Tag Archives: panic

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What they teach you when you are treated for a panic disorder is something that I find particularly important. And I would like everyone to read this because this is something that I really think everybody can use.
   The whole basis of the treatment is merely a true understanding that although this is terrible and you feel as if this is the end – ITS NOT. The most effective treatment from any really caring, trained doctor isn’t drugs or any other means of escape from it (which is the easy way for both of you and probably more profitable for them) Instead, its EXPOSURE. What that means is that when you’re knees are giving out and it feels like you cant breathe and you feel like this is truly the end. STAY. Dance with it. Let it run through you. It will be ok.

  So, It’s like being shot with an arrow. This hurts right now, but you’re ok. You shouldn’t struggle to try to pull it back out, you have to push it through yourself. Let it run its course. Or else you can just keep taking perscription pills for the pain and just walk around with an arrow stuck in you forever.

THE SIMPLE TREATMENT IS JUST WHOLEHEARTEDLY KNOWING THAT ALTHOUGH THIS FEELS TERRIBLE RIGHT NOW, ITS NOT THE END. YOU’RE OK. TIME WILL HEAL IT. BE PATIENT.

And that right there, is one of the most important pieces of information I’ve ever learned in my life. Whether you suffer from panic disorder or not.

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Todays heaviness bore down on me from the very start. My mind was not built to cope with the type of punishments that I put it through and days like this worry me because I can feel the very last of my sensibilities giving way to much more devastating things.
Madness conveys its affections towards me,and whatever distasteful creature lurks in the dark attic of a mans soul, begins to figet in its chamber – behind my eyes.
These anxieties do not speak a single word and yet have the ability to convince all of my common sense of its inferiority and redundancy and so all logic leaves on its own accord, and what’s left is what you’d see of me on days like today; lowly, writhing scraps of a man.
But how could one talk down such a frenzy that knows nothing of any type of vernacular? Consisting only of a mouth that gnaws and hands that only rip and claw.

Living with a panic disorder is to continually be killed again and again and each time is different than the others. What then happens – after years of terrible exposure to this – is a pathetic type of survivalism. A negative neuroplasticity. Faulty wiring. We grow accustomed to the fear and begin to subconsciously nurture and enable it. It sits within our gut like a wayward son that we care for through some unfortunate instinct and a moment without this mania is even more terrifying than the initial dismay. A days worth of silence is far too eerie. ….like that strange orange hue the sky takes on just before the tempest.
Something sinister is lurking just past the horizon. We know. So we learn to nurse this disgusting companion.

All of this builds an incredible amount of character – constantly fighting for your life.  But a deep sorrow comes from the triviality of it all. Awareness that the battles we wage regularly, however endless, are not true. And the only soldier is the now frail voice of reason laying war-torn in the foxholes of a mundane daily routine. There is no honor in a war that no one knows of.

Only through some faulty destiny do we survive. Strong enough to endure this consistent despair in humble silence, yet not enough to rid ourselves of these useless endeavors.

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Pulses of anxiety run up my legs and rush up my spine towards my brain the way squirrels climb up bird feeders out back. They collect tiny peices of my mind and run away out into the yard. Every morning I am confronted with the awareness that there are despicable things waiting, and every morning I wake up with less and less of the pieces required to place logic and reasoning in between me and the fear. The Earth feels entirely hollow beneath my feet and inclined to crack and give way at any moment. I’ve spent the better part of 20 years stuck in that tiny bit of helplessness you feel when you go to pay at a restaurant and suddenly discover your wallet missing. 
Vertigo is my consort.
What a repugnant companion.
What an uncharming life.

I lay in my bed and listen to the overwhelming silence and try frantically to discover any type of distraction. I begin to focus on the sound of my cat patting around a small insect – Indifferent to its demise.  It reminds me of being a child in Jersey and all the times I used to bring jars of fireflies in from the field. My mother would smile. Even fully aware that I was destroying all these undeserving little things, she didnt say a word. Innocence is so endearing even though it can mean the destruction of another. A child kills something and we feel empathy, an adult kills something and we feel rage and sickness. It becomes forgivable when we know not our trail of ruined things or countless inflictions. That’s the basis of a lot of poisonous relationships in our lives. Its also the basis of a blissful, childlike existence.

My mother crept into my room each morning and threw away my jar of dead things and smiled. As if I was a cat who dragged a lifeless mouse in as a deplorable gift. To give thanks. She understood that its better to pick the mangled rodent up with a glove and a trash bin than to tamper with that type of innocence and instill the kind of messes within a child that no disinfectant can clean. Thats what we do when we are young – our selfishness and innocence is the most admirable and preposessing thing, even through the complete destruction of all else. 

My only goal in life is to never stop being capable of this. Everything else can drop dead behind me and I’ll hardly notice. I’d like to playfully rip the world apart limb from limb between my claws like an insect and then move on to another without any recollection.

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