Worry does not empty tomor­row of sor­row — it emp­ties today of strength.

—Corrie ten Boom

It started with a sin­gle panic attack, at work, in the mid­dle of the day.

Heart rac­ing, dif­fi­culty breath­ing, par­a­lyz­ing ter­ror, fear that I was about to die.

If you’ve ever had a bad trip off psilo­cybe, or magic mush­rooms, the effects are very sim­i­lar. Not that I’ve ever had a good one. Half an hour into inges­tion, I start to feel nau­se­ated. At the back of my head there’s a creep­ing sense that some­thing is wrong. My hands start to trem­ble, my mind feels like it’s shud­der­ing. Eventually, there’s a com­plete uneasi­ness in the body, both phys­i­cally and men­tally. Around that time, the body reacts quickly to rid the stom­ach of what­ever is caus­ing these symp­toms, and vio­lently ejects them in the form of vom­it­ing. Stems and caps come out as dark brown flecks, and you won­der how eat­ing some­thing so small thing can make you feel so terrible.

It comes with­out warn­ing, with­out obvi­ous rea­son. All you want is to end the attack. To crawl into a cor­ner and hide. To tear off your stran­gling clothes. To die.

Afterward, you’re not won­der­ing what you’re going to lis­ten to on the way home, or how to get the atten­tion of that cutie in the porce­lain depart­ment, or when you’ll have time to go buy more sham­poo. All you’re think­ing about is when the next one will hap­pen. All you’re left with is a bunch of ques­tions and a sense of insta­bil­ity. I have my sus­pi­cions, but I’ve cho­sen not to write about them until I’m cer­tain, some­thing which I believe will come in time. There’s no sim­ple diag­no­sis, no easy answer.

Recently, sci­en­tists have dis­cov­ered that the word “wheeze” can acti­vate asthma attacks in asth­mat­ics. The mind trig­gers an asso­ci­ated emo­tional response, and the body man­i­fests the reac­tion. It’s the same after a panic attack. Sometimes, peo­ple with panic dis­or­der can bring on an attack just wor­ry­ing or think­ing too much about it.

Not that I have a dis­or­der. The fear of an attack isn’t detri­men­tal enough to stunt me socially, and doesn’t pre­vent me from func­tion­ing as what the DSM IV would con­sider “nor­mal”. It was only a sin­gle episode, but habit of con­stant self-evaluation means that the threat of it hap­pen­ing again is always there. It’s in the back of my mind whether I’m at work, or play­ing games, or cook­ing din­ner. Every minute of every day becomes a strug­gle not to think about it. And when you know you feel like dying dur­ing an attack, you start to won­der whether it’s worth liv­ing at all.

People face this ques­tion when they’re diag­nosed with ter­mi­nal ill­nesses. Told that they have only have a few years left, they live more in those num­bered days than they do in their entire lives until then.

They awaken.

The Awakening Series

1. Introduction
2. Cause
3. The Reborn Dreamer