Dear you,
It's disorders like anxiety that make life much harder on the person than anything else. Nothing ever beats that feeling of fear, of not knowing when an attack would kick in, break you to pieces, mock all the brave moments you had in life, in just a few minutes, maybe even seconds.
You wake up, not knowing if it is going to be a good anxiety day or a bad one, but you hope for the best, and you say that you've had as many attacks as you can remember and still survived; you beat it. But what you don't know is, anxiety is changing you; it's making you want to stay away from people, even from those who love you the most; lovers and family. Anxiety makes you want to be alone during an attack's kick-in, because you do not want to embarrass anyone, and because, in reality, you don't believe anyone is ever going to be patient enough with you when you're going through the attack, because it comes slowly, but the impact remains for hours, or at least that's the case for me.
One day you wake up, feel stressed about going out because you know an attack will kick in, but you
have to go because it's not something you can postpone for another day. You get out of bed, pray that whatever the intensity of the attack, you just get out safely, without experiencing the worst symptoms. You go out and face the world, and when you're about to close the house door, you start imagining things, but refuse to allow them to overcome your state of "I'm sure I can survive another attack." You might get to a point where going out seems so heavy a burden, so heavy you cannot bear.
When it's time for an attack to kick in, you start imagining all types of scenarios, from best to worst. Do I have to tell you how much it hurts physically? It
literally hurts physically. Your muscles start to go tense, and it seems to you that it's the most intense they've gone. You cannot feel them enough to relax them bit by bit. Your hands start shaking, you start losing focus and distract yourself through conversations with people around you, but it never really works, because conversations with people do not easily defeat anxiety attacks. Then, your heartbeats go insane. You try another mechanism to calm yourself down through taking deep breaths; inhale counting to five and exhale counting to seven. It doesn't work, either. Your body is more tensed now. You're sure you'll mess up. You're lucky if your company is someone who knows about all of this. You tell them that you're having an attack, without knowing how you want them to help you. You just tell them so that they understand why you may sound so rude to them. You do not mean to be rude, and that's the worst part about anxiety. It makes you who you are not. You hurt the people around you but you just cannot be nice during these moments. It's hard to know that your mind is playing dirty tricks and games with your body and still feel and look firm. You want a moment of breaking down but you can't, because it will most probably feel trivial to the person accompanying you. At the most intense moments of every attack you end up having one thought in mind: "I want to die; I just cannot take this any longer. My body is collapsing and I'm so, so tired. It's too much." You want to disappear, to leave the person you're with. You want to be alone, completely alone, to shout at your brain to get its shit together and understand that this is not true. It's not true. It's all a trick. Your muscles start to go even more tensed. Your body refuses to act sober enough to let these thoughts go.
When you finally relax a little, you start crying. You cry because it hurts so much to be
this weak. It hurts because your whole body was on an attack, at war. The outcome is a body so drenched in sweat and shivering, a heart so weak and trembling, and a mind that is just too drained to think of anything. You didn't die, but you wish this would be the last time.
Please don't leave me. It's out of my control. I'm sorry.
I'm so tired. I'm so tired. God..
