Thanks to https://unsplash.com/@pawel_czerwinski for the photo!

I experience panic attacks.

This is a self admission that I’ve been working on for the past 4-5 years, although I’ve experienced these for over 25 years. While I’ve been more self aware about my anxiety for 10-12 years – and have found healthier ways to cope with that- panic attacks have been a far more terrifying thing to even think about trying to process. This is a big thing to acknowledge and even write about because it’s something I’ve tried to stifle and keep hidden from others for years.

For years, I’ve had moments where I’ve thought I’m just going crazy or being driven by madness. Moments where everything is so dark and I’m so certain that God can’t hear me- yet I’ve felt I’ve had no one else to reach out to for help, so I’ve feebly called on him anyway.

I’m just now becoming more informed and ok with the idea of allowing myself to feel uncomfortable as I make others aware of what is happening in the moment and aware of what I’m experiencing… it’s helping me to better communicate for sure, but it’s also terrifying to let people in on a piece of your brain that you don’t even fully understand yourself.

About 4-5 years ago I learned about the difference between general anxiety, anxiety attacks, and panic attacks. (I’ll link some resources below)

• Very Well Mind
• Health Line
• University Of Michigan Health

The quick “Bella Version” is that Anxiety attacks have clear identifiers that spark the build up of anxiety, eventually leading up to something that feels like an attack, or like an emotional build up comes to a tipping point. Symptoms are usually tied to emotional feelings, like that of worry. It’s ultimately your brain trying to get your nervous system to protect you.
A panic attack is different in that there is no clearly identifiable trigger that leads through a build up of anxiety- it just hits out of nowhere, with intense debilitating feelings of fear. It can trigger a freeze response, blacking out, detachment from self (out of body experience), detachment from the world, intense fear of immediate death, and intense fear of losing control of self. It’s your brain freaking out, misfiring.

Earlier on, it was much easier to learn about anxiety and acknowledge that it was something I was dealing with. With a lot of my own reading, YouTube videos, and asking questions to my friends who work in mental health, I’ve figured out better ways to cope with my anxiety and I’ve learned how to recognize that something is triggering my anxiety so I can redirect my thoughts and energy and prevent an anxiety attack. This was a process over the past 10-12 years, and it is still something I have to work at even though the process has become easier.

However, despite facing my anxiety and becoming more familiar with coping skills, I was finding myself still experiencing these really intense debilitating attacks that would hit me out of nowhere. Sometimes I’d have 1 or none a year, sometimes I’d have several within a month. Not being able to afford mental health care meant trying to prioritize it myself and learn more on my own. Luckily, this has helped me to better understand panic attacks and be less hard on myself. I’ve more recently received confirmation from a professional who also thinks this is what I’m experiencing- and being able to name it has been a huge help in personally processing what’s going on.

It’s been happening more frequently lately.

It’s frustrating, and always a little scary when I start having them in groupings. I haven’t had one in about 8 months, but in December I had several. The frequency has been a little push to talk about it more… but also because I’ve had my first 2 ever in public in the last month and I’m worried that because I don’t talk about and have tried to avoid these blips in my life, people around me might not understand what’s happening.

Experiencing panic attacks has always been scary for me. I kind of feel them starting right before they hit. It’s a strange shadowy sensation in my minds eye. Like when your peripheral is dark or sees a shadow to the side of you. It’s accompanied by an intense wave of fear or feeling like I need to escape to an open place. Usually I feel it a few minutes before the panic fully hits me- that’s my warning sign.

It used to be when I was younger that this feeling would happen and I would seclude myself. As a kid who didn’t want to cry in front of others and who didn’t understand what was happening to me, this seemed like the safest option. I’d find a quiet place that felt “safe” to “breakdown” in. This could be my room, a closet, outside away from others, or more often than not- the bathroom.

As an adult who’s vaguely still in the same boat, it’s more comfortable not to resist the urge to seclude myself even though I now know I should probably be reaching out for help. Still, it’s difficult to do so in the moment, and the urge to do what I’ve always done to attempt to protect myself and my mind during these is strong.

As a kid, I tried to teach myself to “stave off” the panic and push that shadowy sense back until I got to a “safe space” or couldn’t hold it at bay any longer.

Suddenly that fear, that panic, is overwhelmingly strong. It’s hard to breathe. I feel like I’m choking sometimes, like something is in my throat or a very heavy feeling in my lungs. I cry and gasp for air a lot. Sometimes I sit down or have to lay down on the floor in an attempt to feel grounded. Sometimes I lose a sense of time. I often don’t feel like I’m in my body when they get really bad. It’s like that shadowy sense grows darker and covers my minds eye where I can sort of see myself but don’t feel like I’m within myself. It feels like I’m losing control of basic functioning. It feels like being claustrophobic in a small dark space on the inside- even if I’m out in an open field.

This can range from a two minute attack that feels lesser and generally just uncomfortable; to a full blown 10-20min excruciatingly awful experience. It’s not always one or the other and sometimes it falls somewhere in between.

While this is something that sucks to go through alone, I’ve often been driven to isolate. I don’t want this to be “too much” for someone else to “handle”. I don’t want to be “too much”. I don’t want others to have to deal with my issues. I haven’t wanted to deal with the comments of people who do not / cannot understand….

Yet, what I am ever still learning in my mental health journey is so very similar to what I have learned in my faith journey: God wants us to engage in community for a reason. Authentic community is where the healing happens.

Now this doesn’t mean that every “community” is safe for me. This doesn’t mean that everyone I know is able to be a trusted person to rally into the community I need to heal well. One thing I already know I hardly trust faith based spaces with is any topic about mental health or neurodivergence- which is sad and a whole other post altogether, but I digress.

Even with the *right people in your community, or your current most trusted and closest relationships, it can be hard for someone else to know how to be present / help / respond in the middle of this kind of mental health crisis. Especially if they don’t know what’s happening or aren’t equipped to help.

Finding that kind of community for me is looking like connecting with those who experience panic attacks. It looks like following medical journals and therapists on social media who talk about mental health. It looks like actually opening up to my friends who work in mental health when they ask hard questions and when they actually have the capacity to support me. It looks like being honest with myself and acknowledging what I’m dealing with and how it affects me. It looks like researching and following through with doing the hard work to keep my inner dialogue and my brain healthy as much as possible.

It looks like accepting that my healing may just be recovering from and acknowledging a panic attack itself without letting it direct what I do and don’t do… not necessarily a goal of never having another one again.

Healing might just look like healthy ways to cope, or having a mind to respond “I know it’s dark in here, I’ll just sit with you until you make it to the brightness on the other side”.