Fear Part I: How Does It Fucking Feel?
Sometimes I have panic attacks. Anxiety attacks. Whatever.
I want to talk about what it feels like. A lot of you have them too. This is for you, so you know you aren't alone.
A lot of you don't have them. If that describes you, don't skip this.
Read it.
See, a lot of people don't really understand what having one can do to you, or they think that only weak, chickenshit people have a panic disorder in the first place. Lots of folks have panic attacks and suffer in silence. It's not a problem that gets talked about.
It's because of this that I'm putting a face on this bitch, right now.
I've had panic attacks since I was about ten, but went through nearly a decade where I didn't have any, until they came back to kick me in the ass and turn me into a blithering sack of cowering innards for six months two years. Since then they've come and gone, and though they've threatened lately, I haven't had a full-blown panic attack in about a year. I consider this a victory.
The first one happened as I was riding my bike. It was a beautiful summer evening full of yellow light and soft winds. I was ten years old, give or take, I had two parents who didn't beat me, I ate dinner off the table and not the floor, I didn't have rickets. Life was okay. And suddenly, out of goddamn nowhere, something misfired in my brain.
I got scared. No reason. Just . . . blindingly afraid. My heart was pounding, my palms were sweating, I felt like I was going to throw up. I was only a kid. I had no idea what was happening. What was wrong? Was I sick? Could this be precognition, an intimation of my imminent death? Were my latent telepathic abilities finally kicking in, allowing me to pick up on the brainwaves of some dying animal by the roadside? Was I tuned in to the brainwaves of someone about to kill me? Was someone I knew dying right now?
I managed to drag myself home, ditched my bike on the front porch and staggered inside, where I lay on the couch in the living room and shook like a shaved Pomeranian for half an hour. The beautiful light of the setting sun now seemed like life draining from the world. Everything seemed to draw further away. It felt as though there was an invisible fuzzy blanket between me and everything, but at the same time everything seemed too penetrating and real. My lips were numb, and my hands and thighs felt like melting ice cubes: cold but sweating. My stomach was tighter than the knot in a balloon.
I don't know if the thought came before the panic set in, or in the middle of the fit, but all I could think was "I'm going to die!"
That was simultaneously my first panic attack and my first true comprehension of my own mortality. It was only the first. There were others. The bad ones had me locking myself in the bathroom at school, crammed into the space between toilet and cabinet, shivering like a lab animal. I can't liken the feeling to anything else I have ever felt. Perhaps that white-cold moment in my car accident a few years back where I saw the minivan coming and knew it was going to hit me, and I knew that I was going to end up badly hurt and maybe dead. Except that was over so fast, it didn't have time to cut deep. These panic attacks went on and on, like acid on a wound, and they burned down to the bone.
The less-bad ones I call "the Creeps." A feeling of being watched or hunted; a nameless dread like the nasty feeling that comes if you watch too many movies that really do scare you. Not immediate fear, but a lingering uneasiness, a malaise.
Ever go to sleep while the sun is up, and then awaken when it's night? Ever go into a movie when it's light out, and come out to find it dark? Does that freak out the ape in your brain just a little? That feeling of disorientation and worry is very much like the Creeps. I get it often, for no reason. It's as though the eerie violin music from Watership Down just starts up in the back of my head, and everything is tinged with fear. The world can appear bluish grey in these moments, like I'm looking through thick glass. Sometimes it looks yellowish, or dusty.
When I was alone in the house as a child I used to worry that everyone else in the world had died and I just didn't know it yet. I worried that I was completely alone, abandoned. I used to turn the radio on to talk stations just so I could hear live voices. I would sit and watch the park across the street. If there was nobody jogging or playing soccer it seemed empty as a post-holocaust hell-world. Failing radio and park, I sought my cats. And prank phone calls. The annoyed human voice on the other end of the line was always immensely reassuring to me.
Sometimes I couldn't sleep without hearing human voices so on nights when my parents had gone to bed early I would sneak out of my room, wrap myself in a blanket, and put on Nick at Nite. I'd watch Car 54, Where Are You? and eat Chips Ahoy until I felt tired enough to doze through the haze of unreality.
