Curing Panic with Engagement

Tell anyone outside my family that I struggle with anxiety and they would laugh it off. At the office, at crowded events, around colleagues and friends, I come across as steady and relaxed. Nothing about me reads as nervous. I didn't even recognize the problem myself until it grew too large to manage and started wearing on the people closest to me.

The worry started early. As a kid I fixated on whether my family was safe, turning over every bad thing that could happen to them in a world that felt random and dangerous. If my father was flying somewhere, I would picture the plane going down and then every horrible consequence that followed. My body would stay clenched, my shirt soaked with sweat, right up until he landed, called, and confirmed he was fine. My parents had no idea, since I buried those feelings for years. I would snap at my sister for not phoning me the moment she got anywhere, even if she was only going to see a friend. I insisted she call on arrival. My parents chalked it up to me being protective. For me it was something much heavier.

In college I met my boyfriend. Wonderful guy, but he could not stand being managed by anyone, and that ran straight into my hunger for certainty. He got around by bicycle then. I would pester him to call once he arrived, and he almost never did, so I would work out how long the ride should take and phone to make sure he was alive. It drove him crazy. I was wound up most of the time and had panic attacks where I cried until he calmed me down and I felt safe again. My meltdowns wore on him, but he genuinely loved me, and the connection between us was real. People we knew said we were made for each other.

Three years in, we married, and the hunt for certainty came right along with me. He got to the office, I called. He took the train, I called. The deeper my love went, the deeper my fear for him went too, and the uglier my thoughts became. A missed call meant he had crashed, or he was lying in a hospital somewhere, on and on. When he finally rang back I would pick a fight over his silence. I could feel his patience thinning, so I cut down on the calls and let the suffering move inward instead.

Stopping the check-ins did not help. I sank into depression, stayed shut in the house, and the panic attacks came more often rather than less. Sleep paralysis set in and tore apart whatever rest I managed. Within a few months I had full insomnia. Nights were spent awake, running through every awful thing that had happened to me and asking why I was built this way.

My husband, alarmed, brought me to a psychiatrist. She prescribed antidepressants for the anxiety and sedatives to help me sleep, and she pointed me toward a therapist for one-on-one work. That turned out to matter enormously. The therapist was a kind, sharp woman, and from the start I felt she saw me clearly. Across our sessions she pushed me to build a social life, to sign up for activities and clubs that pulled me in, and to fill most of my waking hours. She caught the pattern fast: when my attention moved from something dark to something absorbing, I was fine. The sadness and the dread crept back mainly in the empty stretches, when I had little to do.

Life got noticeably better. I could tell my husband was relieved to finally have room to breathe, and both of us welcomed how my days had changed. I took up yoga and meditation, started a diploma course in web design, and spent my free hours painting and cooking.

Six months into therapy I found out I was pregnant, and I was thrilled. I had read online about how stress and depression can reach the baby, so I worked at staying light and content. No morning sickness, no hormonal trouble, and my yoga and meditation kept my mind quiet. Nine months later my son arrived, a beautiful boy. Since then I've wanted even more to keep tending my own well-being so I can hold up my family and their happiness, and that is why I wrote this down, so the road I walked from struggle toward steadiness might be of some use to someone else.