Just Calm Down

Change has never been easy for me.

When I was 7, my parents engaged in a messy divorce, one which often pitted me in the center of their battles, one in which they all-too-often forgot I was just a child. It was then that my panic attacks began. The first one that I can recall was during the spring of 1988, when my father took my brother and I to Disney World for a "family" vacation. I say "family" because it was his way of re-defining our family, of showing us how we had to accept that it was he, me, and my brother that were now a family (one that was separate from the family we had with our mother). And so there I was, in the Happiest Place on Earth - in Epcot Center to be exact - having the first panic attack of my life. I remember it coming on suddenly when this jazz band started to play in some restaurant. I got up, ran into the ladies' room and felt like I couldn't breathe. Finally, after nothing I can recall, I left the restroom and rejoined my father with sweat and barely-dried tears dripping down my cheek. We didn't speak a word.

My next panic attack came about 2-3 years later while spending the night at my friend Pauline's. Pauline (who I have written about before here, as I lost her in a car accident when she was just 16 and I was 15)lived across the street from me. After my parents' divorce, my father retained a friendship with her parents (partly because he wanted to keep an eye on my mother...or so I think). Regardless, Pauline and I had just spent the whole day having fun in her basement...watching Dance USA (or whatever the fuck it was called), eating pizza, and then braiding each others hair. Around 11 that night, we awoke to the sound of my father in her parents' kitchen, laughing loudly. Hearing my father's voice while falling asleep - in the first place other than my childhood home I had ever heard it since my parents got divorced - suddenly made my heart palpitate. I instantly jumped out of bed, clutching my chest and crying hard, contracting every muscle in my body. I can still see Pauline holding and comforting me in her post bed, telling me that it would be ok...that her parents had gotten divorced too and that everything was going to be alright. And I believed her.

I can go on and on about the panic attacks I have had since that night with Pauline. They manifested again when I began high school, when I entered college and then again a few years after college when I received a promotion that catapulted me into full adulthood. They were horrific, crippling dark times in my life, times marked with an early adolescent addiction to xanax, multiple suicide attempts, and, not surprisingly, substance abuse.

Now, however, for the first time in my life, my anxiety-filled tendencies are affecting someone else more than they ever have before. Throughout the course of the last month, I moved out of my studio apartment and into the apartment of the man I love. And then, just this past Tuesday, I quit my job of six years and am about to embark on a new and uncertain journey, one that both terrifies and entices me. As a result of all this change, I am, displicably, a shell of the woman he fell in love with. I am constantly on edge, too tense to be touched, yet too afraid not to be. I am on an emotional rollercoaster, yet never fully aware of my ups and downs.

As a result of all this emotional bullshit (and trust me, I know and believe it's bullshit), he's frustrated and (almost) constantly angry with me. And I can't blame him. I'm frustrated with me. I'm sick and fucking tired of this irrational anxiety, of this unjustified angst.

In the past, men have tried to comfort me when my anxiety came to a head. But he doesn't. He tells me (but not quite in these words) it will be ok if i just shut the fuck up and deal, grow up and move on and become an adult. He tells me to suck it up and live and stop worrying so goddamn much. And - just as I did years ago with the best friend I miss so much sometimes it makes me puke - I believe him.