I had these panic attacks for a couple of years, then I found comfort in my quasi-pagan faith, and my fear was lifted from me like a caul.* What need to fear death, when death was but one of Her many faces? I walked free for years before my faith fermented in me, turning to the absinthe of almost-atheism, and my fear has returned along with my bitter hyper-lucidity.
I had not known the meaning of fear. Oh, God, I had not known.
I remember my early to middle twenties as a blur, a horrific, Lovecraftian jumble. I don't know if it was two years or six months. I cannot remember what year it was when it began. Ninety-eight? Ninety-nine? It was so bad I lost time.
At its worst, I was having full-blown panic attacks three to five times a week, sometimes every damn day. And these lasted not for 20 or 30 minutes, like the literature says most panic attacks do, but for hours.
Imagine the most intense terror you have ever felt. Imagine it like one of those neato movie-theater faucets that turns on and off by itself. That is fear. Something definite triggers it, and your body only lets you feel so much of it before it tapers off, stops, so you can deal with the sabertooth or the alien invasion or the roach on the ceiling.
Now imagine your backyard hose, turned on at full.
That is what a panic attack is like.
Now imagine a maniac comes along with a sledgehammer and knocks the faucet handle off. You can't shut the water off. It will just gush out for hours. Your body won't turn it off. It can't.
That is what my panic attacks were like.
There were times when I would lie under my blanket and scream like a rabbit with oven cleaner in its eyes, scream until I was hoarse. There were times when I could not stop crying. I could barely eat, but I still gained weight. Every trip out of the house became a white-knuckled adventure in terror. Until you're seeing everything through the nightmare goggles of a panic attack, you can't understand what I'm talking about when I say that literally everything I saw frightened me.
The fresh ditches beside the road showing red dirt and sandstone became open wounds in the earth where roadkill crawled to die. Gravel rolled out of them like maggots. Dead trees thrust out of the ground like naked bones. The earth was rotting. Roads like grey scabs oozing black blood twisted across a cursed landscape. Clouds drew together in the sky like the edges of a wound, their undersides silvery as the membrane over raw muscle. Clocks ticked off the seconds until my impending death. I changed grocery stores because the closest one was right next to a crematorium, and I could always see the hearses parked out back, waiting. Once, a fleck of black ash came down and landed on my hand, and it was part of a person, and I still have trouble going back to that store because of it. I closed my eyes when driving past clinics I'd been in (and been fucked over in), and passing my old school, because they only reminded me of my helplessness. Dead animals lay perpetually on the road, bloody sacks of guts and broken bones, because we lived in a part of town where the city would not come and collect them. Their bloated bodies lingered, possum and raccoon, squirrel and cat and, once, a handsome dog fox that I picked up and carried into the woods barehanded so that I wouldn't have to see him get torn to pieces by traffic, or see him bloat by the roadside until something with a tooth for carrion carried him off.
I could never forget my fear. Everything reminded me of it.
I lived like this. I was literally insane. It could be argued that I'm only marginally sane now, but if you had met me then you would not have known me. Whatever strength you see in me now, it wasn't there in those years.
So that's what it's like. It's more terror than you've ever felt running a flat-out race up and down your spine, day in, day out. It's waking up blind in the middle of the night, scrabbling at the sheets, with a cry on your lips and your heart about to shatter your ribs, because you heard a tiny voice whisper out of your pillow . . . "You're going to just stop someday, and there won't be anything left of you at all." It's catching a blade of light coming through a dusty window at the wrong angle, and feeling yourself slip for no reason into another world where everything is dead or about to die.
That's what I lived with. That is what I live with the possibility of facing again. I haven't had one that bad for a very long time now, but the nature of the beast is that it recurs, returns.
That is why I sometimes leave parties early, why I don't always like to go out very often or stay out very long, why movie theaters and renfaires and car trips and large groups of people and airplanes and doctors' offices sometimes - but not always - frighten me. Because I hate being trapped and unable to get home when I start feeling one come on, and being overstimulated, overexcited, even if it is good stimulus, brings them on.
I don't drink caffeine, it triggers heart palpitations that can trigger a panic attack. I don't watch many gruesome movies. I hate loud noises. I don't like hospitals or nursing homes.
