Anatomy of a panic attack.

[Joie Violette blouse + my fat pants.]

I like how in movies the whimpering, panicky old broad always gets slapped in the face.

“Get a HOLD of yourself, you daft cow!”

There’s a reason it’s become a cliche: because it works.

If I’m not talking about paranoia related to procreation, I guess I’m talking about anxiety. It’s my thang; I’m like a nervous prophet of feeling weird. Monday morning I was fresh off a 3.2 on the Richter scale attack—a weird, dawdling kinda spiral that essentially had bad manners, but never got around to pooping in the punch. It didn’t go anywhere, just turned a trip to Dick’s Sporting Goods into a fun experiment in finding what sorts of weird things could give me panic attacks.

Answer: everything from kids’ cleats to a misplaced worry about the 401K’s of the employees pushing rolling racks around. Cleats!

All across the country, in suburban shopping malls dotting states from here to Montana, people are purchasing these little shoes for kids they’ve pushed out and paid for. They’ve gotten that far! I can’t afford my car repairs, yet am standing here considering small neon shoes. The “here” to “there” struck me as such a long and unfathomable distance, were I to even travel it, and I kind of crumpled.

Panic spirals start to feel familiar—the onset, certainly, and the steps around the more dangerous slippery slopes. But I have a hard time with the escape part. There have been as many resolutions as there have been attacks, so, how’d I do it before?

I ended up having a bleak moment sitting on a pile of men’s dri-fit shirts thinking about the one I revisit most often. Summer camp—a rollicking disaster from my childhood where I held on to sanity by a sleeping bag drawstring, homesick to the point of madness. How’d little me pull through? “Give me a hint,” I thought, with narrowed eyes, scanning the memory for a clue.

I’d kept a calendar countdown of days until it was time to go home. A counselor named Ivy found it and looked at me, heartbroken. I was supposed to want to be there. My best friend would hold my hand during rest hour while I cried in my bed, guiding me through visualization exercises I’m sure she’d overheard from her psychologist mother. I took showers in record time. Lacrosse had saved my hide that summer. I was the youngest one in the class, so dissolving into older girls’ conversations kept me afloat.

Then, gingerly, I moved on to a summer trip with my grandparents. Same jam: homesick, fingers crossed I wouldn’t feel the little noose that tightens before tears. I’d kept an intense journal that trip—every hike, blueprints of buildings and hotel rooms, movie reviews from pay-per-views, vistas, and meals from New Jersey to Niagara Falls. The days were easy. It was the nights when I wondered if my constantly quivering chin was visible. The cut-out Cupid Valentine taped to the ceiling in the kids’ cabin with a fat, dusty moth cocoon clinging to its face. Cool, empty and inky nights like the Ontario lake I’d swam in every morning. Cold enough to take your breath away. Diving in was like accepting your own dare.

Years later, I went on a month-long bike trip through New England. Exponential risks for nooses. In a routine physical a month earlier, I’d heard my mother ask the doctor, “When do you think she’ll get her period?” implying we’d like assurance it wouldn’t be during the July of that summer when I was away from home with my life in two zippered nylon panniers. “It will probably happen when she’s on the trip,” he chuckled. “That’s the way these things usually work out.”

We spent a week driving all over Richmond collecting things off a checklist. Plastic water bottles, bottle holder, travel air pump, traveler’s checks, a helmet, spare tubes, gloves, and tiny-sized things to fit into the puzzle of storage options secured to my bike. Even tiny tampons. Nothing yet. No noose.

When she dropped me off at Williams College—where we’d spend a few days learning our gears and taking practice rides before heading toward Falmouth, Mass. to start the trek—I met all but one of the other girls, put my stuff in a dorm room, then stood on the front porch to say goodbye.

In an instant, in the seconds between her snapping a quick photo and waving goodbye, the noose whirred and caught, knocking the wind out of me. I steadied myself.

I looked off in her direction, then turned on a dime before she’d even made her full exit, refusal rising up fast.

I faced the girls and raised my palms, smiling. “Let’s go meet Sara, guys, shall we?”

So plucky. And it worked.

In the car on the way home from the mall—Monday, here in 2014—a tractor trailer blew out a tire right next to us. The shockwave rocked the car for an instant. My ears were ringing.

Then it was over.

Before I’d even had a chance to concoct some trifecta of anxiety antidotes past, I got slapped—right across the face.

-C.

p.s. Went back to Williams later, when we were living up in Vermont, to see how things felt. Read the post here.