I don't talk about personal things very much on this blog, or really at all. I'm geeky and introverted, and just not very touchy feely, so it just doesn't come naturally to me to come out and talk about deeply emotional personal subjects. However, I have always known that for most things of this nature it really helps to talk about them, and for some things it may even be therapeutic to publish them to the world. Sort of a very extroverted way of exorcising one's demons. It seems to work for some people anyway.
Something happened to me recently that I feel compelled to talk about. A couple of days ago I had a real, honest to goodness anxiety attack. I was sitting in a meeting at work, and I was already feeling a bit nervous and unsure of myself for some reason. It was toward the end of the meeting, and I had just started to talk about something, and I felt myself falter. I kept talking but then I stuttered a little and my voice cracked. I took a breath and tried to talk some more but my throat was constricting, and my voice began to waver more. I became aware that everyone in the room was looking at me. My heart started to race, my skin became hot, my eyes teared up, and my throat constricted further until I was completely unable to speak. My emotions began to spiral out of control. I put my chin on my chest, instinctively put my hand over my mouth, and tried to gather myself while everyone looked on. My mind was raging with fear and doubt. I was in full "fight or flight" mode, and I was leaning heavily toward flight. I literally wanted to get up and run out of the room, or just burst into a wailing, screaming, crying mess. Just a few seconds passed, but they were eternally long seconds, endured in complete silence. Finally, after a few more labored breaths and about 5,872 heartbeats, I managed to croak out a few more words to finish what was left of my original thought. To my great relief, the others began to talk and ask questions like nothing had happened. And just like that, it passed.
Now, I'm sure if there were a logarithmic scale that rated the severity of anxiety attacks my episode would rate a 1.5, but in my experience it was the equivalent of a Grand Mal seizure. It completely freaked me out. It was all I could think about the rest of the day. It was such a shock to suddenly lose control and have a complete, albeit temporary, emotional breakdown for no discernable reason. I also realized that I had a couple of similar, but much more mild episodes in the recent past. It seemed that this had been building up for a while. The difference was that the previous occurrences happened in situations that were already a bit emotionally charged, so it wasn't completely unexpected to be upset. The symptoms were less severe too. A bit out of the ordinary, to be sure, but not enough to make me realize there was a systemic problem.
When I got home I talked to Stephanie about it. She was concerned, supportive, and completely unsurprised. We talked for a long time, of course, and consulted the all knowing, all seeing god of the internets: Google. The respectable sites that we found cautioned against self diagnosis, but in my case one conclusion seemed fairly obvious: too much stress. In a way, I'm kind of relieved and even a little excited that this happened. My engineering instincts have kicked in, and I now realize there's something going on that is at least treatable, if not completely fixable. So, in the meantime I've set about removing stressful things from my life. Of course, I've only barely started, but one of the first things I did was delete all of my non-work related favorites from my web browser at work. Especially all the links to political blogs. I've decided I just don't need to know how badly George Bush is fucking up the country. When I can do something about it I'm sure Howard Dean and the DNC will let me know. I'm also to going to keep up the exercise. I've been doing pretty well, but it has been slipping a bit lately. The therapy option has come up too, but that just scares me more right now.
There much more to say about this, of course, but another thing I need to do is get some rest. To bed with me. Honestly, I have to say it feels strangely reassuring to get up here and say, "Hey everybody, I'm a complete fucking spaz!" Thanks for listening.
