Panic! but it's not at the disco...

Hey kitty gurlz. So as you may have noticed, it’s been a minute since I last updated my blog. When I started this whole gig, I made several promises to myself and one of those promises was that I wouldn’t force myself to blog if I didn’t feel like it. This is an outlet, not an obligation. I felt then, and still feel, that if I get to a place where I am forcing myself to write and post, then the intention behind this whole thing is lost; it becomes about validation and image-crafting rather than truth and vulnerability. So sorry I’ve been MIA for a little while, I’m sure you’ve all been crying yourselves to sleep over this, but I’m back…for now.

So when last we spoke (or rather when last you read what I wrote and posted on the internet – the millennial version of communication) I had just gotten my results back from my immunology appointment. I honestly can’t believe that was a month ago, it feels like a whole other lifetime ago. Oh that immunology appointment? That was SOOOOO last month…

In any case, I talked about getting my immunology results and my response thereafter. Having lived with chronic pain for almost 5 years now, I am always hopeful that one day a diagnosis will come along that makes sense of everything that has happened to me, and that this diagnosis will come with a specific plan of treatment with markers and measurements for improvement. I want my chronic pain to be neat, tidy, explainable, and treatable with a chronological set of steps. Well, my friends, that just isn’t the way the world works, is it? And so I ended last time by taking ownership of my disappointment, acknowledging that it’s ok to desire more certainty and to desire freedom from my pain, and ultimately recognizing that my pain is demanding that I let go of my perceived control and fear of uncertainty. My body, my mind, and my therapist are all telling me to “lean in” to my discomfort and uncertainty when what I really want to do is “use logic and my superior powers of control to outsmart and destroy my discomfort and uncertainty”. You might be able to guess how that’s going.

Speaking of leaning in and my consistent refusal to do so, let’s get into this week’s topic shall we?

There are a number of things I’ve learned after 3-4 years in therapy, but one thing that has become more and more apparent over time is that you cannot run from your emotions. I mean you can, but your subconscious emotions, thoughts, and worries will catch up to you eventually. And as you might imagine, the farther and harder you run, the worse it’s gonna be when they finally catch up to you.

This is a lesson I know from experience. It was avoiding my emotions, after all, that lead me to therapy in the first place. It was a lifetime of avoiding my emotions that lead me to my diagnoses of depression and anxiety disorders. I know that I can’t outrun my feelings, but I’ll be damned if I don’t still try. There are times when I can do the “lean in” gig, and then there are times when, like any good man socialized by toxic masculinity, I shout my feelings back into myself until they are buried deep and hidden away.

I suppose what I have really learned in the past…say two years is that when we avoid our emotions and we ignore what our body and mind are telling us, our bodies and emotions don’t just give up. They’re not like the person you went on a date with once who called you and never got a response so they moved on. No, our thoughts and emotions are like that fuckboy you hooked up with once in college who still sends you emojis via FaceBook messenger every other day and responds to your silence with unsolicited dick pics.

Too much metaphor? Right, there’s no such thing…ANYWHO…When we ignore our emotions and push them down, they will continue to fight their way to the surface and will start to show up physically. For some of us our repressed emotions may manifest themselves in the form of a cold or feeling run down or in an unexpected outburst at a coworker or friend or loved one. As you may have noticed through my blog, my repressed emotions manifest themselves in the form of CRIPPLING MUSCULOSKELETAL PAIN. That’s right, when I won’t listen to my own emotions, my emotions are like, “Oh what’s that? You don’t feel like engaging with us even though we sent all the signs? Oh what’s that? You’re still ignoring us? How about we make it feel like your pelvis is exploding? Feel like dealing with us yet?” Like Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction, my emotions do not like to be ignored…

So as you may have guessed, I have been dealing with some pretty intense pain flare-ups in the past week or two. And I’ll tell you right now, I handled the situation all wrong. You know what I chose to do? I chose to continue to try and ignore my emotions AND my physical pain. I isolated myself, tried to keep busy, and tried to put my thoughts and concerns about the matter out of my mind. Well…I think you can guess that things did not turn out so well.

