This is What Anxiety Feels Like

It's familiar but not comfortable.

My body temperature has risen. My palms sweat and there's an emptiness behind my bottom rib. There's also the usual tightness behind my sternum, piece-y vision speckled by black dots, a feeling of warmth spread across my cheeks and behind my neck.

They say that panic attacks only last about 15 minutes. But I've spent whole days with my mind in a tunnel.

My first real panic attack happened when I began my Masters program. Before that, for my first few years in recovery, I would feel heart palpitations and shortness of breath. I thought I was always having a heart attack. I realize now, though, that this was also panic. And arrhythmia.

For some reason, grad school transformed my panic from something sitting just behind my chest to a full body state. These attacks started around the time my uncle passed away suddenly. And I was reading a lot of Foucault and other cultural theories about power. I began to have existential crisis, fears that my entire family was disappearing, fears that the only thing I'd ever have to look forward to in life was stifling hot subway rides and luke warm coffee, fears that everything was predetermined into mediocrity. Fears that my student loans would come due and I would be left unable to find work, living in a shelter, a person tossed away.

Yoga helped. Medication helped. Talk therapy helped. I began seeing a feminist therapist who believed, like I did, that diagnosis was an inappropriate operation of power. I cut caffeine. I adopted cats.

And there was something about an animal resting in the calm quiet of mid-morning, breathing in and out on my stomach, licking its paws, that became meditative.

I'm feeling anxiety now like I felt then. I worry that in a few weekends when I'm to sit my exams my mind will freeze up. Or my mind will work just fine but I'll discover that I have nothing new and interesting to say. My chest will tighten. My palms will sweat.

So in anticipation of that moment, my chest tightens now. My palms sweat. My neck flushes.

And I think there's no where to go but forward. Student loans in tow. Cat mouths to feed.

And it's very, very scary.