First, it hit me on the night before my 18th birthday. I was at home, watching The Butterfly Effect when my heart started pounding like crazy. This was the first day I tried coffee and I drank quite a lot of it (now it doesn’t seem a lot, but for a first timer, it definitely was). I tried to ignore that, drank a lot of water and made myself something to eat to calm myself down (back then I still suffered from eating disorders, you can read my story here (click), so eating that late scared me out even more). I started sweating and breathing heavily and it was the first time that I was afraid I am going to have a heart attack and die.
About 15 minutes Iater, I woke up my mom and forced her to sleep in my room in case anything happens to me. I remember she thought that I was in such a bad state because of the movie, The Butterfly Effect, but slept in my room anyway. 10 minutes later we were already on our way to the hospital because I started crying and hyperventilating and had a feeling that I will faint in any second now.
When we arrived, it was already an emergency patient there and I started panicking in myself, why the hell do they ignore me when it is clear that I am having a heart attack. After the longest 5 minutes of my life, they called us in (I was laying on 3 chairs at that moment and crying like crazy) and you know what they gave me? Coca-cola. The doctor immediately realized that I was having a panic/anxiety attack, my blood sugar was low and they tried to calm me down with talking to me patiently. After 10 minutes it was literally like nothing happened and I went home.
The next day it was time to celebrate my birthday with some of my closest friends. I went to the mall, bought some wine and chips and went to the place where we were supposed to meet. And it struck me again. When my heart started pounding and my hands started shaking I was looking for an immediate escape. I ran home and told my friends that I am coming later. I never came back that night.
When the doctors told me, there was nothing physically wrong with me, I didn’t believe them and I was still convinced that something must be terribly wrong and I needed the scientifical proof. In the next few months, I went to a few different doctors to make sure there is really nothing physically wrong with me. I even went that far that I was hospitalized for two days because I said I was feeling chest pain all the time. I really did, but they didn’t find anything. And the panic attacks were still coming to visit me regularly.
A year after that I started college. At daytime I was fine, but on countless occasions, my mom had to come and pick me up in Maribor at like 1 a.m. because I was in such a bad state (it was about a 45-minute drive from home). I sort of felt safer at home but after a while, not even that helped. That was the time I started doing some research on the topic and realized, I suffer from a bad case of anxiety and had an irrational fear of death. I tried so many things to calm myself down; from drinking herbal tea, listening to calm music, meditating; but nothing ever worked. After a few minutes, I was even a bigger nervous wreck.
One day, while doing some research, I stumbled upon an interesting cartoon video on YouTube. It was about a woman, who had a panic attack in the middle of a shopping center. The voiceover explained, that, let’s call her Maria, is gonna have a panic attack and sort of showed what processes were going on in her body and her mind. What the voice said next, changed my life immediately.
It said that she is having a rush of adrenaline, and instead of fighting it, she will have to do something I couldn’t imagine to do: do nothing, observe the adrenaline and accept it; let it go through. It may sound easy but in the middle of a panic attack the last thing you can do is just…be calm. But the next time it hit me again, I decided to understand the adrenaline. And that calmed me down since I gained the feeling of control again; I knew what was happening to my body, and even if I was shaking like crazy, I knew it is going to pass. I worked with it instead of against it.
A few years have passed and even today I still struggle with anxiety from time to time; like 1x/month, if I am lucky. But this is a big change since back then those sorts of attacks were on the menu daily. I started talking to some people and I was shocked when about 60% of them told me, that they suffer from something similar and they just don’t know what to do. It turned out, that in our, so called generation x, anxiety is the most common disorder. I understand this in a way that we are the “generation gap”: I lived in times with almost no technology (yes, I am old), and now I am surrounded by it 24/7 and I own like 6 devices and I live on my phone. It was all happening too fast before our brains could ease into the new lifestyle. Instead of having more time due to technology (since that is what it is supposed to do, spare you quite a lot of time, no?) we have even less time because we have to do so much other stuff in that “additional” time and the pressure is rising. I may be wrong, these are just my 3 a.m. thoughts on the topic.
Anyway, this post by all means isn’t an attempt to attention-whore, so spare me your mean comments. This is my real-talk with you guys, so you can see that my life is not all-that-bubbly as presented on social media. Social media is like 1 minute of my day and the other 23:59 are hidden from you. I hope that this post helped at least one person and remember, that you can talk to me anytime you want; you can ask a question in the comment section below or write me an e-mail at: sindianajonesblog@gmail.com.
And remember the next sentence before judging someone: the real struggles go on behind closed doors.
