This is a story that even after two years, only my mother knows the details of. This is a story about true terror. This is a story about pain. This is a story about embarrassment. This is a story about panic attacks.

During my freshman year of highschool, I went through one of the worst experiences of my life; I had my first panic attack. Unfortunately, I decided to keep this event to myself for two years. I didn’t want people to know. I didn’t want people to know I was different, or that I was struggling. I didn’t want people to think that I was weird, and I especially didn’t want people to change how they viewed me because of my attacks. Due to the fact that I kept this episode to myself for such a long period of time, I’m sure that you can understand how difficult it has been to write about what happened that night. Although it has been challenging to tell, it is something I feel obligated to write about, because as a result of this attack, I kept my suffering a secret, which only made matters much worse. This story is my attempt to describe how terrible an attack is, and an attempt to describe my own personal battle with these attacks.    

My struggle with panic attacks began on a cold, October night in 2013.  

“Hurry up Alexis! We are going to leave without you if you don’t put that makeup on faster,” my sister yelled as I was applying lipstick. 

“I’m coming! Just let me finish up,” I shouted in response. I applied the rest of my makeup and sprinted out the door. My mom and sister were already waiting in the car for me.

“Why did it take you so d*** long to get ready? It’s not like anyone is going to see you in the theatre!” my mother immediately shouted back as I stepped into the car. She took no interest in being late.   

“I just wanted to look nice. Sorry,” I replied.  

We were still early.

That night, my mom, sister and I were meeting up with my aunt, uncle and two cousins to go and see a movie. My one cousin, Josh, was a year younger than me, and my cousin Elaina was around the same age as my sister, so about ten. I was not excited to be out in public with my family.

When my mom, sister and I had gotten to the actual theatre, there were people everywhere- running, eating, talking, waiting, and walking- doing what people normally do before they sit down to watch a movie. My cousins were waiting outside for us, still fifteen minutes before the movie was supposed to start. I greeted my relatives and continued to walk to the theatre alone. I was struggling to hold conversation with my family because I was too distracted by the noises that other people were making. I felt as though there was way too much to look at and way many sounds to take in.

Looking back now, I understand that this feeling of being overwhelmed is a precursor to my attacks. 

When I walked through the entrance, I could see that only a few spots were occupied. The seven of us found a row with seven seats available easily, but as it got closer and closer to the time that the movie was supposed to start, the theatre got more and more pact. After we had sat down, people had quickly began to fill up the room. I watched as each person entered through the walkway. First, a tall man entered with a short blonde girl. I thought to myself that two more people in the room meant that there would be much less air for my lungs to take in. 

I continued to watch people entered the theatre, even though it was making me feel more tense. After more and more people were entering the theatre by the second, I felt as though there was less and less oxygen in the room. While watching as people walked by, I became startled by any loud noise coming from the speakers. I remember a loud boom sounding from one of the ads, and I remember physically jumping out my my seat and breathing as if I had just finished a marathon.

By the time the movie had even started, there were no open seats left in the theatre. I felt like I was being suffocated.  

After the lights dimmed and the movie started, that was when it hit me. My hands and fingers began to feel tingly. I assumed that I was having a reaction to my lotion, so I didn’t think twice about it. About a minute after my hands and feet started feeling tingly, they went numb and I began to feel my heart pounding inside my chest. I assumed that this feeling would slowly go away if I distracted myself with the movie, but it didn’t work. My hands and fingers had soon lost all feeling, but it seemed as though my eyes and ears had become super sensitive. Every sound in the theatre became amplified in my ears. Every bright color displayed on the screen seemed blinding. As I started to become aware that my body was acting different than normal, my heart began to pound harder and faster with every second. 

This is when I started to freak out.

My head was racing with frantic thoughts, and soon I felt as though I was watching myself suffer. My mind had started to play tricks on me. When I opened my eyes, I saw from the perspective of a “ghost me” floating above my chair, watching my actual self from above. I became worried that everyone was looking at me inside a pitch black theatre. I looked around to see if this was true, but it wasn’t. People were focused on the movie. Even though I knew that I wasn’t drawing any attention, I convinced myself that I was. My heart began to beat faster and faster and I thought that I was choking. I was loosing control. Thousands and thousands of thoughts were pounding through my head, most of which I don't even remember, but I do know that I thought I was going insane. I felt the need to get out and run as far as my legs would allow. My body demanded that I leave, so I did.

My route of escape was to the bathroom. 

As I stood up to walk out, I understood that people would be looking at me, and that made everything feel ten times worse. I got up and began to feel extremely dizzy. My chest felt extremely heavy, like my lungs had sank down to my hips.

When I finally made my way to the bathroom, I was greeted with a line. As I was waiting, I looked into the mirror and realized that my body was twitching, I was sweating profusely and that my breathing was indeed noticeably loud. I got into one of the stalls after waiting maybe thirty seconds and just stood there. My fingers were still numb, my breathing was still rapid, and my heart still beating out of my chest. I still felt like there wasn’t enough oxygen, even after I had left the cramped theatre. The twitching didn't stop. I became so worried that the person in the stall next to me was watching my feet jitter around. I thought that maybe I was having a heart attack, or that maybe I was going crazy. I stood in that stall wanting to leave the theatre all together, but I forced myself to stay because I didn’t want my mom asking me questions about why I left the and never came back.     

