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 midair, and all my weight came down on my right hand as I braced for impact. The bones in my forearm snapped under the weight, sounding like a plank of wood breaking in two.

When I sat up, tenderly clutching my right wrist, I saw a forty-five-degree-deviation in the middle of my forearm – exactly where a deviation shouldn’t be – and all I could think was, That’s broken, and maybe in a way they’re never putting that back together again.

But now that’s happened in my head – my capacity to think, my everyday composure, that state of simply being me, has been obliterated, and spilling out is this searing worry that’s only containment (barely) is me. I don’t know how there could be so much worry, or how to stuff it back into wherever it came from, or whether it can ever be put back.

I could wake my parents and tell them, but – at 18 – that seems so babyish. And it’s not really the done thing in our family. We don’t share those sorts of things, although I don’t know why. Soap families have always seemed so improbable to me – talking, discussing problems, dealing with them like, well, humans. I’ve never known that.

Getting out of bed, I make my way into the living room. Our household heater is broken, and we’ve been using a little fan job to get by. It’s pitiful as I sit next to it, trying to warm myself, trying to find a way settle. A book I’ve been reading sits on the coffee table, but I read and reread the same paragraphs, unable to process or understand the words.

I don’t understand the fear, the overwhelming certainty and dread that not only is there something wrong – although that focus isn’t attached to anything specific – but that there’s no way to navigate it. It’s not settling, nor easing. It’s like waking from a nightmare, only to stay in the fear, rather than waking diluting it, and time dismissing it, until it all seems so surreal that it becomes not real at all.

This is staying real.

This is reality.

Sleep’s the only escape. Sleep always is. And sleep is meant to ameliorate any problem.

But when I crawl back into bed, I’m cold and can’t find any peacefulness.

That fiery panic follows me into a fitful sleep, and when I wake in the morning, it’s still there.

Just like it might’ve always been.