Today I’m having a panic attack.

What a fucking horrible sentence that is. It is one I never wanted to say or write again, and yet there she is! Right there. I don’t know why.

I was doing so well for so long. It had been a little over one year. One year since my mind and body threw me through another one of these shit storms. Stupidly, part of me had hoped I was cured. I enjoyed talking about anxiety as a thing of the past. I partially believed that it was gone.

The other half of my brain knew very well that I would be right here once again, and it laughed at the first half of my mind for its idiocy.

That I guess is the part that annoys me about all of this (other than the general fact that I’m having a panic attack of course). I knew it would come back. I knew in the right circumstances I would be right here again, but I had so hoped that I wouldn’t be. I hoped for it so much that I convinced myself, at least partially, that it was true.

Never again would I feel the heat in my face and the shaking of my hands. Never would I feel the adrenaline pumping through my veins without a proper cause for it being there. Never again would I fear passing out before realizing that it was only another attack. Only…

I tried reading poetry. I definitely cried. I cried full tears loudly as I walked around my empty house. There was snot. It wasn’t pretty, but crying isn’t supposed to be. I tried to eat but my appetite is gone. I tried to unpack my clothes that are still in their boxes. A simple meaningless task such as folding however was just TOO MUCH for this mind of mine. Folding sent me right over the edge again. I was back in the panic pool shivering while burning up, and shaking, and ugly crying all over again.

This is all ridiculous. I have a stressful job, but it isn’t anything I can’t manage. I’m good at my job. I enjoy my job, yet today my job was too much. Today my mind decided that life was just a bit too much and a new house, and taxes due, and money being money and never being enough, and my job, and my life, and my fears all just became too much and now I’m crying again. Fuck.

I don’t know what to do from here. I can’t keep running away from everything that gives me a panic attack. Living in Spain gave me panic attacks. A random day at work gives me a panic attack. Doing nothing gives me attacks and doing too much gives me attacks.

But it’s been a year.

I thought I was okay.

But today I had a panic attack.

And I will probably have another.

But I am living and I will be okay, and eventually I will once again get to a place where I stupidly convince myself that they are gone. I will live in that beautiful bliss, fully aware that it is smoke and mirrors. I will be happy there. I just need to make it through a bit of dark reality first.

Today is not my day.

©C. O’Connor, 2018