My first panic attack was caused by my father.

Courtesy of Pexels.com

I would always hesitate to burden those I love with the blame for my anxiety, but if anyone who raised me is at fault, my father is. He abused me physically until I was thirteen and put my foot down, telling him I’d go live with my mother if he put his hands on me again, so instead of being easier on me, he doubled down on the mental abuse.

Growing up, the thing I heard the most from him was that my dreams, goals, desires were not good enough. I was not good enough. I internalized this bullshit idea to the point where my inner critic speaks in his voice, says what he said to me, when I’m at a breaking point. I rationally know that I’m not a bad person, no matter what my mind tells me, but it’s hard to change that inner voice.

I will always remember my first panic attack. I was sitting on my nightstand, a dark blue lacquered piece of furniture that had been handmade by my stepmom’s father, and it creaked under my weight. I couldn’t breathe. My father was screaming at me, but I was lost in a fog, far from my present situation. Every gasp of air felt like a fish sucking in oxygen, like nothing was getting through the right pipes.

“You’re having contractions,” my father told me, a maniacal smile on his face. As though he wanted to care for me as he railed against me. What a strange impulse to have.

“They’re not contractions,” I managed to say, scoffing even in the midst of my labored breath. “I’m hyperventilating.”

Courtesy of Unsplash

I hyperventilate a lot these days, far more than I did back in the days when my illness was hidden beneath dissociation and repressed emotions. I try to be open about it with new friends. Even so, inevitably one of my panic attacks will be so severe that it scares most people away. I keep a tight circle around myself, a group of people that care for me deeply and understand my struggles. I know it can be annoying, dealing with someone who is chronically afraid and also triggered by innocuous, nonsensical things, and that’s why I’m so grateful for the people that do care. They’re the ones that see the bravery beneath the fear.

I’ve had a lot of time to think about how and why I turned out the way I did. I spent most of my early twenties railing against my illness, throwing myself headfirst into new traumatic situations just to try to forget the old. But running away didn’t work — the unexamined problems kept cropping back up in different forms, new situations giving me deja vu and focusing my perspective on the parts that I needed to work on.

One of the biggest things that spending so much time being afraid has taught me is that fear is kind of a stupid survival mechanism in a lot of cases. Sure, you should listen to the fear that tells you not to get too close to the edges of cliffs (especially if you’re a clumsy person like me), but the fear that tells you the restaurant is too crowded or that everyone is staring at you? I’ve taken to answering back to the first fear response in my brain with, “So what?”

I do not regret my trauma or the anxiety is has wrought. I used to regret the loss of my healthy mind, but I realized that all of our minds are fraught, touched in different ways by the throes of this life. I make the best of what I have. And I love as hard as I can, as much as I can.

Maybe I cannot undo what has been done to me. But I can be better than I was.