Falling into a panic is attack is incredibly heavy, clouded, and takes your full attention for sometimes days prior. When you’ve experienced them for so long you can sometimes track them like a storm. You are in tune to your thoughts, feelings, senses... your body tenses and holds firm.. your wall is up to protect you from everyone and everything that may try and harm you (which sometimes can be a literal anything). Your eyes dart every room, back and forth, every person, face, wall, what is moving? where is the window and where is the door? How can I get out? What am I missing?
It’s exhausting.
You can be totally frozen and yet every other sense is on overdrive trying to put up barriers to pretext you while at the same time using up all of your energy. Causing absence of exhaustion. Defeat. Can’t take any more or do any more.
I am still in a time where I sometimes think I am stronger than these triggers and attacks. I smell French vanilla coffee and I want to vomit. But the healing and growing part of me wants to be stronger than a scent. But it’s not just the scent. The scent is a trigger acting as a time portal, sending me back to working in a store. I’m standing in jeans and my work T-shirt. I’m trying to work when suddenly his face is there. His stupid fucking face. Holding that styrofoam coffee cup. He’d done it several times before. It used to be my favorite. I’m staring at him. Trying to be strong but so mad. The inside of my lip is blood from my biting. Chewing. A restraint I’m attempting. My wrists still hurt from his stupid fucking hands, clenching and holding them together. I dump the coffee and never drink it again. Not that kind.
That is a trigger. I will get a whiff of it and that is what happens. And I want to fight it and be stronger but sometimes I fucking can’t. And then I get angry for wasting yet more time.
But then it happens. I push it back and ignore and avoid and then I’m left with my only free morning.. having wasted it. I am trapped in my bed witg my thoughts and demons and triggers and all that I avoid with keeping busy.
I get angry about what makes me feel better. For what I crave and desire and for what makes me feel whole again.
When I come to I am frozen again but this time I am still. I am loose. I am calm. I am breathing and it is effortless and full and feels like it’s for the first time. That first breaths. I was drowning or at the top of a mountain and can finally take full and deep breaths. I can visualize my lungs expanding with air. My rips growing to the point it looks like they’ll crack. My face is wet. The air feels cool as it dries. My eyes are glazed. My body is still. I feel both dead and alive. I’m in a coma.
And then I get up. Its time for coffee.
