Punk rock panic attack
My mind is scattered. I’m doing my best to get by having received some devastating news recently that has required me to be stronger than I ever imagine I needed to be. In one quick phone call, this “grup” has grown up big time and become a parent, caretaker, therapist, advisor, advocate and researcher all while trying to maintain some sense of equilibrium. Small cracks appear. Crying on the metro after getting bumped out of the way. Feeling like we’re way too hard on one another and wishing I could see a kinder, more supportive society develop out of the collective wonkishness that we are finding ourselves in.
I used to have panic attacks in my teens. Quite likely I had them as a young child too as I was part of the first generation of kids to get hopped up or drugged down on medications to help us take the edge off of divorces, bullying and other situations that our parents wanted to rid from our young psyches. Maybe then I couldn’t articulate panic. It came out pretty easily. I’d barf in school. Many years after grade school I remember a conversation with a school chum where my claim to fame was that I threw up hot dogs after lunch and the class had to go outside for the rest of the afternoon since I stunk up the room so badly. Quite a strange way to be remembered.
The teen years brought fears of death. It stank of the concepts I assigned to it of death being the end. Painful. Heartbreaking. Silence. Permanent. You just don’t want to go there. When you’re young, death is what happens to old people. Then in my teens, the reality of hearing that it happened to babies, to kids like me hung over me with the threat that it I wasn’t careful, it would happen to me.
I can’t say I came to Buddhism only as a means to manage panic attacks and fear. I remember it coming from wanting to find a way to be free from suffering on many levels. The panic attacks were the cherry on the sundae of suffering. The creamy ball of desire, wanting, clinging was covered with the gooey tangle of fudgey fear and marshmallowey jealousy. Toss on some sharp fragments of nutty aggression and Ben and Jerry’s could serve it up in a small pint of Samsaric Swirl.
I was feasting on it. Devouring it.
One can’t be sustained by this kind of diet.
Now the panic is back. It came back with ferocity at a punk rock show this past weekend. I joked that I was like a female Larry David and everything that could go wrong, was going wrong. Arriving at the venue, some guy kept looking at me. My husband asked me if I knew him and I didn’t. I thought he wanted to fight me, but my husband felt otherwise so I flashed the Wonder Woman like-protective forcefield of my wedding ring at the gawker. No idea on if what set me off, but as soon as the band took to the stage, my heart began to POUND. The sound was insane. I usually love this kind of thing I thought to myself, but instead I was terrified.
Was I dying during a Black Lungs set? Am I destined to a life only of Dallas Green and nothing harder in my musical rotation?
I told my husband I was freaking out, needed air and put some kleenex in my ears while the 7 foot tall, 800 pound goateed bouncer told me I couldn’t stay in the hallway. We went back in and headed for the lower floor with the merch table only for me to be greeted by a thick wall of smoke. I hate smoke machines. Perfect for my asthma. Add that onto my list of things I am afraid of dying from right now. As the music literally crushed me, I tried to breathe. Tried to focus on the band. Tried to focus on the crowd. I was too far gone.
With a racing heart, I sat downstairs with my husband where it was quiet in an area of the bar where perhaps there sat other elderly punk rockers who were regaining their composure and thinking about their life insurance policies.
I’m being confronted with some heavy shit. I’m facing it in trying to be mindful in my conversations. I’m finding it harder to be gentle on myself when I’m being attacked. Music was my friend. Now I’m seeing that it’s groundless. I’m falling. Going beyond the concepts of permanence, attachment, fear, death… This is now entered my path and I need to work with this.
Thanks for this courageous post. I did my first ten-day silent meditation retreat last June. I started having panic attacks on Day 4 and they continued until Day 10. I was a wreck by the end, but somehow I persevered. Like you, I think I was an anxious kid but didn’t really realize it. But, it came out full force at the retreat. It was so incredibly frightening. I thought I was coming unglued; completely caught off guard at the battle between ego and essence, and my ego was fierce. I’m still working at processing the experience and it’s been nearly a year now. It’s completely humbling and freeing, and I’m so grateful to have read your post which gave me the strength to say out loud what was the most terrifying yet necessary experience of my life to learn to really accept, relax and let go. It’s a daily battle, but little by little the desire to cling and control is abating. Thank you so much.
