This post is the product of a years long battle in my life, a battle that is still ongoing but is reaching and end I believe: My Anxiety Disorder. I really want these posts to serve as a Rosetta Stone for my journey so far, and something I can look back on and use as a bearing to focus my strengths for the future.

It’s a long story, so I’m going to try my best to break it up into 3 different posts. The spelling here is bound to have mistakes, as I’m uploading this thing the minute I feel it’s finished. I don’t even want to go back and look over it again.

Here it goes.

How it began. When I was around 19 years old, I was living in an apartment with my then partner. A 29 year old English woman named Amy. The next three years I spent there were pretty dark. But how I got there is a story in and of itself…

I left home when I was 16, and had completely moved out by the time I was 17. It was a bit of a turbulent time when I left. My Dad was struggling financially following the recession, and was doing everything in his power to try and bring some money in for the family.

I dropped out of school and started taking grinds (classes outside of school) so that I could at least go back and resit the exams I had failed at the time. Because I wasn’t in school, I was spending my days with my Dad, studying in his offices and following him around for the duration of his work day.

Around the time I had dropped out, I broke up with my girlfriend. My friends, all being teenage boys, took her side at the time of our break up, and everyone I knew had turned their back on me. To be honest, I was kind of a nut case at that age so I can see why it didn’t take much to tip them over the scales then, especially when some hot girl wants to keep hanging around with them under the condition they don’t see me anymore. So I was alone.

Once I began hanging around with my Dad all day, I was introduced to a whole other world at the time. I met tons of different people that you could only describe as characters, outgoing people, cunning people, dangerous people, experienced people, I mean it was like most of them walked straight out of movies. Having a proclivity to spend my time with people that were older than me, and not feeling much association to people my own age (even less now so) I took to this environment like a duck to water. I loved going for a drink at the local each night not knowing who we were going to bump into or what we were going to hear.

The spot we used to drink at was located just outside one of the more bustling areas of town. It acted as a conduit for many different walks of life to stroll through or meet up before heading out for a night of debauchery. It also acted like a hub for the wealthier folks in the area to hang out and look down on others publicly.

On my 17th birthday my Dad bought me my first beer. It being my first birthday I’d spend friendless, he picked me up and took me to a restaurant where he had a meeting scheduled. At one point during the evening he asked me if I drink and I said yes (the only times i had drank up until that point were beers that I had stolen out of our fridge when my band-mates were staying over). Since that evening, every time me and my father were out together we’d get a drink.

So, every time we’d frequent the local I was progressively honing my drinking skills and pints turned into rum, which turned into vodka, which turned into pints of vodka. It got to a point where I started going out on nights with the people I met at that spot after my Dad had taken off for home at the end of the day. This was probably not the best step forward in my development. I started drinking out of control, going to nightclubs and bars where they were picking up the tab. I started taking drugs, coke mostly. I really went off the rails.

Getting back to the local itself. I was having a drink one evening with a friend there, when this group of girls strolled in. One of them really caught my eye, she was beautiful. She was tall, had this black leather jacked on, heels, short hair, and something about her just really hypnotized me. I pointed her out to my friend (he spent a lot more time around there than me, so it was pretty likely he knew who she was) and he started laughing. I asked him what was so funny, and he told me she was a guy. He wasn’t a transgender or anything, just a really effeminate guy.

My jaw dropped at that point, and he started reassuring me there’s nothing wrong with being attracted to him. He asked if I ever considered whether I was gay, to which I said “Fuck no!”. The reality was, I had asked myself that multiple times in the past. The answer was always no. Not completely. The only thing I knew for sure at the time was that I wanted to be with him.

After a long period of internal back-and-forths on the idea, I went for it and made it happen. We started dating in secret, I knew my Dad would never approve of it in a million years. We used to text each other when we were both in the area and I’d sneak of for a “cigarette” and quickly meet up with him. The few people that knew about us really went out of their way to reassure me that it was normal and there was nothing to feel ashamed of. This reassurance, and coupled with the fact that I felt so happy and at ease with myself, lead me to make the stupid series of moves to get more blazen with our secrecy.

