Panic

Imagine this:

You’re walking beside a highway filled with fast-moving traffic when suddenly an oncoming automobile blows out a front tire and veers off the highway directly at you. You have a second or two to save yourself. There are a couple of ways you might conceivably respond.

Here is one way: you calmly observe the situation and think, “Okay, if that car continues on its current trajectory it is going to impact me and terminate my life. Logic tells me to jump out of its path. So I’ll do that.”

You might do that if you’re that cyborg guy in the movie Alien. But if you’re a human being, that is not what you will do. You will instantly jump, with adrenaline-fueled muscles, out of the path of the car. As the car whizzes past you, so close that it grazes your clothes, you will suddenly feel weak, your heart will be pounding, your hands will be shaking, and your legs will feel so weak you fear you will collapse. Those symptoms are the after-effects of the sudden rush of adrenaline through your body.

The near-death event produced in you what is customarily called a state of panic. Panic is your body’s way of going into emergency overdrive to save itself from an immediate, life-threatening situation. When panic strikes, your brain shuts down and your body simply reacts. You don’t think of what you’re going to do, you just do it. Our bodies evolved that response because when split-seconds count, your body doesn’t have time to wait for your brain to think things through and decide on the best course of action. The body has to react now. And because they’re not thinking, some panicked people do the wrong thing, they do the very thing they should not do, and it costs them their lives.

Maybe you’ve never experienced panic. If so, you’ve been blessed. Maybe you’ve experienced panic only a few times in your life. If so, you’re lucky.

For some unlucky people, panic strikes them hundreds or even thousands of times in their lives. It strikes them when they’re in their car, when they’re sitting in a restaurant, when they’re standing in the checkout line at the grocery store. It can strike them simply because they contemplate being in a situation where panic could strike.

I was one of those people. For me, attacks of panic started on a visit to New York City when I was about 22 years old. I vividly remember my first panic attack and I’ll remember it until I die. Having panic strike you over and over “out of the blue” is something I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy. To say it is life-changing is an understatement. If you can’t get it under control, it closes so many doors to you. Some people become afraid to leave their home – they become house-bound.

Over the years, I tried many kinds of therapy and many medications. Nothing stopped the panic, but tranquilizers numbed me enough that I could endure the panic without fleeing the situation. But who wants to take tranquilizers every time they want to drive their car or buy a few items at the grocery store? The panic attacks were so hellish that for most of my life I simply said “No” to invitations, to social engagements, to going to all kinds of places and doing all kinds of activities. The things other people enjoyed and looked forward to doing were things I dreaded and only managed to endure.

If it sounds bad, wait – it gets worse. People who have panic attacks are ashamed of their panic. They don’t want to admit they have these attacks and try to appear as normal as possible to other people. They’ll put on a smile and act calm when their heart is pounding and they’re barely able to keep themselves composed. What they really want to do is jump up and run out of the room, or bail out of the car in the middle of a highway, or bridge, or at a red light. They want to abandon the restaurant meal they just ordered – throw some money on the table and leave. They desperately want to be anywhere else than where they are, and it takes all the willpower they can muster to remain where they are and appear normal.

Over the years, I added beta-blockers to the medications I could take for panic. If I had to go to the dentist, I would take some beta-blockers along with tranquilizers. If my job required me to speak in public, I’d take beta-blockers along with tranquilizers. They were not a cure, but they “got me through” what I had to do.

In recent years, I’ve taken a drug called an SSRI. The drug changes my brain chemistry and blocks panic attacks from occurring. It’s been a miracle drug for me, but it has negative side-effects that are also life-altering and which many people find unacceptable.

So am I cured? Yes and no. When I go into a situation that would formerly elicit a panic attack, I still get anxious. Sometimes I can even feel the very beginning of a panic attack, but then it stalls. It doesn’t progress to a full panic attack. That is certainly an improvement.

The downside is that decades of panic attacks, decades of developing avoidance behaviors, decades of automatically computing in my head the best strategy to avoid a situation likely to lead to panic – and having to do that multiple times per day, daily, weekly, monthly, yearly, for the better part of a lifetime – leaves behind something like psychological scar tissue. Bend a sapling and keep it bent; it will still grow into a tree. But the tree will grow bent, and once grown, there’s no way to make it straight. It is what it is.

Since I’m turning philosophical, l will add that for a long time, I’ve felt that this is how my life was intended to be. Every strategy I tried, with the hope of making my life different, failed, as if destined to fail, as if there were no other way it could have turned out. Like a train on tracks, I seemed unable to steer my life by one degree right or left.

I’m not saying I understand why my life was what it was, and is what it is … but only that I feel it couldn’t have been otherwise.

And I feel like the people in my life, close friends present and past, are and were destined to be in my life. Every friend who was in my life for a time, and who is in my life no more, seems, on reflection, to have been exactly the right person to have in my life at that exact time in my life. I feel they were all there for a reason. And maybe, I was in their lives for a reason.

Shakespeare wrote,

All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts …

At the risk of being a little theatrical and a tad off-topic, I understand the sense Shakespeare was trying to convey. When I was very young, I felt strongly that I had existed somewhere before my birth. At times I felt I could almost remember that place. So I had my entrance, and I played my part, and one day I’ll have my exit. Maybe then everything will make sense.

“Now we see through a glass, darkly.” So true, Paul, so true.