Now, you may be tempted to think of me as a pussy, a big fat wusswad who is scared of her own toenails. I assure you, nothing is further from the truth. There are a shitload of things I'm not scared of, thanks. The list of things I have done without fear would probably turn your hair white. I don't feel the need to brag about them, because if you don't believe me by now, I really don't care what you think.
But you should know what it's like to feel fear you can't leash, can't control. You should know how real and immediate it is. Because even if you don’t have them, chances are you know now or will someday know a person who does, and understanding these people as best you can without belittling them and what they deal with is about the kindest thing you can do for them.
If you are one of the people who has panic attacks, I urge you to do what I should have done but could not do because I had no insurance and no-one to help me: for the love of all you hold dear, get help.
Please.
And I don't just mean get pills, though those can be wonderful and helpful and you should not be ashamed to use them to break the cycle of panic. I mean get help to learn to control them. To cut them off before you need to take a pill. To ride them out when they happen. To recover when you've been swamped. Anxiety, panic attacks, they are extremely treatable, and virtually everyone who seeks help for them experiences significant improvement in symptoms.
I know it's hard. I know it's so fucking hard. I know that sometimes it's not possible. I understand that. The pain of it. All I am saying is that you should try, because you deserve it, because what you are dealing with? It's real. And it can be helped.
If you are a friend or family member of someone dealing with this crap, I can't tell you what to do beyond educate yourself about both the problem in general and what the person in question needs, and try to be open and understanding. If we appear agitated, or are insisting on something really odd or strange, like needing quiet or needing to go home right away or whatnot, be aware that we aren't trying to be party poopers - we're trying to control our panic. Please help us, if we ask for help - most of us find it so hard to do that by the time we ask for it, we really do need to be humored right away.
We really, really appreciate it.
Feel free to link this around if you know anyone you think should see it. Part two, about how stupid it is that we are expected to just "suck it up" and deal, is coming soon, so stay tuned.
* Which is not to say that I think that god-botherin' is the best cure for panic disorder. It isn't. Faith is a marvelous restorative, but you can't exactly force yourself into it for your sanity. And sometimes it doesn't help.
I want to talk about what it feels like. A lot of you have them too. This is for you, so you know you aren't alone.
A lot of you don't have them. If that describes you, don't skip this.
Read it.
See, a lot of people don't really understand what having one can do to you, or they think that only weak, chickenshit people have a panic disorder in the first place. Lots of folks have panic attacks and suffer in silence. It's not a problem that gets talked about.
It's because of this that I'm putting a face on this bitch, right now.
I've had panic attacks since I was about ten, but went through nearly a decade where I didn't have any, until they came back to kick me in the ass and turn me into a blithering sack of cowering innards for six months two years. Since then they've come and gone, and though they've threatened lately, I haven't had a full-blown panic attack in about a year. I consider this a victory.
The first one happened as I was riding my bike. It was a beautiful summer evening full of yellow light and soft winds. I was ten years old, give or take, I had two parents who didn't beat me, I ate dinner off the table and not the floor, I didn't have rickets. Life was okay. And suddenly, out of goddamn nowhere, something misfired in my brain.
I got scared. No reason. Just . . . blindingly afraid. My heart was pounding, my palms were sweating, I felt like I was going to throw up. I was only a kid. I had no idea what was happening. What was wrong? Was I sick? Could this be precognition, an intimation of my imminent death? Were my latent telepathic abilities finally kicking in, allowing me to pick up on the brainwaves of some dying animal by the roadside? Was I tuned in to the brainwaves of someone about to kill me? Was someone I knew dying right now?
I managed to drag myself home, ditched my bike on the front porch and staggered inside, where I lay on the couch in the living room and shook like a shaved Pomeranian for half an hour. The beautiful light of the setting sun now seemed like life draining from the world. Everything seemed to draw further away. It felt as though there was an invisible fuzzy blanket between me and everything, but at the same time everything seemed too penetrating and real. My lips were numb, and my hands and thighs felt like melting ice cubes: cold but sweating. My stomach was tighter than the knot in a balloon.
I don't know if the thought came before the panic set in, or in the middle of the fit, but all I could think was "I'm going to die!"
