gate number 29

14.10.2022

Song: Moon River – Audrey Hepburn or Frank Ocean (or any version you like, really)

Last year around this time, I hopped on a plane to chase the moon across Europe. As I'm typing these words, I'm on a plane hitting 37,000 feet, about to reach the tropopause again, going back to my country in the middle of the fall semester. I lied to a bunch of people about my last journey. I lie about a lot of things; I just try not to do it on here. This right here feels like a journal, I don't see any accomplishment in lying to myself. My "irritable" bowels were indeed bothering me, but the reason I was around the great belt of calm air back then - the closest I was going to be to the ozone - was my panic attacks.

I was sure last year people believed that the reason I went back was just my bowels that couldn't stop bothering me, but now I'm not so sure anymore. I've recently discovered that - through a little bit of self-reflecting - I'm not very good at hiding my emotions from others. Friends can tell instantly whether I'm nervous or uncomfortable. And to my horror, I'm just as good at believing they're wrong. That's beside the point.

The point is that I never try to hide that I'm a 22-year-old man-child who's scared – no scratch that - terrified of great physical pain. When I was calming down from my first panic attack last week, the first one in about a year, lying down in my bed staring at my Frank Ocean poster (also, where is the album?); I thought to myself, "No, this doesn't make sense. No, no, no, I've been taking my meds. It shouldn't be this way; it should be THAT way." A thing I had to find out about the relationship between medications and panic attacks is that there's no getting out of the tunnel in terms of full 'recovery'. Last year, two weeks after I was prescribed my medications, I remember thinking, Holy fuck, that's it. I'm done; I've made it out. That's it, it's going away.

I allowed myself to be lulled into a false sense of safety by believing that this was how things would always be, but then, lo and behold, I was wrong. I found out that one thing will work for a while, as it did for about a year for me, and then it won't work anymore; you have to find something else to keep you "sane".

That Monday night, I kept telling myself, "It's truly terrible; not only has this occurred to you for god knows how many times now, but people have been going crazy over this for hundreds of years. You are not the first or the last person to struggle with this, most importantly, and unfortunately, you are still alive to witness it, whether you want to or not. So you need to keep it moving. Now that I come to think of it, some of that weird pep talk was just pure nonsense. But that night might've been the first night I've initiated into that awareness and into that reality. Some kind of curtain has been lifted. You're never getting off this train, I thought. And my god was it dreadful. I cried and cried...

-

18.10.2022

Visited my psychiatrist today. He's a friend of dads. I'm not convinced the guy likes my company. Mom says it's okay cause he doesn't have to like me in order to help me. We always have this back-and-forth about my state of mind. The more I dramatize my life and tell him how these little moments of 'weaknesses' show that I'm an insane person and I’m in great pain, he persists and tells me I'm looking at it from the wrong perspective, which I find it hard to believe cause…well I'm…always right, no? In the last 10 minutes of our session, we were in this see-saw, teetering. I asked him if I could visit him again before I left for Sheffield, and he said, "please do". When he asked when I was leaving, I told him next week but definitely before Halloween. Before he asked, ''Why before Halloween?'' I was already halfway through what I would dress up as and what I planned to do with my friends. According to him, I told him all about it with this "guilty smile" as if I thought I shouldn’t be excited about these things anymore because my life had turned upside down again. He said, "The moment you start getting excited and happy about things, the way you talk changes, you're more present, you have something to look forward to; try to keep that excitement and charm with you; that will be your best friend when the panic tries to smack off the wall and get to you". That was it. That was the end of our session. So I reached out to my bag, grabbed my coat, and thanked him.

Just as I reached the door handle, he called my name, I turned around, and he had this grin on his face; he said, ‘’This pain you’re talking about, it won’t last forever; nothing does’’.

-M