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
Back in the 1980s when I was just a teen, I had a lot of mental health issues before I even knew what they were. They were my normal – being agitated, or having unexplainable bouts of melancholy, or feeling a disconnect from everybody else. It wasn’t until they exploded into panic attacks that the public hospital psychiatrist was able to give me some muddy clarity. But the worst of those mental health issues, the meltdowns, came at important times developmentally – when I should’ve been making my way out into the world, I was dealing with anxiety, cluster panic attacks, and OCD; when friends were marrying and working steadily,…
Search