The 5 year anniversary of my first ever panic attack!

Last weekend marked the 5^th year anniversary of my first ever panic attack.  I can’t speak for anyone else, but I know that I was never able to forget the date of my first attack because it felt like life was never the same again after it.  It was interesting to reflect on how much my life has changed in those 5 years and on how anxiety is still a part of my life but not in the same way it was back then.

After that first ever panic attack which happened on a central London bus on a scorching hot June afternoon, I went to bed dazed and confused and wondering what the hell had just happened to me.  It was the first of many attacks that would plague me with scary symptoms over the coming weeks, but at the time I didn’t really know what it was all about.  

I was convinced that I was ill in some way, and I went through about a million possible diagnoses from pregnancy, dehydration, stomach bug and migraine.  At the time of the first panic attack I experienced I was massively overwhelmed with life, and although I wouldn’t admit it to myself: I was stressed out! The relationship I had been in for 10 years had been going through bad patches for the last year and a half, but I was desperately trying to save it, and meanwhile my job had been cut from permanent to contract in the recession, and I was attempting to prove myself worthy of a full time job again.

It felt like I was on a hamster wheel going round and round trying to keep everybody happy, and just hoping that I could fix everything that was going so badly wrong.  I look back on all of it now and I think it is no wonder that I started to get panic attacks on a regular basis.  I was looking after everybody but myself back then.

Although I consider my very anxious and panicky days behind me, I still get the odd major panic attack and those old agoraphobic thoughts tend to speak to me at those times as well.  I would say the thing that has changed in those 5 years since my first attack is how I deal with the fear of panic.

During the first year that I experienced panic attacks I couldn’t handle the thought of being out in public and away from safety if I had an attack, and at the first sign of one coming on I would literally leg it from wherever I was to go and hide away somewhere.  That was how I became agoraphobic in the end.

Gradually over time I have learnt to sit with the fear and that the fear of the attacks is worse than the attacks themselves.  Sometimes when I feel myself getting scared that I am on the verge of a panic attack I just say to myself “go on panic, panic all you want” and that kind of takes the fear out of it for me because I am not trying to fight it off.

The main reason that I no longer frequently suffer from panic attacks and agoraphobia is that I have learnt how to treat myself better.  I have let go of the toxic work and personal relationships that were holding me hostage, and I don’t try to please and keep people happy anymore.  As a result of that I don’t feel overwhelmed or over pressured by life.

If there is one thing I would have done differently in my anxiety journey, it would have been to have listened to my body at the time of that first panic attack.  I might have saved myself from a full on nervous breakdown if I had done.  I am pleased with how I have dealt with it all over the last 5 years though and I am proud to say that I now use my fight response more than my flight!

Publishing my first book! A safe place - a memoir of anxiety, agoraphobia and depression

Just over three months ago, I published my first ever book on kindle called ‘A safe place’.  The book is a memoir of my experience with anxiety, agoraphobia and depression. 

It was pretty exciting and surreal on March 9 this year to see the book complete, published and available for people to buy on Amazon.  The book was kind of two years in the making, after I originally wrote the draft over spring and summer 2013 and then shoved it in a draw to hopefully do something with one day, and then in spring 2014 I dug the notebooks out and started the mammoth task of editing the 90,000 words of draft into the story that I truly wanted to tell.

When I started writing the draft in 2013 I was at a pretty low point in life.  I had gone through a nervous breakdown two years before, and in the wake of that my 10 year relationship had ended, and I had needed to leave the corporate world because my agoraphobia and bouts of depression were too extreme for me to be able to force myself to commit to making it into an office every day.  I found myself living back at home with my Dad in my old childhood bedroom, and I was making just enough cash to make it through one day at a time.

To be honest I started writing the book out of boredom.  Between the little bits of freelance work that I could pick up there was a lot of dead time, and I was looking for something to fill it with.  One day the idea came to me that maybe I could write a book about helping people to deal with panic attacks, as I was really starting to get the hang of beating them thanks to CBT therapy.

As I started writing though, I quickly realised that it wasn’t the sort of book that I wanted to write.  During the time that I had been dealing with agoraphobia and anxiety I had read so many of those ‘say goodbye to your panic attacks in ten easy steps’ books and they always left me feeling more hopeless than ever because the techniques didn’t work for me.  The books that had helped me the most had been memoir style ones, because I always felt like the person writing them knew exactly what I was going through, and that gave me hope. 

I decided that I wanted to tell the full story of my battles with anxiety, right from my first ever panic attack on a bus in central London, to my full nervous breakdown a year later, to then developing agoraphobia and losing my confidence to leave the house for months, and all the details in between.

When I first started writing the draft it was all a bit clunky, and I struggled to get my emotions out on to paper, but a few weeks in to the writing process it suddenly became a massive need in me to get my story out on to the page.  I had been the most unenthusiastic and directionless person for the last two years, but suddenly I found myself rushing to get to the library for opening time and I would sit at a desk there writing solidly till 5pm, stopping only to go to the toilet or to eat lunch.

Writing the draft became my life, and at the weekends I would think about what I was going to write the following week and how I would express my emotions in the story.  I didn’t have any money, but I didn’t care, the book was giving me everything that I needed.  It wasn’t always easy writing about my experiences though, I was still massively grieving for my relationship and job, and sometimes as I wrote about something it would trigger off the loss that I felt and I would get extremely emotional.  Sometimes after a week of writing about tough and painful memories, I would find myself lying in bed crippled by heartache for everything that had gone from my life.

I found editing the book a year later just as all-encompassing as writing the draft had been.  I loved seeing this thing that I had created become a polished product.  When I first started though it felt like typing up three notebooks full of 90,000 words was going to take forever, but like everything in life it all happened bit by bit, and I can honestly say that I loved every day of editing the book.

 

I am proud of myself for telling my story and everything that I experienced with anxiety, agoraphobia and depression.  Although the book massively helped me to heal and to release my journey, my main hope from publishing it is that somebody going through something similar will feel a connection with it and it will give them the strength to take that first step towards recovering and embarking on a bright future.

 

If you would like to check out my book, you can find it here on Amazon. http://www.amazon.co.uk/Safe-Place-anxiety-agoraphobia-depression-ebook/dp/B00UFTY0GQ/ref=sr_1_2?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1434988548&sr=1-2&keywords=a+safe+place

 

Thank you xxx