Productive Anxiety Attack

A Story by Yangy

I wrote this to calm myself one time when I was having a panic attack in school

Shaking. Furious, extreme shaking. Another panic attack has struck. A constant build-up of conflicting emotions and my mind focusing on minuscule errors and pointless traumas. I sit in a room at my school, missing another class that I barely stumbled out of, more time ripped from between my fingers. Ironically missing my such a large proportion of my time in class was what led me here. I feel my shaking worsen inside me, my hands pulsating. My body tenses and shivers as the anxiety surges through my veins like it’s a zebra, running from the hungry predator of my mental health. I turn my music volume up. “Make it stop, let this end” blasts through my earphones. I can’t help but feel the relevance to my current predicament. I want to rise against the anxiety that is beating me whilst I’m down but my everchanging mind distracts me from thinking about the good things in my life.

When I planned to return to school, I wanted to hit the ground running and get ahead while I could, but I let my health get in the way and I stumbled, everything got ahead of my and I’ve fallen behind. Collapsed on the floor I’m broken. I have tried to climb from I’ve fallen over again. I can’t run, I can barely walk. Year after year, I face the repeated struggles with society, study and keeping myself happy. I wish for the opportunity of a re-education, but the labour I’d have to face is too intense for me to tame on. I would expect myself to be a master after studying the impossible subject of happiness, but I can barely pull the strength to go on, or pick up the pieces of courage together to drag my empty corpse of bed every cold, dark morning.

Chairs creak around me and, it sends a stronger surge down my weakened spine every time they do, pencils hit paper-coated desks gently but in my twisted head it sounds like their words are being carved into my mind. Words that are reminding me I’m not good enough, that I’m going nowhere, that I’m worthless. I clasp my hands and dig my nail into my thumb to try to keep myself still. I wish I could procrastinate my emotions. I’m exhausted. The way I feel is getting in my way every day. I try to live the cold-hearted life but I’m flooded with vivid and colourful, yet blackened emotions. I care about others, about where I go, but I don’t care about myself anymore, or what happens to me. I help many but few know the pain I deal with, I have the anxiety of a thousand horror movies to unfairly let out upon an audience of one. The contradictions in my head are driving me to the point where I’m facing the extinction of the little sanity I have left.

I stare at the glaring, bright screen of my phone as I write this, looking at the words that are dancing with the devils in my head and mocking me, telling me that no matter how much I write, how much effort I put into carving my sentences, that I will always be like this. I’ll never grow a shiver-free spine. I look up again. The calm greens are giving me nausea, the blinding lights are keeping me further from my answer for happiness and the cluttered pens in damaged containers make me uneasy.

My life is going too fast, for a minute I’m enjoying a day out with my closest friends and the next, I’m here vibrating like a phone constantly going off, my thoughts are my texts, sending the notifications through my body at the speed of light. “Ting, nobody likes you. Ting, you’re worthless. Ting...” - I wish I could mute it but I can’t. There’s nothing I can do. I must read every message, every update, every alarm.

The life is gone from my clouded eyes, my reflection is distorted by the million shards of a broken mirror, my voice lacks emotion or power, my finger prints are distorted by countless small, rounded scars. Worst of all, I still feel the guilt for being a burden upon the lives of everyone close to me. I feel the love and desire to help everyone I know, to carry the weight of their thousand burdens. For a while I can. I am like a guardian angel. I solve their problems and help with their outlooks in life. But I’m only human. When I can’t help, I think of how I can’t do anything. I feel every breath I inhale makes me a thief, and life is my ongoing heist. Forget living on borrowed time, mines minutes are stolen from those who deserve it better. I hold them like a hand grenade, ready to throw if it gets too close to the inevitable explosion.

I try to steady my arms and legs. I want to look like I can be calm, like I can appear stable in at least one manner. The opening ‘G’ on the piano for ‘Welcome to the Black Parade.’ A calmer, bittersweet shiver. It reminds me of my father and how he was cruelly taken from me, when I was a young boy, a hearse being his black parade and our family as the marching band. I read back on what I’ve written, I think about how I could use it, how I can excuse the colossal mess that is my mental health for some good. As I focus my mind on productivity, the raging storm inside my head begins to clear. Drenched in the freezing rain of depression I plan my next move. I can feel the thoughts swirling around in my head still, but I know I’m starting to improve.

Or so I thought. I look at the time and see I’ve been here for merely half an hour. A thirty-minute lifetime. Merely ten songs. I feel the drowsiness consume me, taking all my energy and life for the day. My eyes begin to weigh me down with a million sorrows. I don’t want to be here anymore. This school is a false paradise I refuse to endure for any longer, but I must. I’m caught in an endless cycle of sickness, mental health, missing class and trying to keep relationships up with my peers. It’s too much now. How can I carry on with life if it goes at a fraction of the speed of everyone else’s? How do I deal with time when it does nothing but drag on, and on, and on?