Adolescent Angst

Fast forward several years to early teenage-hood.  My mother had long since left my abusive father and moved interstate.  Of course he followed and I still had contact with him over the school holidays.  I was always petrified to go, but even more scared not to and so the anxiety remained.  That fact combined with the emergence of 'flashbacks' relating to my child abuse made for a pretty mixed-up teenage girl.  Of course I said nothing, I was ashamed.  I tried to tell myself every day that it was me who was making it all up.  I constantly viewed the world as unfair and everyone in it as potentially dangerous.  The only constant throughout my schooling was that I tended to do very well academically.  Eventually that too slipped away.  I always felt like a person on the margins, never quite fitting in anywhere.  School was extremely difficult...I remember most kids as just being cruel.  Still, I kept up a brave appearance, ultimately pretending I didn't care much about anything.  Sure, like many others, I tried to kill myself when I was 15 years old, and obviously failed.  I have spent the past 20 years attempting to ignore the scar on my wrist.  Enter the world of drugs. By partaking of them, I could go to the 'happy place' I could never quite find in the real world, and I could be part of a group of like-minded people who would become my friends.  My relationship with drugs continued into my early 30s.  I won't bother textualising all the happenings around my experience of society's underbelly as it would take forever.  Perhaps I will write about that some other time because undoubtedly the stories would fill a book on their own.  Suffice to say, the drugs themselves ended up turning against me in the end also so they are now no longer part of my existence.  This  now means that I have to face my panic head-on...I can no longer use drugs to numb my pain.  More days than not, it consumes me.  The presence of panic-disorder almost makes the memories of child abuse pale in comparison, though I personally believe it is the abuse which caused it in the first place.  It's an ongoing, every day struggle.  It is mentally, emotionally and physically taxing.  It feels like a sentence; a burden; a curse.  I want to scream out about how unfair it is.  I want to ask 'what did I do to deserve this'?  I want to punish the man who took away my innocence and blame it all on him.  I want to wake up in the morning and it will all be gone.  But panic disorder does not leave, it does not discriminate, and it won't explain to you why.  There are two choices.  1. Learn to live with it. 2. Stop living.   I know what I'm choosing and it's definitely not the latter.

In the beginning...

I cannot speak for other sufferers of panic disorder when it comes to the reasons why they have it.  Indeed the therapists who have treated me have all had their own views on which personal event of mine was the catalyst for developing such a disorder in the first place.  Yes, it could've been the fact that I was sexually, physically, and emotionally abused as a child.  Yes, it could also have resulted from being the quintessential high achiever from as far back as I can remember, and yes, maybe it was the traumatic medical events I had experienced as a young adult.  Not one of the therapists even brought up the illicit drugs I had taken during my entire adolescence and for most of my adulthood which I found a little strange.  Perhaps it was all of these variables combined.  Sometimes I think identifying the specific cause is worth exploring, other times I wonder if it would make any difference at all.

My earliest memory of panic would be around the age of four, give or take a year.  In any case I was just a little girl.  I remember being hysterical and my mother dragging me off to the bathroom to hold my head under the cold-water tap in the bath...just to calm me down, an event that certainly happened more than once.  I remember pushing all my girlie belongings from my dressing table with one violent sweep of my little arm, cheeks drenched with tears and fists clenched with rage.  I remember putting one of those little fists through my bedroom window pane and marvelling at what I'd done.  It's true I felt scared of getting in trouble for what I had just done, but I also felt powerful.  I'm pretty sure that this was the moment my love affair with opposing authority began.  I remember being frightened most of the time and I remember feeling lost all of it, and I certainly remember the first time I ran away.  I was five years old and had decided that the big, bad world had to have been better than staying where I was...so I packed my little bag, put on my little shoes and off I went.  Round and round the block I stomped...for two hours (according to my mother's recollection).  She had asked a neighbour to follow me from a distance, knowing full well, that if I had've seen my mother or anyone else coming after me, I would've refused to cooperate and return with them.  I'm not exactly sure how a five year old girl could refuse an adult anything, but obviously parents thought differently back then.  Never once did I cross the road...I simply knew I wasn't allowed to.  Ha!  My first real act of defiance came to an abrupt end when my little legs were too exhausted to continue...and so I trudged back to the place I had started.  Once inside, I plonked myself down onto my bed and sifted through the plastic bag I had taken with me.   Yeah that's right, a regular, good ol', plastic shopping bag. I had packed it in such a rage, that I had no idea what the hell was even in there.  As it turned out, I had only included the top drawer of my dresser.  The contents?  Singlets, undies,  socks...and get this...hankies. LOL!  I never was much of a planner...or a user of handkerchiefs :)  To be cont...