Live through a panic attack at a show, you can live through anything… Hang in there, we know you’re strong as heck.
Your friend in the Dharma.
Kris
I share with you in the adventures of public panic attacks. I had one not long ago despite having sucessfully cleared most of my PTSD symptoms from my life. It came out of the blue and in a situation that had nothing to do with my previous triggers. Not exactly, anyway.
I’ve a suggestion for you, too. Recently I learned that so-called “mental health” issues are not just physically experienced, like panic attacks. But they can be related to our physical health as well. Things like making sure your body is getting enough of the right nutrients can influence our anxiety levels.
There are other physical disorders that also mimic depression and anxiety, like the thyroid condition I now have. And this thyroid condition was triggered by adrenal exhaustion, which is no surprise when you consider that PTSD is all about the adrenals working overtime.
Yoga, meditation and following a spiritual path are irreplaceable in my life for my mind/body/soul well-being. But there’s a need to make sure that our biochemistry is also functioning as it should. Make sure you get your own checked out.
Sending you love and comfort at this time. Be well.
“Your problem is that you confuse the world with what people do. The things people do are the shields against the forces that surround us; what we do as people gives us comfort and makes us feel safe; what people do is rightfully very important, but only as a shield. We never learn that the things we do as people are only shields, and therefore we let them dominate and topple our lives. In fact I could say that for mankind, what people do is greater and more important than the world itself.
The world is all that is encased here; life, death, people, the allies, and everything else that surrounds us. The world is incomprehensible. We won’t ever understand it; we won’t ever unravel its secrets. Thus we must treat it as it is, a sheer mystery!
An average man doesn’t do this, though. The world is never a mystery for him, and when he arrives at old age he is convinced he has nothing more to live for. An old man has not exhausted the world. He has exhausted only what people do. But in his stupid confusion he believes that the world has no more mysteries for him. What a wretched price to pay for our shields!
Act like a warrior and select the items of your world. You cannot surround yourself with things helter-skelter any longer. I tell you this in a most serious vein. A warrior encounters those inexplicable and unbending forces because he is deliberately seeking them, thus he is always prepared for the encounter. The first thing you must do, then, is be prepared. A warrior takes the responsibility of protecting his life. Then if any of those forces tap him and open his gap, he must deliberately strive to close it by himself. For that purpose he must have a selected number of things that give him great peace and pleasure, things which he can deliberately use to take his thoughts from his fright and close his gap and make him solid.
In his day-to-day life a warrior chooses to follow the path with heart. It is the consistent choice of the path with heart which makes a warrior different from the average man. He knows that a path has heart when he is one with it, when he experiences a great peace and pleasure traversing its length. The things a warrior selects to make his shields are the items of a path with heart. You must surround yourself with the items of a path with heart and you must refuse the rest.
Sadness, for sorcerers, is not personal. It is not quite sadness. It’s a wave of energy that comes from the depths of the cosmos, and hits sorcerers when they are receptive, when they are like radios, capable of catching radio waves. The sorcerers of olden times, who gave us the entire format of sorcery, believed that there is sadness in the universe, as a force, a condition, like light, like intent, and that this perennial force acts especially on sorcerers because they no longer have any defensive shields. They cannot hide behind their friends or their studies. They cannot hide behind love, or hatred, or happiness, or misery. They can’t hide behind anything.
The condition of sorcerers is that sadness, for them, is abstract. It doesn’t come from coveting or lacking something, or from self-importance. It doesn’t come from ‘me’. It comes from infinity. The sadness you feel for not thanking your friend is already leaning in that direction.”
- Castaneda
Panic attacks suck. I haven’t had one in a while. Used to think they were drug induced or low self-esteem induced. But then I had one after I had gotten sober and already come out. I don’t know if there’s any logical explanation or reason for them but, like everything else in life, they pass and we learn how to deal with them. These are the kinds of experiences that give us the capacity to be compassionate. We only understand another’s suffering to the extent to which we have fully embraced our own. Hang in there, you’re not alone…