,” where the word “anxiety” doesn’t even appear. It deals in the same small exaggeration that makes science-fiction and fantasy so compelling; reality is stranger than fiction, but fiction can also be realer than reality. Okusami said as much in an interview with Under the Radar: “It brings the story across in a more true way. I feel like if you just straight up said all the facts of it, that would just feel kind of dry and you wouldn’t really get the emotion of it.”

A song like that has a real shot at cracking you open when you least expect it. I’d love to say “Nightmare Machine” was my turning point—that a song changed my life. But that’s not what songs are for. What it did was force me to admit to myself that I wasn’t coping as well as I wanted to. I should have asked for help right then and there, but instead, I wrote an early version of this essay and set it aside without showing anyone. I let anxiety sit like an old tub of yogurt at the back of the refrigerator of my mind, mutating new shapes and colors I couldn’t make myself look at. By February of this year, a perfectly harmless heart palpitation was enough to break the seal and send the whole rancid mess spilling out. Just one extra heartbeat felt like a sure sign that it was my turn to go the way of all those people on the news. Someone in the world was going to have a random deadly heart failure that day. Why wouldn’t it be me?

Of course, it wasn’t. And on some remote level, I knew it wasn’t, and wouldn’t be, and if it was, what good was hyperventilating? Every story that scared me made the news precisely because it was unusual, and anyway, when you zoom out, most of what looks like senseless tragedy stems from structural failure. But even after the EKG, it took months before I started waking up without that uneasy feeling in my chest and stopped compulsively Googling symptoms of a heart attack. At my lowest point, I spent whole days holding my fingers to my neck, feeling for a pulse I believed would stop if I didn’t listen for it. I had to rebuild my caffeine tolerance from scratch; if I wasn’t careful, a single cup of black tea could raise my heart rate and send me into a panic spiral. My wife had been through a similar phase with her own anxiety; if she hadn’t been there to remind me I was fine, actually, I would’ve been pestering the closest ER every three days.

I found a therapist who taught me grounding techniques to get through the episodes. I finally found a new job with nine-to-five hours and no TV. I started going out to shows again and reacquainted myself with the feeling of a kick drum drowning out the sound in my chest. Eventually, the panic attacks got less frequent; until a week ago, I planned to use this paragraph to announce that I hadn’t had one in five months. Oh well—I’ve been told my goal should be progress, not perfection. The single most important thing I learned was a little mental game my therapist taught me to help me fall asleep. After all, as I heard from another, lighter song on Nothing’s Ever Fine, the best thing you can do some days is “go to bed and start again tomorrow.”

Taylor Ruckle is an Arlington, Virginia-based music writer for publications like Post-Trash, FLOOD Magazine, and Washington City Paper. Find him at @TaylorRuckle on Twitter, or on the balcony at the 9:30 Club.