The Cruel Director

A Decade with Panic Disorder

This next story I am about to tell happened back in 2007 or so. I remember it being an overcast day, and I was nursing a bit of a hangover. I’d recently started drinking again after a brief period of abstinence, and as a result of this on-again-off-again relationship with alcohol, my nerves were shot to shit.

I was working at Safeway at the time, and we were doing one of our morning huddles when all of a sudden things just felt wrong. The words being spoken during the huddle suddenly stopped making sense. Reality as I knew it was melting around me. It was as if I’d been unknowingly dosed with some terrible hallucinogenic and all I knew was that I needed to leave right now.

Without saying a word to any of my co-workers, I bolted out of the department and made a beeline for the front exit, walking between the dry goods aisle in case I lost balance and needed to break my fall with a bag of basmati rice. The vertigo was getting worse, and I figured that if I was going to faint, I wanted it to be outside before, God forbid, any of my coworkers saw me do it. By some miracle I did make it out of the store, and the first thing I did was sit down on a bench and light a cigarette with hands that would simply not stop trembling. 

My manager came out to check on me. I told him I needed a minute, and thankfully, he was understanding. I had no idea what had just happened to me, but I was afraid to go back inside. I felt safe outside. I whipped out the old flip-phone I had at the time and gave my mom a call, telling her what I’d just experienced, and that’s when a new word entered my lexicon, one that would remain with me for many years to come.

“Oh,” She reassured me. “You just had a panic attack. I get them sometimes, too.”

A fucking panic attack.

Little did I know that this one experience would ultimately direct my actions for the next decade.

There was now a new director in my life, and this director had rules. I could no longer walk through crowded open spaces. As far as the grocery store, my choices were to either hug the aisles, or stay on the perimeter. And while grocery stores were bad, shopping malls were even worse, and if for some ungodly reason I had to go to one, I would frequently pretend I had to stop and tie my shoes in order to ground myself and keep the vertigo in check. 

This is because the moment I stepped into an open space, the vertigo would set in, my heart would start pounding, and I’d have the immediate sense that fainting was inevitable.

This was simply the director showing me who was boss.

Curiously enough, he seemed to forego these rules so long as I had an acceptable level of Oxycontin or alcohol in my bloodstream.

Then in 2009, I got sober. I’m not going to go back into all of those details, as I’ve spoken about them at length in the prior piece I wrote. What I will say is that it made managing these symptoms a bit tricky. 

And this brings me to the 12-step meetings I would attend.

I would frequently bury my face in my cellphone, not because I didn’t want to pay attention to what was being said, but because it was something available to distract me from the dizziness that would inevitably set in while sitting in a large room surrounded by people, especially if I was in a front row. The director also frequently instructed me to get up and go out for smoke breaks, and like the previously mentioned example, it had nothing to do with not wanting to hear what was being said, but the symptoms would set in and I couldn’t bear to sit in the room for a moment longer. While all of these rules certainly added a considerable degree of stress to my life, they were manageable. 

And then on April 21st, 2011 I experienced the panic attack of all panic attacks.

I remember the date because it was my (new) one-year sober anniversary. I went to a meeting. I sat through the meeting. And then right as the meeting was about to wrap up, I was hit with an intense panic attack. I didn’t think anything of it, and I just walked outside and got into the car with my friends.

It went away. And then it came back.

I spent the rest of that night alternating between feeling normal, and then feeling like I was frying balls on mushrooms. I remember laying there on the couch, messaging with friends on Facebook just in an attempt to hang onto my sanity. There were several times that night in which I truly wondered if I would ever feel normal again. 

It passed by morning, but it was not done with me yet. I endured many waves of these panic attacks for the next year or so. The best way to describe the way I felt was like my soul had been ripped out of me. I truly feared I was losing my mind, and it felt like a fight to stay ‘here’. For some reason that I can’t explain, I didn’t really share what I was going through with any of my friends, and I imagine that many of them found it strange that I no longer wanted to attend meetings, or go to any gatherings really. 

