Panic Attacks

The Tornado of Anxiety

When I was young, I recall feeling like I was walking in a fog. As if I wasn’t really real. Mariah Carey once wrote a song called “Looking In”, and there’s a lyric I have always strongly related to. That you’re someone else you’re looking in.

That’s what it’s like. You’re you, but everything is clouded in a deep mist. You are there, but sensory inputs are muted. Until they’re not. A sudden realization that I was alive, mortal, and would one day die swirled into an existential angst that questioned reality, existence, and the knowledge of impending death.

I’m speaking of when I was five or six years old.

Now, the anxiety affecting one person won’t be that which afflicts another. I was raised in the Jehovah’s Witness religion, and at a very young age, we’re inculcated with the notion that salvation is something one works for and very hard at that. Preparing for death at such a young age with no safety net or assurance of love or grace made every step potentially your last before imploding into the destruction they preached was inevitable for those who did not measure up.

In the 1980s, as far as I recall, there was no language in the common vernacular for those who suffered torrents of amorphous clouds in their soul that morphed into terrifying cyclones capable of psychic destruction. The gray twisted into shapes like hands strangling me from the inside. And so, I and others like me, suffered in silence. I dared not speak of it lest I be thought to be crazy.

The anxiety about the anxiety likewise creates more anxiety. A factory of self-replicating storm cells, the choking sensation and struggle to breathe feel like death but appear placid on the outside. It’s being in a pool over your head with no one to pull you out.

It’s being the death row prisoner injected with lethal poisoning, killing you, but you’re unable to move a muscle in response. All looks well as you’re dying.

A veil of dread often precedes these hellish attacks like something awful is going to befall you. Time slows down, and your extremities experience numbness and sometimes tingling. Your chest may feel crushed. You have trouble breathing and don’t realize you’re huffing in small tufts of air like a woman in labor.

Lightheadedness follows.

With the sense of unreality closing in and the sense of impending doom, you sense you are in very real danger. Death seems imminent. Anxiety could not possibly cause the departing of soul from body and the weight of a tractor trailor on your frame. And so, you call 9-1-1 or have someone drive you to the emergency room.