Anxiety and Me

Panic has been a part of my life for a long time, a bit like an acquaintance you don't really have any time for but who just won't leave you alone until you go for a drink with them, it sits there over your shoulder. Waiting.

A brief history of my anxiety is this: I don't remember being able to stop thinking. Ever. I don't remember a time when I haven't worried myself into knots about something and lay in bed at night just listening to the jumbled, rambling nonsense of my brain. When I was about sixteen or seventeen it got worse, and by the time I was nineteen and twenty I was having panic attacks nearly everyday.

I haven't had a panic attack in five years, but I would quite like to tell you about them anyway.

A panic attack, when it happens, is a strange phenomenon, not unlike having an out of body experience (not that I can claim to have had many of these to compare to, I grant). I know what is happening but yet can do absolutely nothing about it. They are, oddly, usually started off by something absolutely trivial which I can't remember at the end of the whole thing. Never the less it happens, the muscle of my throat contracts, becomes a tight, solid, useless mass and all the while my brain is saying 'you know how to breathe', and I do. It's In. Out. In. Out. Right? So that's what I do, but instead it turns stupidly into inoutinoutinoutinout. Making all the right moves just not, you know. Breathing. I suck air in at an astounding rate and send it nowhere except uselessly back out where in came from. How can you concentrate so hard on breathing but not be able to breathe? Inevitably the hysteria of ohchristi'mgoingtodie kicks in (not so helpful when trying to breathe) and eventually I pass out on the nearest available surface/person, thus taking matters out of my control. Thank God! My body cries, Now I can get on with it properly! And it does, and I wake up and got about my business.

I used to spend a lot of time and energy pretending to be a "normal" human being, but recently I find myself believing that this person doesn't exist. What is a normal human being anyway? I tell people I haven't had a panic attack in five years and they smile and nod and say "Oh good, you're better then!" And I smile and nod in return, thinking it would be rude to tell them that I don't think I was sick in the first place, so how could I be better? I don't tell them that I have worked very hard on not panicking, that I have methods and ways, that when I feel the panic rising in my gut to twine about my throat I close my eyes, open my lungs and breathe from my toes. Because even after all this time, and even though a little part of me loves my anxiety for making me who I am, it still feels a touch like admitting you're always going to be crazy.

Even though I know I am not.

And I write this blog not to get sympathy or because I feel an overwhelming desire to share, but because I hope it might reach even one person who is now where I was seven years ago. Anxiety can be a lonely place if you don't have the right people, and so I don't often ask you to retweet my link, or talk about my blog, but I hope you might this time. Because it would be very nice to feel I've helped, even if it is just in this tiny way.