That was simultaneously my first panic attack and my first true comprehension of my own mortality. It was only the first. There were others. The bad ones had me locking myself in the bathroom at school, crammed into the space between toilet and cabinet, shivering like a lab animal. I can't liken the feeling to anything else I have ever felt. Perhaps that white-cold moment in my car accident a few years back where I saw the minivan coming and knew it was going to hit me, and I knew that I was going to end up badly hurt and maybe dead. Except that was over so fast, it didn't have time to cut deep. These panic attacks went on and on, like acid on a wound, and they burned down to the bone.
The less-bad ones I call "the Creeps." A feeling of being watched or hunted; a nameless dread like the nasty feeling that comes if you watch too many movies that really do scare you. Not immediate fear, but a lingering uneasiness, a malaise.
Ever go to sleep while the sun is up, and then awaken when it's night? Ever go into a movie when it's light out, and come out to find it dark? Does that freak out the ape in your brain just a little? That feeling of disorientation and worry is very much like the Creeps. I get it often, for no reason. It's as though the eerie violin music from Watership Down just starts up in the back of my head, and everything is tinged with fear. The world can appear bluish grey in these moments, like I'm looking through thick glass. Sometimes it looks yellowish, or dusty.
When I was alone in the house as a child I used to worry that everyone else in the world had died and I just didn't know it yet. I worried that I was completely alone, abandoned. I used to turn the radio on to talk stations just so I could hear live voices. I would sit and watch the park across the street. If there was nobody jogging or playing soccer it seemed empty as a post-holocaust hell-world. Failing radio and park, I sought my cats. And prank phone calls. The annoyed human voice on the other end of the line was always immensely reassuring to me.
Sometimes I couldn't sleep without hearing human voices so on nights when my parents had gone to bed early I would sneak out of my room, wrap myself in a blanket, and put on Nick at Nite. I'd watch Car 54, Where Are You? and eat Chips Ahoy until I felt tired enough to doze through the haze of unreality.
I had these panic attacks for a couple of years, then I found comfort in my quasi-pagan faith, and my fear was lifted from me like a caul.* What need to fear death, when death was but one of Her many faces? I walked free for years before my faith fermented in me, turning to the absinthe of almost-atheism, and my fear has returned along with my bitter hyper-lucidity.
I had not known the meaning of fear. Oh, God, I had not known.
I remember my early to middle twenties as a blur, a horrific, Lovecraftian jumble. I don't know if it was two years or six months. I cannot remember what year it was when it began. Ninety-eight? Ninety-nine? It was so bad I lost time.
At its worst, I was having full-blown panic attacks three to five times a week, sometimes every damn day. And these lasted not for 20 or 30 minutes, like the literature says most panic attacks do, but for hours.
Imagine the most intense terror you have ever felt. Imagine it like one of those neato movie-theater faucets that turns on and off by itself. That is fear. Something definite triggers it, and your body only lets you feel so much of it before it tapers off, stops, so you can deal with the sabertooth or the alien invasion or the roach on the ceiling.
Now imagine your backyard hose, turned on at full.
That is what a panic attack is like.
Now imagine a maniac comes along with a sledgehammer and knocks the faucet handle off. You can't shut the water off. It will just gush out for hours. Your body won't turn it off. It can't.
That is what my panic attacks were like.
There were times when I would lie under my blanket and scream like a rabbit with oven cleaner in its eyes, scream until I was hoarse. There were times when I could not stop crying. I could barely eat, but I still gained weight. Every trip out of the house became a white-knuckled adventure in terror. Until you're seeing everything through the nightmare goggles of a panic attack, you can't understand what I'm talking about when I say that literally everything I saw frightened me.