Once my Dad found out, he threatened to send me off to Bulgaria, where he said they beat the shit out of people like that. He spent hours and hours convincing me that I wasn’t “one of those” and that I need to stop all of that shit. Eventually, people I had a lot of faith in from his circle made me break up with him. We weren’t dating for too long, but still, it broke my fucking heart. I thought I’d made some kind of step forward in my life, I couldn’t describe it but it was just some feeling of understanding that clicked in my head. That had been stripped away now.

In the following weeks at the local, I became friends with Amy. She was this outgoing woman that seemed really down to earth and was up for having fun at any chance she could. We got on like a house on fire. We ended up getting really close and sort of developed a thing together. One night, when we were having a drink, she let out to me that my Dad had actually pushed her to start seeing me. I totally clicked in my head. He was trying to prove his point and have her straighten me out. Once I realized this, I decided to give him exactly what he wanted.

Amy and I started getting serious with each other, to the point where I pulled all of my possessions out of my parents house and we went to go live together. To the dismay of my mother, and the frustration of my Dad, I lived with Amy for around 3 years.

In those 3 short years, I had lost over half of my body weight through drug use, had multiple domestic disputes in which the police were called over to our apartment, and underwent the experience this whole post had been leading to up until now.

The substances I were taking at the time mostly consisted of weed, MDMA and coke. At one point, I wanted to branch out and experiment with LSD. My first acid trip started off great; colors were more vivid, the living room began to angle in strange ways, and my dogs ears never felt fluffier. I even felt like I had a religious experience. Until things started to go south.

I ended up going to some extremely dark places, and due to our unfamiliarity with it, the trip ended with Amy placing a spoon in my mouth in case I was going to swallow my own tongue. At the peak level of evil during my trip, I honestly felt like I was having some form of organ failure, at the same time I thought I was melting into the couch. It was at that point that I thought of who to call and admit my stupidity to in an attempt to get help. My Dad was on a business trip in another country at the time, and I wasn’t going to stress out my Mother about this. So I contacted no one.

Looking back on it, I think that moment was my first experience with a panic attack.

When it became Official. My days in that apartment mostly consisted of smoking weed and writing music all day long, unless there was something more interesting to snort lying around. I had no job, no qualifications, and no references for the construction or waiting work I had done previously. The job market at the time was nigh impossible to enter without them. So I was a house wife basically.

One day, I sat down to light my first doob of the day, slapped on some Goodie Mob on my Samsung Galaxy Ace, and something weird happened. I started feeling extremely dizzy and light headed. I couldn’t walk properly and had this massive sinking feeling in my stomach. I had no idea what the hell was going on, but at that time my first impression was that it was something brain related.

I called 911, fearing for my life, and the operator had me describe my symptoms, to which I quickly asked her if it was something neurological I was suffering. I never realized this, but 911 operators have a doctor on staff that they can consult for issues like this and provide you a diagnosis over the phone. The one they had was obviously wise enough to know exactly what was happening to me, and they asked me if I had any benzodiazepines in the house and I said no, so they called me an ambulance.

Being broke for the last 3 years meant I had no credit on my phone at all. I did the quick USSD credit check and it turned out I had 5 cents left. I used it to send the letter “c” to my Dad, hoping he would interpret it as “Call”, lucky enough he did. I hopped in the car with him and cancelled the ambulance 911 had sent.

Once we got to the waiting room of the hospital my limbs started seizing up, and I became mostly paralyzed. They placed me in a wheelchair, had me breathe into a bag, and gave me a benzo. Ever since that moment, I was constantly getting these episodes in which I would experience extreme fear, as if I was dying, and would start seizing up if I didn’t breathe into a bag or take a pill.

They started prescribing me a whole range of different pills. I went from Lorazepam, to Flouxatin, to Diazepam, Bromazepam, and this antidepressant I can’t remember the name of. Because I had nothing to attribute this fear to, my mind started attributing it to the medication I was taking. The antidepressants didn’t help, they had a reputation for affecting some people negatively. In my case, that manifested itself into wanting to commit suicide. I went back to my GP to tell him about this and he said “Oh yes, well that can sometimes happen. These pills cause sparks in your brain, and sometimes they can kick off more than others. Just take half next time”. In hearing that, I lost total faith in the meds I was taking and that was the last day I took the antidepressant.

