by Amy Alexander
In my Southern town, there were, the people claimed, certain surface streets that could kill you. Stay away from the streets named after Greek gods. Stay away from the zip code that ended in 08.
These streets festered, filled with bad guys that live in shadows, even at noon, and dirty needles that could jump up and chase after you.
A nice, young professional woman, a reporter at a business magazine, it was taught, ought to take the interstate to get swiftly past the dangerous side of town back to a nicer part.
On the freeway, a young woman could fly at such a pace as to outrun the bad. I imagined this mythical Southern lady, scarves flying behind her like Isadora Duncan’s.
I pictured the dancer who died being strangled while driving because strangled, while driving on the interstate, was what I felt in my throat every time I encountered an on-ramp.
I had a choice: Carve up the mean streets or leap above them on raised, steel race tracks. I chose the former, because none of the things that might happen to me in the bad part of town were as terrifying as a panic attack.
I had a phobia of driving.
And of dining in restaurants. Or, rather, chewing. (A tough thing to be afraid of in a restaurant.)
And of meeting with confrontational people.
“What do you mean don’t go on Hollywood Street?”
“I’ll have the soup.”
Look at the space above the eyes. The space above the eyes.
So it looked like an act of resistance when I went out of my way to drive all of those surface streets I was not supposed to go on.
Turned out, they were inhabited by people like any of us, for the most part, and I told my fellow citizens and colleagues that very thing, any chance I had.
And yet, I knew it wouldn’t be long before I was found out.
Running away from the panic doesn’t really work.
For me, the distress began to feel like a Whack-a-Mole, but with nasty Alien babies who drooled acid and wanted my heart popping up in different places. If I smashed in in one area, it would circumnavigate to another, always there, someplace, in my life.
This had been the case since college, when the panic attacks came so many, all at once, within a span of six months, that I can’t, now, tell you which was the first one.
Once, in a crowded cafeteria, one table away from last year’s boyfriend, who was droning on and on about women’s weakness.
Once, in my advisor’s office, talking about magic realism and my plans after graduation, which actually seemed like magic realism.
Once while reading a poem.
I cannot know what panic attacks feel like for other people, but I can best describe mine by conjuring the image of Alice in Wonderland. We had a record of her story when I was a child. In it, when she takes the pill that makes her very tall, she says, “Goodbye, feet. I’ll send you a present for Christmas!”
It was the seventies, the age of bizarre, and somehow this obscure recording became welded in my memory, and perfectly describes panic. I would rise up out of the lower half of my body, up, and up, until my mind was saying goodbye to my feet, which terrified both feet and mind, and jacked up the heart rate and doubled the fear, which jacked up the heart rate again.
Another solid description of what panic feels like, from the inside, comes from the song, Graceland, by Paul Simon, when he sings, “There is a girl in New York City / Who calls herself the human trampoline / And sometimes when I’m falling, flying / Or tumbling in turmoil I say / Oh, so this is what she means.”
When the mind and body revolt against you, in every way, as it seems to do during a panic attack, it leaves behind a traumatic patina, a fright so deep and lingering that the dread alone is enough to bring about yet another panic attack. And on and on it goes.
My parents raised me to have a steel backbone. We were Colorado people.
I can recall leaning my cheek, hard against the top of a cross country ski pole, heavy, congealed flakes falling on me, the dim day growing dimmer, crying, shivering, because there was no way I could ski another yard, and my mom saying to me, “Well, you really have no choice, unless you want us to leave you here. Have a granola bar.”
I knew I’d better not complain, then, about my racing heart while I am going to the pretty college with the well manicured lawns and the red rock Edwardian buildings.
So I didn’t tell anyone. I attributed the panic attacks to a parasite I picked up during a swim in a canyon stream and kept lurching forward, figuring out ways to not eat in the crowded cafeteria, not challenge my verbal or mental capacities (this led to a less than stellar senior year report card, but nobody noticed), and not to read long poems about emotionally charged or difficult circumstances.
At some point during grad school, I witnessed a terrible accident over the Atchafalaya Basin in Louisiana that stranded us, along with several hundred other cars, on a bridge without an exit for hours. My date drove a bright yellow sports car, and the Medevac helicopter used his vehicle to find the dead woman on the bridge. She was that close to us. She could have been us.
Someplace in my fractured mind, it seems, a part of me must have believed she was us. Because the next time I drove on that bridge, there it was, the worst panic attack of my life.
Panic attacks while driving are no joke, and my brain and body were so wrecked by it that they somehow, in a silent correspondence, decided that all driving would kill them.
And so began the driving phobia.
People close to me learned, quickly, that they couldn’t expect me to visit them alone, and if we went on a long drive, I would not be able to share the driving load. I could manage marginal distances in my own town, but no interstate or night driving.
This rapidly started to ruin my social and professional life.
When I took a job at the business magazine, I walked around in dread, knowing that it was just a matter of time before they sent me to cover a story in a place that could only be accessed via the interstate. Any city on the other side of a large waterway might have been Mars, to me.