Well, I wanted to. I just wasn’t allowed to.

No, the director had decided that isolation was my best course of action.

I could still manage to go to work, and as long as I stuck to the rules the director laid out for me, I was functional, although I still experienced intermittent episodes of what I can only call “the void”, periods of time in which I felt like I had to hold on, lest I be sucked into a black hole and annihilated. 

And who wants that?

It felt like everything I’d ever known or taken as being real was ripped right out from underneath me, and all I was left with was a feeling of emptiness and the constant fear that my next episode was waiting for me right around the corner.

This finally became so fucking unbearable that I made an appointment with a doctor, and she prescribed me Wellbutrin. While I initially felt better (placebo effect), within a couple weeks time I wanted to throw myself out of a window just to make it stop. I then made an appointment with an actual psychiatrist. I explained what I was going through and she got me in early. The first thing she told me was that whoever would prescribe Wellbutrin for panic attacks was an idiot, instructed me to throw it away, and wrote me a prescription for low-dose Xanax. 

Despite my history with pills, I never liked Xanax. It made me feel foggy-headed, but also knocked these episodes out within half an hour of taking one. I kept them on hand in case of emergency, and thankfully, I didn’t need them very often. I’m sure that just knowing they were there had something to do with this. In fact, most of my prescriptions ended up turning into dust because I would carry the bottle around with me in my pocket, and this would knock the pills around until they eventually disintegrated.

I’d finally found something to keep the director at bay. And we had an uneasy truce for the next handful of years. The sense of the void had all but disappeared, but the threat of its return was all it took to keep me in a constant state of anxiety.

This was until I found meditation. 

A quick warning to those interested in meditation. It’s often marketed as a way to stay calm, cool, and collected. But people can and frequently do go off the rails once they start doing it in earnest. And I warn people to stay away from all of this stuff unless they really, really feel drawn to it like I was. 

I’d read plenty of reports of people losing their minds when taking up meditative practice. And a lot of these symptoms sounded much like what I’d experienced in 2011, and like a fool, I went ahead and pressed forward, much to the dismay of the director.

It was in 2019 that I stumbled upon a form of dialectic practice that went with the meditations I was doing. It sounded intriguing and so I figured, hey, why not?

I used panic attacks as the focus of this practice, and drew out each situation on paper, and while I was going through the details of each one, something stood out to me. The director’s threats always revolved around fainting in public, or losing my mind and having a nervous breakdown. The funny thing is, neither of these things ever happened. Not even once. It was simply the fear of them happening that gave the director his power, and kept me in this self-made prison of the mind.

It made me realize how badly these rules had stunted my capacity for growth, and had even stolen years from my life in the form of isolation. 

It also showed me that at the very root of this thing, there was simply nothing there. All of the threats, all of the cajoling, it arose out of something that simply never was. 

I’ve not had a true panic attack since doing that dialectic, and while I still experience anxiety sometimes, the rules that I was beholden to for so many years are nowhere to be found. I go to the grocery store and I no longer avoid the produce section. I can walk through the mall and for some strange reason I no longer have to stop and tie my shoe. There is no longer a bottle of crumbling Xanax rolling around in my pocket, and there hasn’t been for years.

That period of life was a painful one, but it taught me a valuable lesson. The mind is powerful, especially the deeper parts. And often more powerful than the mind we have conscious thoughts with on a day-to-day basis. And we’ve all got the cruel director somewhere down in the deeps, commanding us to do things that are not to the benefit of ourselves or others. But if we do have the courage to go down there, we may be fortunate enough to shine a light into that darkness and find that the thing that drove us to misery and self-destruction is strangely absent. And this might just provide an opportunity to grow to our full potential and be what we were always meant to be, in whatever fashion that looks like for each of us. 

The director’s chair is empty.

It always was.

May you all be well.