And so Sunday afternoon it happened, I had a panic attack. It's been about a year since my last. This one, ladies and gentlemen, this was one for the record books. It started, as it usually does, with a general feeling of dread, that sense of being overwhelmed washed over me with no prompting or trigger. Then the tears, they start to well up even though my primary emotion isn’t sadness. Then the panic starts to set in as I realize what is happening. Then it’s the breathing. I start gasping, fighting for air, even though each inhale seems to bring no relief to my already burning lungs. Then it’s the muscle spasms. Usually it starts with my hands, they start to tingle as my muscles tighten and my nerves get pinched. Slowly my hands start to cramp, then my feet, my legs, my hips, and my abdomen until I’m crumpled in a ball wherever I am, sure that I am going to hyperventilate to death. And there I stay, sometimes for a minute or two, in this case, about 45 minutes.

It’s in situations like these that I have to make some decisions. Unfortunately, I was home alone when this happened on Sunday. My first hope was that my dog would somehow enact special Lassie-dog powers where he would sense my emotional state and come to my aid and calm me down. NOT. He was terrified of the sobbing noises coming out of my mouth and hid in the corner. On to the next plan. I have anti-anxiety medication designed for fast-acting relief and so I drug myself to the medicine cabinet to take some in the hopes that it would at least help me stop hyperventilating long enough to call someone.

This is the stage when things get really tricky. At a certain point in these episodes, inevitably, I realize that I need to call someone. I need someone physically present to help me. I always try to manage things on my own, but being alone always amplifies the fear and the panic. For better or worse, having someone there at least lets me know I’m not alone. The issue is, who to call?

I have so many wonderful friends in my life, people who lift me up when I’m down, people who take me to doctor appointments, people who pick me up from surgeries, people who hold my hair back while I puke after a night at the bar, just a plethora of good fucking people who have seen me in many compromising positions. But here’s the thing, there are few moments when I feel more vulnerable in life than when I am in the midst of a panic attack. It takes a lot of vulnerability to let someone see you crumpled on the floor sobbing uncontrollably. And unfortunately, we live in a society where calling someone to pick you up off the floor is more often recognized as weakness than celebrated as gut-wrenching courage. And so with that in mind, I sat crumpled on my bed, thinking about whether I should call someone or just continue to hope it would end soon.

Isn’t that crazy? My fear of vulnerability told me to stay put when all I needed to do to get help was ask for it. There I was, afraid I would hyperventilate and cry until I passed out and/or died and I was worried about letting someone see me and run the risk of them perceiving me as weak or unbstable, even though I know they’re a trusted friend. That is insane to me. And very telling. I have done a lot of work around vulnerability, but I clearly have a lot more to do. Ultimately, and thankfully, I decided to reach out to friends who moved in down the street from me who offered to come pick me up. In the meantime, I called a friend in Chicago because I knew the sound of her voice would calm me down. My friend helped me to calm down over the phone and get my breath back in time for my friends from down the street to pick me up and take me to their place where they promptly fed me bacon and eggs and played Mario Kart until I felt better.

I could and probably will write whole other blog posts about the emotions and issues I’ve been avoiding that I think lead to this most recent panic attack, but for now, I don’t have the energy. 24 or so hours out, I am feeling better, but drained. Thankfully I have appointments set up with my doctor and therapist this week and my family is visiting which will give me some much needed time away with loved ones. I’ll end with these concluding thoughts:

• Don’t ignore your feelings, they will find a way out eventually.

• Vulnerability is not weakness and should never be considered as such.

• The mind is a powerful thing.

• Train your dog to respond in emergency situations so that they don’t sit in a corner chewing on a bone, ignoring you.

And lastly, I want to include a small video clip I took during my panic attack on Sunday. DISCLAIMER, this is a triggering video, think before deciding whether to watch or not. Because my panic attacks don't always fit the mold of typical panic attacks, I had planned to film myself having one (the next time it happened) so I could show my therapist and work on strategies. In reflecting more, I am choosing to post it publically because of how afraid I was to be seen this way while it was happening on Sunday. The fact that I was more afraid of others perceiving me as weak than I was about breathing is alarming. I am a firm believer in the idea that shame thrives on being unspoken. Bringing shame to light loosens its grip over you. And so here I am at my most vulnerable and uncomfortable refusing to believe that these moments make me weak. Rather, it is my ability to navigate these moments and share without fear that make me so incredibly strong.

Until next time…

Peace and love,

Adam