On Panic Attacks Abroad

I didn’t know I had anxiety disorder until I was nineteen years old in a Costco in Los Angeles. I was walking down the dairy aisle, probably buying milk for the person I was dating at the time, when my heart palpitations started to ring in my ears. I felt out of control, like a train about to run off its tracks.

I had been in and out of hospitals for most of my teenage years, making myself so physically ill that I would take myself into the emergency room after a night of panic. My heart would hurt, I could not breathe, I went an entire week without eating food because I didn’t trust the mechanics of my body. I thought my epiglottis had forgotten to function, like a part of my brain had missed the memo on how to partake in basic human survival methods. It was like being trapped in my body that was in constant self destruct mode. It was a kind of incessant doubt that made me skeptical of the autonoumous function of my body's ability to live without overthinking.

When I was 22, I couldn’t leave my house without an anxiety attack happening every five minutes. I would induce yawning to fill up my lungs to capacity, only to feel like I was lacking breath moments later and needing to yawn again for the twentieth time in an hour. The attacks had gotten so bad that I could not go to class or get on a bus or leave my house without fear seizing me. Often times, I would sit outside my classroom door, begging my brain to go in. My prefrontal cortex was yelling at me, "WHAT ARE YOU DOING? SUCK IT UP! WHAT IS THE BIG DEAL?!" But my limbic system was powerful, blockading me from everything I wanted to do. "You're a failure. You're sick. You'll never do anything ever again," it'd say. 

The attacks would come and go. They came at different times. They showed up at home, with friends, with family, strangers, at school and at work. When I got hired at Trader Joe’s, they started to happen so often that it felt like it would always be my normal. Most people I worked with hadn't noticed. They said I seemed like the happiest person in the room. People with any kind of mental illness are usually the best actors. However, those close to me knew. They saw how I had become slowly engrossed in the rapture, falling apart, almost willingly because I had become so tired of the fight. I thought I deserved it. 

Finally, I approached my boss and told her what was going on. How when I am on register my heart would pound, I could not breathe, work had been torture and I hadn’t known what to do. Every day I wrestled with my mind to calm down. It was a minute-to-minute, second-to-second challenge, something I'd pass off as "I'm doing ok," when in reality, my brain had been hijacked by a sadistic and cruel form of paranoia. But I learned how to deal with it at work, it was easier because I could shut off my brain while trying to make a customer laugh in the middle of a transaction. Distraction had felt like some kind of super power.

Last year, when I began the process to study abroad, I worried about how I would manage the fear away from home. I always wanted to travel, I was jealous of those who seemed to meander around the world like it wasn't a big deal. I figured that my brain, being the way that it was, I was sentenced to a life of confinement. But the thing is is that those things follow you. They will be at home with you or at a beach in Asia or a restaurant in Europe or jumping off the Nevis Swing. Just like any illness, a mental illness is part of your fabric and it follows you to any place you go. Ultimately, I had to decide that I would deal with the anxiety even if I was alone, even if I was thousand of miles away from home because traveling meant more to me than being anxious. 

It wasn't always easy. Some anxiety attacks I had abroad were so stifling that I feared for my ability to process fear. Most times, I was with someone: a roommate or a friend or a guy I had fallen for in a short period of time.

It wasn't until I had to leave Thailand that I had to face the real fear of my brain for a 12-hour layover in Malaysia by myself. I had four flights back home: one two-hour flight from Bangkok to Kuala Lumpur(KLL), one eight-hour flight from KLL to Australia, a three-hour flight from Australia to New Zealand, a five-hour layover in New Zealand and then a thirteen-hour flight to Los Angeles. It was roughly 48 hours of traveling, 5 different time zones, currencies, three different languages and no one to talk to other than the intermittent messages I'd send to friends and family. To make matters worse, I hadn’t slept the night before, I could not access money on my card in Malaysia and I hate flying. It was a total nightmare, a seemingly perfect blueprint for a mental breakdown in Southeast Asia.

So there I was: in Malaysia, my card being denied access, hungry, tired, stressed. So I waited for the inevitable anxiety attack to hit me in a shopping center filled with people. And it never came. Instead, I walked around the mall, watched the people move around the shopping center, walked outside in the humidity, attempted to traverse the city center to see the Patronas Towers while carrying my backpack, failed, walked back, and wrote. I contemplated taking a Xanax, but I wanted to see my anxiety through, because discomfort is not always a bad thing. I wanted to face my fears and when I told my brain that, it just sort of shut up. As if to say, "ok, ok, I get it, you're busy, you don't listen to me like you used to." So I found a coffeeshop and started writing, every now and then my hands would shake with fear. But I just spoke to it, "I get it. You're afraid and you're tired. But you did a thing, a very cool thing. And no matter what happens, you did it." 

For anyone with anxiety, fear feels like your constant. The best way I've been able to describe my particular case of anxiety is like a tumultuous undercurrent in the ocean. It's always there, the ripplings sift through me all the time. Every now and then the wave hits a giant rock and it peaks, hitting the air, forcing me to feel at a loss for breath. I know I'll have more anxiety attacks in the future. I have accepted that this is how my brain is and even though it has been debilitating, when managed, it has given me incredible insight. I am more empathetic because of my anxiety, I feel for my friends and my family when they go through pain because I know how pain can be immersive. My anxiety has made me funnier, a better lover, more passionate, tenacious and adventurous. While my anxiety has, at times, been self destructive. It doesn't have to control my life. It sits behind me in the background, trying to be a backseat driver, but I I have control over the steering wheel. Traveling helped me see how my mental health does not have to define me as weak, but can have the ability to make me courageous.

Breathing is the first thing any health care practitioner will tell someone to focus on when they have anxiety. More than it being a mental illness, the physical ramifications of anxiety are real and disruptive. The title of this blog is called "before I exhale," because it's about the moments of clarity one has when they focus on their breath and release their control. So I spent my twelve hours in Malaysia reminding myself of the courage I was able to have to travel alone and move through fear even though it had been coursing through me  all the time.