After a few minutes in the stall, the feelings subsided. Thankfully, the tingling, twitching, frantic thoughts, third person view, heavy chest, pounding heartbeat, worry and fast breathing were all gone. Although the physical symptoms went missing, the emotions started pouring in.

I started to feel hopeless.

I started to feel tired. 

I started to feel depressed.

I stayed in that stall for at least an hour after the attack had finished. In that hour, I was pacing the tiny bathroom stall, listening as people entered and exited. Negative thoughts were bouncing through my head in a sick type of self-destructive cycle. I became mad at myself for not knowing what my body was telling at me, and blamed myself for all the pain I had just gone through. Before I knew it I was crying harder than I have ever cried before, quietly though, because I was still worried that people could hear me.

After this hour had passed, I came to the consensus that I needed to get back into the theatre before anyone started asking questions. I walked back through those doors, and luckily didn’t struggle with breathing. I went back to my row and sat back down next to my cousin.

“What the heck took you so long in there?” he asked with the attitude of a typical middle school boy.

I responded by saying, “I was feeling nauseous, so I went on a walk for some fresh air”.

I lied.

During the rest of the movie, I tried to make sense of what had happened. I was so focused on trying to figure out what my body had been doing in the past two hours that I can’t even remember what movie we had all seen together, or even what genre it was for that matter.        

On the car-ride home I was confused. I couldn’t come up with a logical explanation for why my body was going into this state of high alert. I knew that I was too young to have a heart attack, but I didn’t know why my body was going into the state it was. I grabbed my phone and typed into google everything that my body was doing during the episode. I read the words PANIC ATTACK SYMPTOMS in the heading of the first link. When I read those words, my chest felt like it was sinking into my body. Those words already had meaning to me. When I was nine years old, my mother had a panic attack while driving with me.

She was driving and I was in the backseat. We were going to get our nails done for a wedding. While driving, she took a random turn and pulled the car over. I asked her why she pulled over and she responded by saying that she couldn’t drive anymore. She had me call my dad and tell him that he needed to come and save her. After I hung up the phone, I asked her what was wrong, and she said she couldn’t breathe. I asked if she wanted to call an ambulance, she said no. She had me talk to her. She told me to describe to her some kind of vacation. I went on and on about being on a nice relaxing beach in Hawaii until my dad came. While describing all this to her, I could see that her hands were all sweaty and that her chest was expanding and contracting at an alarming rate.

My dad told me to get out of the car and wait on the grass while he went in and talked to me mom. I could hear him repeatedly telling her to “just breathe”.

At the time, I didn’t understand why that would be helpful, but I now know that breathing is nearly half the battle.

About a month later, my mom was hospitalized after an extreme attack. While visiting her in the hospital, she told me that she was in the hospital because of her brain, not because of her body. She told me she had been having panic attacks, but didn’t tell me anything about them. That was the only time we had talked about any type of anxiety until l came out with my experience in October of 2015, nearly 730 days after my first attack had happened.

After reading what that webpage had to say about attacks and thinking about my mother, I realized that I had a large choice to make: Whether or not to tell someone about what had just happened. Somehow, I came to the conclusion that it was a bad idea to tell anyone about what had happened. 

Even after knowing that my mom had struggled with attacks before, I didn’t want her to know of my intense anxiety. I didn’t want anyone to know what had happened in that theatre. I felt embarrassed, and still sometimes do feel embarrassed about being the way that I am, because the words “mental illness” still have a stigma.

Because I didn’t want to be different from others in a “mental” sort of way, I kept this whole experience away. I was ashamed of something that I couldn’t control.

I get mad at myself to this day because I made such an awful choice in that car ride home. I somehow thought that blaming myself for my attacks and keeping all my feelings to myself was better than making myself vulnerable and getting help.

This decision created a lot of self-hatred because I spent two years criticizing myself for having some kind of “abnormality” without hearing anyone tell me what they thought. I spent two years suffering alone. I spent two years isolated from any information that would have actually helped me through my problems. 

Since having these attacks has been something I have been going through for the past few years, I have learned that hiding from my friends and family about my attacks is just as traumatic as the attacks themselves, which is why I feel that I need to write about my experience. Being open about what I have to go through is something I have learned to do over the past few months and although it is difficult, is also somewhat relieving. 

Since this day in freshman year, I have experienced many more panic attacks. After I told my mom about this episode and many of my other attacks, she offered me the most support that a person possibly could. She understood everything that I was going through and was able to empathize with me more than a friend or someone who has never had an attack could. Many of my close friends now know that I suffer from panic attacks, but I never tell them this story, because it created so much internal tension in the following years. 

Panic attacks are something that I would never wish on my worst enemy because of how terrible they are. Words aren’t sufficient in describing what an attack is like, or how terrible they actually feel, but I can say that the best way to deal with them is to be open about it, and to always keep breathing.