is feeling Bad
I'm a student finishing my BA in liberal arts next month, and going to graduate school in the fall. I play mid-nineties pop songs on the ukulele. I have a stub-tailed cat named Spoon. I have Panic Disorder, and that's the one part of my life that blows the hardest. I'm a writer, and I've never found anything more difficult to express in words than the certainty of catastrophe that grips me all of the time, not just during the attacks themselves. My fear of death has become almost unmanageable since this began in November. It would be fair to say I am obsessed with it. My mind wanders in classes, I think of the experience of it, I worry excessively about "bad air" in buildings and in the subway. I think the suffocation experience of my first panic attack traumatized me in ways I've yet to deal with. I have been doing well these past few months, mostly off of medication. Twice-a-week therapy , yoga, meditation, and reduced caffeine intake have surely helped. But recently (due to stress, surely, related to my thesis and other finals and graduation) I've been unable to sleep, and lonely with my condition, especially these terrible night-time panics, and suffocation dreams. Thus, internet community.
Hermann Hesse, Gary Lutz, John Ashbery, Ukulele, Peter Sarstedt, David Bowie, Narrative, Collage, Interiority, Smells, Yoga, Cigarettes.
April 24, 2008 6:10am
Things having been going pretty well lately. My subway commute, once the most intolerable part of my life, has returned to being a mere annoyance. I …
I am 21, suffered from specific phobias as a kid, but came down with panic disorder with agoraphobia last November. The first panic attack I had was on the subway, I thought there must be a gas leak, some kind of poison in the air. As my arms and legs went numb I realized, this must be what it's like to die. Now even when I'm not in a panic I think about death, and every sensation in my body (and of course, I notice all of them) feels like the beginning of the end.
