ANXIETY DISORDERS ARE NOT THE SAME AS SITUATIONAL ANXIETY. I wrote this because I’m tired of seeing people struggle against a$$holes who think anxiety is just someone being “over reactionary.” I get hit with anxiety as part of having CPTSD, amongst other things, and whilst I have never been hospitalised with it, that DOES happen to some folks.
Imagine you’re in a room with no windows or a door, one that’s made of steel. It’s a tiny space, enough room to walk around the square steel table that’s bolted to the floor in the middle, provided you pushed the steel chair back under it when you stand up. The table edges are sharp and unforgiving, the type that would leave a serious dent in your head if you fell against them.
It’s really cold, so cold in fact that you can see a thick layer of frost creeping up the walls, enveloping the entire room before it reaches out towards the table. You swallow hard, and sit back down.
Have I mentioned you’re naked? Well, you are.
You’re sitting in that awful chair, hard and glacial to the touch. You watch the fading heat from your body puff around you a little as you try and rise, but you can’t because body heat and a frozen chair mean you’re fused. Didn’t your mother ever warn you not to lick frozen surfaces? There is absolutely nothing you can do to stop this.
Your breathing becomes hard, jagged and increasingly rapid. You wrap your arms around yourself in an effort to keep warm, but it’s futile. Your skin is changing colour in the way it does when you’re cold straight to the bone. You eventually freeze in your seat, still breathing but entirely unable to move. Your hands and fingers feel like they’re being stabbed with needles, and it hurts to breathe because it’s so cold.
You begin to feel light headed, struggling to keep your eyes open. Exhaustion takes over, because your mind is racing a million miles an hour, and you’re trying to calm down and steady your breathing in an effort to stop the freeze from stealing you completely.
Anxiety can hit you like this for plenty of reasons, or none at all. People assume folks need a reason to feel like this, and oftentimes there isn’t one; your brain simply freaks out and hurls this bundle of horror at you. If you’re lucky and recognise the early warning signs, maybe you can stem things off somehow, and stay calm enough so that you don’t appear rigid and mute.
If you are so far gone that you can’t reel yourself back in, a frozen hammer will punch you in the chest with such ferocity that you’ll lapse into a full blown panic attack. Anxiety and panic attacks are not the same thing, but panic attacks can and do often follow the other. It’s cyclical, you can end up in a sadistic cycle of anxiety and panic from the fear of experiencing them alone, and even more so if you’re around people you don’t know.
You’re hunched over the table now, the side of your face fused to the table in the same way your body is with the chair. It stings, those same needling sensations in your hands are now pinching their way around your face, scalp and into your skull. Deep rooted stabbing prying into your mind, claw like scratching cascading down your entire form until you lose complete control of yourself. That clawing gets under your skin, snaking around your insides and through to your spine, freezing every tiny cell of you right down to the marrow in your bones. You can’t move. You don’t even try because you know it will be incredibly painful. All you can see is the dwindling swirl of your breath as it leaves your numbed mouth. You can’t see properly, your sight fails you and you succumb completely before blacking out. Just as you see the light fall away from you, you shatter, exploding into a fine dust of ice that mists the room.
Every tiny part of you floats down to the floor, settling with the rest of the cold until something happens to pull you back in. It’s a slow and painful melting process, and the fine, icy mist that is you, softens and gradually seeps back together in a dark confused liquid, but you’re heavy like lead. This can take hours, sometimes days.
Some people can do it of their own accord, some people need assistance, and some people suffer so badly that only a sedative will kill it off. There’s no light in that state. Everything is dark, gloomy, and frozen. It’s feels like you’re dying but you’re not that lucky. People faint, collapse, vomit, lose control of their bodily functions, and more, in that state. Everything is a sharp and brutal knife edge, noise, light, sensations, emotions, fears — they are painfully keen and agonising.
Don’t ever tell anyone who lives with this to “get over it.” You don’t know what you’re asking of them.