The fresh ditches beside the road showing red dirt and sandstone became open wounds in the earth where roadkill crawled to die. Gravel rolled out of them like maggots. Dead trees thrust out of the ground like naked bones. The earth was rotting. Roads like grey scabs oozing black blood twisted across a cursed landscape. Clouds drew together in the sky like the edges of a wound, their undersides silvery as the membrane over raw muscle. Clocks ticked off the seconds until my impending death. I changed grocery stores because the closest one was right next to a crematorium, and I could always see the hearses parked out back, waiting. Once, a fleck of black ash came down and landed on my hand, and it was part of a person, and I still have trouble going back to that store because of it. I closed my eyes when driving past clinics I'd been in (and been fucked over in), and passing my old school, because they only reminded me of my helplessness. Dead animals lay perpetually on the road, bloody sacks of guts and broken bones, because we lived in a part of town where the city would not come and collect them. Their bloated bodies lingered, possum and raccoon, squirrel and cat and, once, a handsome dog fox that I picked up and carried into the woods barehanded so that I wouldn't have to see him get torn to pieces by traffic, or see him bloat by the roadside until something with a tooth for carrion carried him off.
I could never forget my fear. Everything reminded me of it.
I lived like this. I was literally insane. It could be argued that I'm only marginally sane now, but if you had met me then you would not have known me. Whatever strength you see in me now, it wasn't there in those years.
So that's what it's like. It's more terror than you've ever felt running a flat-out race up and down your spine, day in, day out. It's waking up blind in the middle of the night, scrabbling at the sheets, with a cry on your lips and your heart about to shatter your ribs, because you heard a tiny voice whisper out of your pillow . . . "You're going to just stop someday, and there won't be anything left of you at all." It's catching a blade of light coming through a dusty window at the wrong angle, and feeling yourself slip for no reason into another world where everything is dead or about to die.
That's what I lived with. That is what I live with the possibility of facing again. I haven't had one that bad for a very long time now, but the nature of the beast is that it recurs, returns.
That is why I sometimes leave parties early, why I don't always like to go out very often or stay out very long, why movie theaters and renfaires and car trips and large groups of people and airplanes and doctors' offices sometimes - but not always - frighten me. Because I hate being trapped and unable to get home when I start feeling one come on, and being overstimulated, overexcited, even if it is good stimulus, brings them on.
I don't drink caffeine, it triggers heart palpitations that can trigger a panic attack. I don't watch many gruesome movies. I hate loud noises. I don't like hospitals or nursing homes.
Now, you may be tempted to think of me as a pussy, a big fat wusswad who is scared of her own toenails. I assure you, nothing is further from the truth. There are a shitload of things I'm not scared of, thanks. The list of things I have done without fear would probably turn your hair white. I don't feel the need to brag about them, because if you don't believe me by now, I really don't care what you think.
But you should know what it's like to feel fear you can't leash, can't control. You should know how real and immediate it is. Because even if you don’t have them, chances are you know now or will someday know a person who does, and understanding these people as best you can without belittling them and what they deal with is about the kindest thing you can do for them.
If you are one of the people who has panic attacks, I urge you to do what I should have done but could not do because I had no insurance and no-one to help me: for the love of all you hold dear, get help.
Please.
And I don't just mean get pills, though those can be wonderful and helpful and you should not be ashamed to use them to break the cycle of panic. I mean get help to learn to control them. To cut them off before you need to take a pill. To ride them out when they happen. To recover when you've been swamped. Anxiety, panic attacks, they are extremely treatable, and virtually everyone who seeks help for them experiences significant improvement in symptoms.
I know it's hard. I know it's so fucking hard. I know that sometimes it's not possible. I understand that. The pain of it. All I am saying is that you should try, because you deserve it, because what you are dealing with? It's real. And it can be helped.
If you are a friend or family member of someone dealing with this crap, I can't tell you what to do beyond educate yourself about both the problem in general and what the person in question needs, and try to be open and understanding. If we appear agitated, or are insisting on something really odd or strange, like needing quiet or needing to go home right away or whatnot, be aware that we aren't trying to be party poopers - we're trying to control our panic. Please help us, if we ask for help - most of us find it so hard to do that by the time we ask for it, we really do need to be humored right away.
We really, really appreciate it.
Feel free to link this around if you know anyone you think should see it. Part two, about how stupid it is that we are expected to just "suck it up" and deal, is coming soon, so stay tuned.
* Which is not to say that I think that god-botherin' is the best cure for panic disorder. It isn't. Faith is a marvelous restorative, but you can't exactly force yourself into it for your sanity. And sometimes it doesn't help.