I would much rather have interviewed the President of the United States of America than drive to the next town over.
After a few months, I took on the look of someone half-deranged, and my boss put into my annual report that while I was the most productive writer on staff, I did not deal well with stress. Like, at all.
Almost under the table, she slipped me a sheet of paper with the name of a social worker scrawled on it.
I called the very next day.
My therapist was a fatherly man with a salt and pepper beard who, I strongly suspected, nodded off when my stories started to meander or drift.
The day I told him, in an off-handed way, that I had been grabbed at age six, hauled into a grove of cattails in a wetland near my house and that something very bad happened to me there, but that it was really not a big deal now, it was a long time ago, and isn’t it time I grew up, anyway, he stopped me.
“You know that something like that happening to a child of that age is extremely damaging to the psyche, don’t you?” he said.
I did not know that.
Remember, I was raised by strong stock.
The social worker suggested I try Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR), a therapeutic technique that involved recalling a traumatic event while focusing on an external stimulus, in this case, it would be my social worker’s hand moving back and forth before my face, as a way of unearthing the awful day and, in an almost dream state, rethinking it all in a way that would clear the memory.
The EMDR Institute compares this process with the act of removing a huge splinter from your hand. Get it out, and the body, always on a mission to heal, mends, as if by magic. Let it lay, and you might lose your hand to Gangrene.
Using eye movement, my social worker explained, I would remember what happened to me when I was six years old and be on my way to fixing my brain. From there, I would learn to understand my panic attacks and how to talk them down, gently.
EMDR takes several sessions, so that spring, I spent a lot of time at my social worker’s office remembering and rethinking, understanding the unspoken things my mind told me about fight and flight, articulating the things I could have done, instead, if I had been Wonder Woman.
The sessions left me disoriented at times; angry at others. Some nights, after re-living the worst day of my life, I would come in and not talk, just get into bed.
At work, I was busy covering the story of a serial killer who abducted girls much as I had been, but they did not survive. I had to work on that, too, in my sessions, to help my mind understand that the present was not the past and that, while there are no guarantees, at that moment, I was safe. And maybe, just maybe, I could ask to not write about violence against women.
When I was a girl, they called me messy. I had a tendency to end up with my necklaces balled into miserable, impossible tangles. One of my aunts could easily untangle them by taking a strand at a time and tracing back where it had folded in on itself and grown grotesque and stuck. The process of EMDR, for the weeks when it was at its most intense, felt a lot like that. I was taking apart time. I was smoothing it out. It was laborious and tedious work.
By the end of the most intense sessions I had become, in my memory, Wonder Woman herself, exploding – Pow! – To stop my attacker and send him running away out of fear, rather than out of the knowing that he had done something very terrible to a very little girl.
Only after had squared off with my trauma and smoothed it out did my social worker turn to the practical reason I went there in the first place. He taught me that when I was having a panic attack, my breathing and heart rate increased, and so, he said, I would have to learn to decrease them, and, more than that, I could learn how to decrease them.
Using visualization, he talked me through driving to the entrance ramp, going to the next exit, and leaving the interstate.
“Think,” he said, “All of these other cars are going on an adventure. An adventure! And you, too, are going on an adventure.”
In the margins of our sessions, I expressed to him my longing to be a writer who worked for myself and called my own shots. He helped me put together a plan, beginning with saving up enough money to start my own freelance writing business, learning how to run a business, and just being able to say out loud, “I want to work for myself now,” to my family and friends. I did just that.
I can’t say I am a hundred percent free of panic attacks, nor can I say that the trauma is gone and sealed away forever. It’s still something that I carry around with me each day, and when I hear stories about assault and abuse, I panic and feel a little bit of my own childhood terror each time. I cannot watch movies like “The Lovely Bones,” where girls are abducted and killed, since that so nearly happened to me. I explicitly told my doctor that I was not to have strangers touching me while I gave birth.
My friends still know that I would rather not drive, but, thanks to having the persistence of an Elephant, I can drive many places, mostly panic-free, and I know all the alternate routes, in case I start to feel my heart rate increasing too rapidly.
A big part of healing and learning to live with panic attacks, or any mental challenge, is forgiving yourself. Some weeks are just tougher than others, I tell myself, and it’s okay to avoid triggers if you’re just not up to managing the anxiety that day.
That doesn’t mean you won’t be able to manage it another day. Panic is not a life sentence.
Amy Alexander is a word tinkerer and visual artist who lives in Louisiana, but longs for the west. Her work has appeared or will be appearing in Memoir Mixtapes, Riggwelter, A Twist in Time, Three Drops in a Cauldron, and Split Lip Review. Her books, The Legend of the Kettle Daughter and The House You Carry Inside You are forthcoming from The Hedgehog Poetry Press in 2019. Follow her on Twitter @iriemom.
The Sunday Solace series focuses on mental health. We hope to provide a judgment-free space to explore and discuss our issues in a creative manner.