Panic

‘Eighty percent of success is showing up’. I just no longer showed up for anything and when I did I was often so panicked that I wasn’t entirely present. Composer, Allen Shawn called his book about his anxiety, panic and agoraphobia: ‘Wish I Could Be There’ and I wished that I could be there too. Shawn's book is pretty good, he's literate and ‘Wish I Could Be There’ is well balanced – he threads neurobiological and psychoanalytic perspectives into a work that's primarily autobiographical and writes with care and skill; his descriptions of his parents are particularly detailed. He didn’t seem to have been conspicuously mistreated, there was one incident in his upbringing that can be viewed as plainly traumatizing but the seeds of his phobia can, perhaps, be seen in the details of his parents way of relating to the world. A kind of ‘death by a thousand cuts' rather than by some incredible and obviously terrible misfortune. Of course, not everyone would find it easy to identify with Shawn's story. He grew up in a family who travelled around in chauffeur driven cars and he grew up to be a successful composer. These are uncommon experiences. Of course, the challenges that he faced are to some extent his own but there is also much that most could identify with I think. The book opens with an account of him being mugged. He says that what bothered him about this event was that the muggers held him in place. Its other unpleasant aspects faded into the background as his phobic fear of restriction took hold and overwhelmed him. When I was a kid I remember going to a fair and getting on a ride, the ride involved being swung upside down at high speed – this didn’t bother me but in order to hold us in place while we were upside down, machinery pushed a pad onto our chests, in turn pushing us back into our seats. I began to panic at being restrained and the ride attendant offered to reverse the machine and free me. Similarly, I remember canoeing once and feeling something like vertigo at the thought of having to paddle through a metal tunnel that had been placed in a lake as part of some sort of obstacle course. I was disconcerted enough to lose concentration and so managed to turn the canoe such that it was wedged sideways against the sides of the tunnel, becoming an impassable obstacle for people behind. And when family visited I crouched behind a wall in the garden on what seemed to be the coldest day that winter; I stayed crouched for hours. When I could no longer withstand the sub zero temperature, I crept back into the house and exchanged a few simple words with the visitors.

Once, when I was at school, most of my classmates left the classroom to watch a film that was related to what we were studying and I and a couple of others stayed behind to finish working on something. I completed the work and left the classroom to watch the film that was being shown in another room. I came across a door that was ajar and assumed that this was where the movie was being shown. The thought of being mistaken and walking into the wrong room made me anxious and I couldn’t shake the, seemingly nonsensical, feeling that I was about to walk into a trap. So I walked around the circular corridor and tried to pluck up the courage to enter. I was still unable to open the door however, and I ended up walking around the corridor for about an hour – stressed by the knowledge that, had a teacher crossed my path, I would have some explaining to do and that I didn’t have an explanation; I don't have much of an explanation now other than that my cerebellum was playing fear Scalectrics.

The film that was being shown was: 'One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest'.

There were several other occasions early in my childhood that indicated that something was going awry. There were other occasions when I would feel crushed or panicked while in enclosed spaces or at the prospect of being confined but why list them all? I was also hospitalized when I was about ten due to psychosomatic pain caused by anxiety. 

 

I walked around the block a thousand times rather than enter a house party when I was about eight - I associated such things with alcohol and I associated alcohol with my drunk mother smashing the house up or injuring herself in a violent way that involved the loss of a lot of blood. I was angry. It was a warm day. I was exhausted. And so I went to the party. It was not what I expected. The adults were pleasantly drunk. It was a common or garden 'Bohemian' house party. I sat on the polished wood floor with Delah’s daughter while she played rough with a kitten and talked the kind of spirited jiberish of which five year olds are fond. I was no longer angry but I did not adapt to being there. 

If you stop showing up at all then you liable to become stir-crazy - cabin fever is added to a cauldron of terrors.