Panic Attack

October 2016

I do not know what is happening to me. I have never felt this out of control before. I guess I have been broken, and now there’s nothing else but insanity pouring of me. Everyday I wake up with arms and legs made of bricks, and a bowling ball for a head. I skip one, two, all of my classes, but I cannot sleep for more than an hour at a time. I wake up in an impossibly debilitating panic: my heart beats out of my chest, my hands shake a million miles an hour, my stomach clenches into a microscopic knot, tears waterfall down my face. I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe, I’m going to die, I CAN’T BREATHE. In these moments I secretly hope my breath never comes back. I hope I explode. I hope my body breaks down; surely it cannot handle the terror much longer.

On my better days, I eventually roll out of bed. On my best days, I change out of my yoga pants and oversized t-shirt. I find my computer, wherever I threw it the night before, and try to do my homework. But my brain slugs along behind the rest of me. Concentration escapes me. I don’t eat; I’m not hungry. I don’t drink; my lips crumble underneath layers of dry skin. I am a desert: parched, empty, devoid of all signs of life. I want a vulture to scoop me up and fly me away and eat me alive. I want to be snapped up inside a venus flytrap, digested, vanished, without a note goodbye.

I don’t yet know it, but the medication that is supposed to keep me alive—not just alive, but fulfilled, satisfied, whole—is ripping me apart from the inside out. I rapidly switch between being stuck in the deepest, darkest hole of depression to exploding out of my skin in the highest, bone-chilling skyline of mania. Any and every trigger sends me back and forth between the two most intense existences I have ever experienced. Sometimes there is no trigger. And sometimes I become both existences at the same time. Shaking with impatience, but unable to move. Racing to the top of the highest mountain, only to fall straight back down.

I am scared of myself. I don’t know what I will do to me.

I am surely dying, but it’s happening so slowly. I don’t think I can wait much longer. I beg the Earth, the sun, the stars to let me go. I cannot believe in a God who puts me through this torture. Maybe I have already leapt into Hell. Satan slowly scratches through my skin, to my blood, my organs, my soul. And he takes my soul and rips it to shreds and leaves me there alone for eternity.

I can’t decide if I’m melodramatic or psychotic. My brief, ever-lasting time on antidepressants turns me completely mad.

But of course, I do not know the culprit of my increasing insanity. I do not know that what is supposed to heal me instead wants to destroy me.

I am imploding.

*****

I miss my nothingness from the bottom of my crinkling, cracking, collapsing heart. I want to be void of all emotion, like usual.

Before I started going crazy, I talked frequently but said nothing. I stared blankly through my tearless eyes. I ceased to feel. And I was perfectly okay with that.

I want my brain to just shut up.

SHUT UP.

LEAVE ME ALONE.

I crave silence.

Now I feel so much. Too much. I cry so often that my eyes are permanently red and puffy, and I can’t put in my contacts; my eyes hurt so much. Too much. For mere moments I am dry; then the whimpering starts up again. I am pathetic. I let myself become vulnerable for the first time in so long, and I made myself get hurt. I should have never gone to see that stupid therapist, that ignorant psychiatrist. Everything is my fault. I hate myself. Why can’t I just go back to nothingness? Nothingness is calm. It is satisfactory. Yes it is lonely, but I don’t notice the loneliness usually, because I am so consumed in feeling nothing. I don’t feel happiness, but I also don’t feel sadness. A fair trade off. I merely exist and wait until I find a reason to live. To feel exhilaratingly, profoundly alive. Can someone tell me how that feels? I seem to have forgotten. Maybe I never knew to begin with.

I feel myself rapidly devolving. I see things that aren’t real, and I hear things in my head that aren’t me, and I dream up things that terrify me beyond my wildest imagination. I’m jumping and running around and drinking and laughing and smiling and erupting. And then I’m wilting and drooping and sobbing and dying.

And I’m so over it, but it doesn’t stop. I’m positive that it will never stop. Whatever it is, it has taken over me. It has inhabited my body, and it forces me to feel all of these things that I just don’t want to feel.

I crave my nothingness like an alcoholic craves vodka, a binge eater craves cake, a cutter craves razor blades.

Please give it back to me. Someone, anyone.

Can you hear me?