I don’t know when I had my first full-blown anxiety attack, or what precipitated it. I do remember it happened in a particularly stressful period in my life, when I was torn between my heart’s longing and my mind’s screaming “Stop! Run! Don’t!” My whole life was in turmoil and wrought with uncertainty. Anything could change at any moment, unpredictably. Every waking minute I was expecting the proverbial axe to fall again (and again) and destroy whatever progress I’d made since the last axe fell. Progress through my late teens and twenties was made haphazardly, first backward, then sideways, then forward diagonally, then forward again. Progress was hard to come by. And I operated by instinct, with no wisdom to draw on and only a shallow well of experience to learn from.
I also, like many young people, arrogantly dismissed the wisdom of the elders in my life who had decades of earned wisdom to draw on. And they were willing to share that wisdom, if only I would receive it as the gift it was.
Honestly, nobody could rescue me, because I wasn’t sure if I even wanted to be rescued. The chaos felt like “the way it should be,” if that makes sense.
Remembering that time, I feel an old familiar tightening in my chest.
I came by my anxiety naturally; my young developing brain was exposed regularly to unpredictable and sometimes frightening experiences, like the time my brother Bruce and I were both thrown from a vehicle as a tire blowout caused a violent rollover downhill off the side of a highway in West Point, New York. My grandmother (the driver) survived, thank God. We all did. While she hung upside down by her seatbelt in the crumpled rental, my 11-year-old brother pulled himself from the wreckage and crawled to the top of that hill, waving down passing cars, miraculously flagging down two doctors driving home together from a hospital shift. I was lying unconscious far from where the car came to rest. My brother thought I was dead. I can still hear him screaming in the distance as I came to.
There was other stuff, too, the kind of stuff I don’t want to talk about just yet. The kind of stuff I’d have to put a *trigger* warning on, just to be cognizant of readers who may be in a flashback season of their own healing journey.
Suffice it to say, in my world, things could change in an instant, and unpleasant and even terrible things could happen when your guard was down, when you weren’t vigilant, when you and those around you weren’t doing everything possible to keep you safe.
We also moved a lot. Every couple years until I was in 5th grade, and yearly after that. Military life. It seemed we were constantly uprooting our lives before we could get settled in and my parents could be relieved of the stress they were under. I loved the “starting over” part of going to a different school every year. But it’s hard to learn to connect deeply with others when you barely have enough time to get to know them before you’re saying good-bye again.
Eventually, after too many moves and one too many traumatic experiences (when one is too many), I grew into a control-hungry, control-needy young woman. One whose decisions and thoughts were dictated by the “wisdom” I had earned through my insecure, unpredictable first two decades.
Without the humility needed to listen to those whose wisdom I had available to me, what I did instead was retraumatize myself again and again by what I either allowed or engaged in, just trying to process it all while I lived my haphazard-progress life.
And I lived like that for years.
Eventually, I “discovered” there was no control to be had. I couldn’t control anyone else but myself. I found solace, peace even, in disordered eating and then a full-blown eating disorder. And then I found my way, or fell my way, into alcohol abuse. I was 18 years old, in college full-time, failing my first semester freshman year, binge drinking and purging and partying my way to destruction.
And then one day, I don’t remember when, my body and mind began to fail me out of the blue. In one episode, I woke up on the floor of a shopping mall restaurant, my brother Bruce leaning over me and calling my name. He said we’d been moving through the buffet line when I slowly leaned over and faceplanted against the sneeze guard before sliding down onto the floor.
At some point, I seemed to be having these “episodes” all the time. I would feel a flutter and flip in my chest. I’d instantly become super-focused on my pulse, then on my breathing, and I wouldn’t be able to fill my lungs. And then my mind would fog. I couldn’t think. Panic would set in. My heart would race, I’d try to breathe, I’d get lightheaded, and then I’d wake up on the floor or the lawn or wherever I happened to be standing moments before.
Eventually I developed a fear of going out without my husband Scott. I wanted him to be with me at all times, in case I had a panic attack. An anxiety attack. Whatever it was. I didn’t want to be alone, or with someone who had never seen this happen to me before. With someone who wouldn’t know to catch me, to break my fall.
What an awful, terrible, sad way to live.
Over the years I tried counseling, several times for the eating disorder, then marriage counseling, and then for one specific life-changing trauma. And those sessions, those seasons of counseling, absolutely helped me. For once I was seeking wisdom from people I hoped “knew better than me.” And their expertise helped me.
But not with the anxiety attacks.
And then, in my mid-thirties, something life-altering happened to me. Something that changed the way I saw myself. The way I saw others, even those who had harmed or mistreated me. And I began to gain a new perspective on this messy journey we call “life.”
I began to experience true peace for the first time in my life. A peace beyond my understanding at the time.
Part 2 coming soon…
