That First Panic Attack
That Other Me is a series that explores the immediacy and intimacy of various mental health episodes I’ve experienced throughout my life. 1989 It’s an explosion in my head that shocks me from a restful sleep, a conflagration that engulfs me in anxiety so that I can’t see a way out. I sit up in bed. My brother sleeps obliviously in his own bed opposite me. But I might as well be alone. It’s just me. The night. And this terror. Something’s broken. That’s all I know. Like my right arm, which I broke nearly three years earlier while playing a social game of football. I jumped, was flipped in…
That Other Me
That Other Me is a series that explores the immediacy and intimacy of various mental health episodes I’ve experienced throughout my life. 2016 I walk and walk and walk, taking a roundabout course from my home, unable to settle thoughts much too quick to be contained or moderated, the agitation from their mania pulsing through my body. Is this it? That’s a question growing increasingly prevalent in my forties – to have emerged from five years of severe agoraphobia, decades of anxiety and all these other mental health challenges, only to be here, much more capable in some ways but mentally unstabler in others; circumstantially unsatisfied, physically debilitated with chronic…