This phase went on for months. I had no psychologist because I couldn’t afford one, no one had a straight answer for what was happening to me, I didn’t know if I was going to be stuck like that forever or if it had some kind of end. The only advice I received was from my Dad when he would say “It’s all in your head. Its psychological.”, to which I would say “yeah, no shit”.

Apparently when you’re suffering through periods of intense mental stress, this can manifest itself as nightmares, and I had them almost every night. Evil, horrible, simulations that would torment any optimisms I had come to form throughout the day.

I’m a religious person, and I always have been. Roman Catholic by birth. Because sleeping was an almost insurmountable effort at times, I started drinking this tea called Valeriana, which is made from a herb of the same name that I known to induce drowsiness, or the need to sleep. The effects of it were so intense that once you feel asleep you would be knocked out for hours. Because of that, it was often very hard to wake up from the nightmares.

I remember one nightmare in which I was in a church, sitting at the back of one of the rows of pews. I could hear nothing in the church other than some footsteps. I looked out between the rows of pews and I saw what looked like this tiny dinosaur body, like a small raptor, but its head was the head of the Virgin Mary. It took a few steps forward and then turned and looked at me and screamed. I prayed frequently, for help and strength. I remember jolting awake from that vision and nearly crying due to the fact that one of the last bastions of faith and comfort I had was completely ridiculed and defiled by that dream.

After a while, my Dad convinced me that these panic attacks only happened to me when I was stressed, and that if i drank then they wouldn’t happen. So I started drinking wine again, and out of a total placebo-like act of faith, they started stopping. Without my noticing, the episodes became less and less frequent. Evidently I had to ween my way off of the medication, and I did it in a very calculated way. I hated the meds, but they were notable stopping the attacks from climaxing.

What I discovered. That constant mental struggle that lasted for months really changed my perceptions about the world, and my place in it.

When you’re a teenager, you really don’t have a fully developed metric for danger, expiry, or situational awareness. You think you’re invincible. Don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against that, and I would hate for anyone to have that feeling cut short like I did, especially at my age then. But I came away with a sense of reality, fragility, and humility I hand’t had before.

When you’re getting paralyzed and breathing into a bag that someone else is holding up to your face in a crowded restaurant at a table full of people you barely know, you loose a lot of your dignity. Sure, some people may say that they don’t mind, or they don’t see you as an less of a person for it. But it doesn’t mean you don’t feel that way. You can’t keep up the same persona you once had, you don’t think of yourself as the person you knew.

That bag I got from the hospital that day, I still carry it with me everywhere I go, eleven years later. Having a crutch like that makes it really hard to see yourself with any respect. You doubt yourself when faced with even the smallest tasks sometimes.

I walked away from that series of months as a completely different person, and I’ve never been the same since. I only wish I knew more about what I was going through and that I had the help to manage it correctly. When faced with an impending sense of danger with no clear origin, you begin to attribute it to all manner of different things. I stopped drinking alcohol, stopped drinking caffeine, stopped eating certain foods, stopped taking certain medications, became a hypochondriac, stopped watching certain TV shows, stopped using certain words. It was a nightmare.

It was a period so impactful that even remotely thinking about the events I’ve described here would have sent me off on a tangent again.

I walked away. I did come out of that rut. I got a job, met a girl, moved out, left my old life of substance abuse and lethargy behind.

I managed to walk away from it in the end, not as the same person, but as someone trying to make the best of a second opportunity, one in which I hoped that I wouldn’t ever return to where I was. Although that last bit never worked out, I did manage to move on and make a life for myself to some extent.

I’ve left many, many details out of this whole period, but even writing down this little overview of that period in my life already feels like a huge step forward. I feel like I’ve zipped up and archived a folder full of files and moved it to a new drive. This all takes up a little less space in my head, and I hope the next two posts to follow this one will too.

Thanks for reading.