The Big Goodbye
It wasn’t long after I finished my typewritten novel that I started experiencing panic attacks. The first one woke me in the middle of the night, terrifying me, and leaving me seething with anxiety. I was sure something had broken inside my head. I thought the anxiety would run it’s course, the way a cold would, but it remained omnipresent. The nights became a horror; I dreaded the quiet, where the anxiety could just spill out into the emptiness. But, conversely, sleep brought the only refuge. Finally, I decided I needed to see a GP – just not my GP, who knew my parents well. I didn’t want to risk…
Twenty-Four
The very first melancholy episode I can remember experiencing occurred when I was ten. It was a simple moment of darkness, of feeling inexplicably down. Given it arrived with little surprise, things must’ve been happening earlier that normalised this for me, although I don’t recall anything specific. These episodes got worse through my teens, along with periods of agitation, punctuated by the occasional manic burst of energy. But I learned to mask it all as best as I could, although that wasn’t always easy. These things made it hard to fit in, hard to connect, hard to be like everybody else. Everything was an act. I looked like one of…