Chapter 1: Lunch break
That hot April day was the first time I found out what a panic attack felt like.
I had exactly 32 minutes to shake off the suffocating sensation in my chest. My upper body compressed within itself, as if I had a human-sized rubber band wrapped around me. As soon as I finished nibbling on a slice of tortilla in the office cafeteria, I excused myself from my colleague sitting opposite me and slipped out of there. She had made small talk the whole time while eating, but I couldn’t reproduce one word she said. I needed to step out into the fresh air and regain my composure before my hour-long lunch break would end.
Downstairs, as I rushed outside the building I couldn’t contain myself anymore, tears started rolling down my cheeks. I always expressed myself best through crying. Anger, joy or fear, it all came out in the form of a good cry. I’d been taught from a young age that a woman doesn’t scream or shake, slam doors or pound trash cans in her way. So I cried to expel from my body any type of emotion, like a good girl does.
For a few weeks I hadn’t been able to stop the tears. The tap below my breastbone that kept them safely shut got jammed on the ‘Open’ position, allowing tears to burst freely at random moments during the day, no warning beforehand. My body was uncontrollable in that way. I never liked waterproof mascara, too harsh on the eyelid skin. But what would I have given to be wearing some of it that day!
It was hot for an April day, even for Barcelona. I took the usual back streets around my office for a stroll, to calm myself. They were full of lush greenery, front lawns and balconies brimming with palm trees and giant cacti. But despite the beauty surrounding me, the tightness in my chest kept my attention locked within.
That hot April day was the first time I found out what a panic attack felt like.
A solid disc in my stomach waved up towards my chest and back down, pushing out tears and spontaneous sobs. It made sense that it was called ‘an attack’ because that’s how it felt. Sudden and powerful. I needed to keep walking. Stopping would mean a crash of all those sensations within my own body. I felt raw on the inside, like a pipe without insulation. I put one step in front of the other and I started counting to ten to make sure I was breathing. I got to number ten too quickly, so I continued. I needed an outside anchor to cope with the moving disc on the inside. At some point, while counting numbers, I thought ‘Oh, that’s how it feels like’. Nobody sees anything on the outside, but there is a disc smashing everything in its way on the inside.
I saw three colleagues from Finance, strung on a bench like birds on a line, chatting, their empty lunch boxes laying on the dirt in front of their feet. I realized I’d better look normal as I would pass them. I straightened my shoulders, head looking ahead with a slight smile plastered on my face and put the headphones in my ears. They couldn’t see the lava in my blood from the outside. They couldn’t see my open tap, momentarily on pause. Few people truly see what they look at anyway. They are too absorbed with their own reality.
There was a new trend going around, to use part of your lunch break to meditate, either sitting or walking. Or to eat by yourself mindfully, to taste the food better. Millennial hipster routine and such. So if anyone looked at me suspiciously, I had my story prepared: I was doing a walking meditation, so I had to go round in circles on the streets and through the park. After passing my colleagues, I ditched the mask I had put on in order to look normal and avoid any questions, and allowed myself to feel, and probably look, miserable again.
I was never a particularly euphoric person, but even for me, that state of mind was too dark. I needed to get out of it, but I had lost the map of my own well-being. I thought I would take the afternoon off and go home. But then I remembered I didn’t have a home anymore. Two weeks before, I had moved out of the home I had made with my soon-to-be-ex-husband during the previous eight years. So I continued to walk.
I had to keep my mind in check and, after a quick swipe through my meditation app, I found a twelve-minute session focusing on relieving anxiety. I pressed Play and I listened to the soothing female voice spilling into my brain. One step in front of the other, breathing, listening. ‘This meditation is for when you’re feeling overwhelmed…’ . ‘...the mind starts having all kinds of thoughts…’
Those weeks, I walked so much during lunch breaks, listening to meditations on that app that I had come to know all the imperfections of the sidewalks in the area. Cracks where the grass pushed through the pavement. That square slab of concrete that bulged upward right before the crossing into Augusta avenue, making people stumble on their way to the street. That corner where a beech tree root curved up the pavement above it. They had become my regular, familiar signposts. Upward and downward on the sloping sidewalks of the neighborhood, left towards the center and right towards a private school that looked like a Scottish castle.
Those signposts and that meditation voice were the constant I needed in a time where my entire world turned upside down and filled with unfamiliar experiences. An important stage of my life was ending, my identity as a married woman was melting away. With it, there was the beginning of a new stage. But I wasn’t ready for it yet. I was still fighting to let parts of myself die together with my old role. Because I didn’t know who I was outside of that role.
The audio ended, the soothing voice disappeared from my ears. I heard the world on the other side of my headphones again and with it I felt the solid disc in my chest return. The muscle of my heart beat so fast it was ripping apart, one side pulling right and the other, left. I was in awe of how much one’s body could hurt when going through heartbreak. That reminded me of another time, just a couple of years before, when I was in a similar kind of pain.
I was lying on a bed in an emergency room after being admitted with fever and abdominal pain. We were trying to conceive, I had missed my period, I was ecstatic. The sudden pain and fever made me fear losing the baby I believed was taking shape inside me. The two doctors at the obstetric emergency room, who stared into the ultrasound monitor for a few seconds too long, proclaimed that I wasn’t pregnant. I had to quickly mourn that fact, as the next piece of news followed suit. I had a severe ovary infection which might leave me devoid of at least one of my ovaries. I started to see losing my unborn children, one by one. Time became liquid, a rough wave engulfing me, in which I struggled to breathe.
A few minutes must have passed when a nurse entered the narrow emergency room through a side door, holding a threatening needle. She started to pierce it through the vein on the back of my left hand. As I squinted my eyes and eyebrows together, inhaling the pain, she told me:
‘I know this hurts. But pain makes us more profound.’
I opened my eyes in surprise and she squeezed my fingers shut, a silent compassion on her face hovering above me. Her words filled my mind with wonder and made me briefly forget about the pain in my hand, in my belly, in my heart.
The 32 minutes I had left of the lunch break were coming to an end. As I approached the office building, a colleague waved at me and I had to slip on my professional face, and go be a functioning adult.
Read next: Chapter 2 - The elevator
I love it how tangibly you describe body sensations! I was feeling with you while reading.