It was high school algebra, and I was sitting silently in my seat. I started to feel a familiar feeling that sometimes crept up on me and made me feel sick or like I was going to explode and die. By this point, I knew this feeling wasn’t normal. It was something I had grown up with, but not something my family understood. My parents didn’t know what panic attacks were. My brothers thought I was being overly dramatic. Hysterical even!
I knew this was another thing about me to hide. This particular day, I felt my breathing tighten and I started sweating in my seat, but I just looked straight ahead, and I vividly remember thinking these thoughts while I stared into the head of the person sitting in the desk in front of me.
– something is very wrong with me.
– I am not normal.
– no one else is feeling like this.
– look at this person in front of me, just sitting there, like a normal person, not about to die like I am.
– Why do they get to just think normal thoughts?
– No one knows I’m like this.
– why am I like this?
– why am I like this?
– WHY AM I LIKE THIS?
The only thing that helped was physically moving, but unfortunately we were not allowed to just get up and walk out of class so we could roam the halls trying to get our breath back into our bodies. Instead I sat there and held it in, preferring to risk spontaneously combusting than to try to make anyone understand that there was something seriously wrong with me. I clenched and unclenched my fists. I tried to breathe, but not too loudly. I told myself I wasn’t going to throw up even though I was definitely going to throw up.
Eventually the feeling faded or the class ended or maybe I did die and this is just a different life I stepped into. Maybe every time I had a panic attack, I died and started again.
When they happened at home, my mom used to walk with me. I would tell her I couldn’t breathe. And she would say I definitely could breathe, because I needed to breathe to tell her I couldn’t breathe. Which would make me feel one atomic sub particle better. She would take me outside for fresh air and because I thought I was going to throw up every single time, so being outside felt better just in case. We would walk in circles in the front yard and she would talk to me about random things to help distract me. I would tell her “I can’t, I can’t, I can’t.” And she would say “you can, you can, you can.” She was my little blue engine that carried me over the hill.
When I was 17, I finally saw my first therapist. I don’t remember what event actually prompted the first visit. I just remember the relief at finally understanding what the actual fuck was wrong with me. Oh, panic attacks. Yeah, that’s a thing. Not a crazy person thing, just a normal thing that happens to some people. It was also something I could learn coping mechanisms for and there was medication I could take when the coping mechanisms didn’t work.
I’ve had panic attacks for as long as I can remember, and at 17 I found out what they were. I tried hypnotherapy, and while I don’t think I’m the type of person who can be hypnotized (panic is partly about control), I did learn a lot from that. If you’ve never had hypnotherapy, it often starts with walking down a set of stairs and to a door and through the door is a happy place. My happy place was walking the trail near our house with my mother.
When I hit my 30s, my panic attacks mostly receded. Now they are pretty rare, though I still have anxiety and excessive intrusive thoughts and the occasional melancholy. When I do start to feel pressure build, I still think about that trail and my mom talking me down. When I get into full blown anxiety, she’s the one I call crying because I know her soothing will bring me back to earth. Honestly, without my mom I’m not sure I would have made it through high school.
Masked Misfit 
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