Hello!
Since I last wrote, I wrapped up my first semester of grad school, celebrated my birthday, moved back to Denver, reunited with my hometown friends, and watched one of my oldest friends walk down the aisle.
Needless to say, I’m feeling rejuvenated for the first time in awhile. Burnout is real, and rest is required if we want to do the work we love.
In that vein of thinking, I’m adding a paid option to this newsletter. Paid subscribers will get exclusive, bi-monthly writings from me (sometimes more), as well as special interviews and updates on my creative work.
All contributions will directly support this newsletter, as well as the book I’m writing.
Become a paying subscriber now to make sure you don’t miss a story!
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Here’s today’s story:
I am in the back seat of a car, riding home with three childhood friends: Genie, Maria, and Jared.
We’re all in college, and we’ve just spent the weekend visiting Genie at Yale—cheering on the football team and dancing with glow sticks and scarfing down late-night wenzels (if you know, you know). We’d planned on rising early this morning and driving back to Cobleskill, our hometown, to eat a home-cooked meal before the start of fall break.
Instead, we were greeted with the news of an active shooter nearby. The threat had been called in from a campus pay phone and the shooter was at large, so we could not leave the dorm.
Instead of setting out into the sunshine, the curtains were drawn. The doors, locked.
The Yale campus is connected by a network of underground tunnels, which can be accessed at entry points across different dorm buildings. I spent the day envisioning the shooter sneaking through these passageways, making their way to us.
What, who, were they hunting?
We fed our hunger for safety with microwavable ramen noodles, pretending not to fear what darkness outside might reach us.
Later, as evening loomed, the campus was finally declared safe (no one was harmed), and we got into the car to go home.
Now, in the car, my throat begins to feel tight.
My breath, short.
We sit at a few red lights. I unfurl my scarf from my neck, take a few deep breaths.
The more I inhale, the less oxygen I get.
Outside, night is dripping down, and the lights of New Haven flick on, making the inside of the car grow darker.
More breaths, less air. I am not thinking of the shooter anymore, but somewhere in my subconscious, he is still hunting us. Or, rather, I am being hunted by the fear—in my own imagination—of what could’ve been.
The skin around my lips begins to tingle. My fingers follow. I feel light, excited, as if I am a balloon about to float away.
Am I…dying?
This is my last chance, I think, to say anything before I suffocate. “Um…I can’t breathe,” I choke.
“What do you mean?” asks Maria, her normally smiling face in the passenger seat now serious, flat.
She turns around, sees my distress, tells Jared to pull over. As a pre-med student, ambulance volunteer, and future PA, Maria already knows exactly how to calm me. She comes around to the door and checks my vitals.
She looks me in the eyes, and I look back, feeling safe and grounded for the first time all day.
She guides me through some deep breaths, which keep me rooted in the fact of my aliveness, then says, “I think you’re hyperventilating.”
Hyperventilating? I’d merely been sitting in the car when my breath took itself from my body.
How could that be?
Of course, she was right. But I couldn’t process it then—not yet. So Genie navigates us to the ER at Yale Hospital, and I spend an hour waiting, only to be told by the doctor that it had been an asthma attack.
He gives me a prescription for an albuterol inhaler, then sends me on my way.
***
Five years later, I will go to the hospital because of a similar attack, and a doctor will hand me a Xanax and tell me to go home. No one will say anything about mental health, or anxiety, or panic.
I feel stupid, like I always do when this happens.
But I’d been so convinced that I was in grave danger. Wasn’t seeking help the right thing to do?
It took years to learn what spurred these episodes: anxiety.
The hardest part about living with anxiety, and panic attacks in particular, is that they present us with the challenge of deciphering what is real from what isn’t. While my feelings of panic and my shortness of breath are real, the thoughts that spur these physical side effects usually are not.
It’s sort of like being enclosed in a box where all four walls are glass. You feel trapped, but you can’t see what’s keeping you in. The truth of your life and the world beyond that anxious moment are so close, yet there’s no door leading back to that place.
Whenever I begin to feel panic—hands clammy, breath short, throat tightening like a snake around my neck—I do all I can to remember the difference between the real and the unreal.
I ask: Am I actually suffocating or choking in some way, at random? Or, am I feeling this way because I fear that the hypothetical situation I’ve been obsessively ruminating on will come true?
It has always been the latter.
In these moments, it helps to focus on what is real; things I can feel, see, taste, and hear. The whir of the breeze or the moan of the refrigerator. The softness of a blanket, the solid ground beneath my feet. Most of the time, it helps prevent the initial level of panic from turning into a tsunami of throat-tightening worry.
When these reminders aren’t enough to halt the attack from coming, they at least help me ride the wave as my panic sets in. I remember that reality is a thing that exists beyond my panic, and that if I hold tight to the memory of what is true, it will once again be mine.
I have a sense that such self-knowledge is the best defense against anxiety, so that when those walls rise up without warning—whether in the back seat of a car, in a crowd, or alone in the depths of night—you can cut your own door into that suffocating box and set yourself free.