Before I get to the first panic attack, I need to go back much further.
I’m 45 now, married, and a father of three. When I think back to the beginning of this story, one thing still feels important to say clearly: I had a wonderful childhood. It was full of love, friends, games and the kind of carelessness children are supposed to have.
Then, when I was twelve, the country I was growing up in became a war zone.
My family and I had to leave our home. At the time, we hoped it would be temporary. A few months, maybe. Instead, the war stretched into years.
I remember that, at first, one small part of me was actually happy because I didn’t have to go to school. It sounds ridiculous now, but I was twelve. Children can find something good in situations they don’t yet understand.
What followed was much harder to process.
My parents were trying to find work and somewhere for us to live, so we moved several times. I changed schools, neighbourhoods, groups of people and the whole environment around me.
For someone who was extremely shy, constantly having to enter a new place and somehow become accepted there was difficult.
I had gone from a big group of friends, daily games and a completely familiar hometown to a life that felt much smaller. In the original video I described it as feeling almost like I was living in a cage — while my parents were focused, understandably, on keeping the basic parts of daily life going.
But life moved on.
Through high school, university, new friendships and new interests, things gradually began to feel normal again.
After university I changed a few jobs, and when I was around twenty-seven or twenty-eight, I finally joined a large company in the field I really wanted to work in.
I loved learning. I was curious, ambitious and completely dedicated to the job.
Probably too dedicated.
I worked overtime. And whatever free time was left, I often borrowed from sleep.
Around the same time, I started living with my girlfriend, who is now my wife. We shared a life — including the good habits and the bad ones. And we were apparently quite good at keeping both.
For roughly two years, irregular sleep, irregular meals and fairly constant work stress became normal for me.
Then my body began doing things I didn’t understand.
Every now and then I would feel something strange inside me, almost as if my body was vibrating or sending a signal to my brain that something wasn’t quite right.
And new fears started appearing.
Driving through a long tunnel suddenly felt uncomfortable.
Going down a long escalator into the subway could make me want to turn around.
These were ordinary things I had never been afraid of before. That was what made them so strange.
But I didn’t take any of it particularly seriously.
I didn’t call it anxiety. I didn’t have a framework for what was happening. I mostly treated it as something odd that would probably pass.
Looking back, those were the first signs I can recognise now.
At the time, they were just disconnected moments: too little sleep, too much work, strange sensations in my body, a fear that appeared where there hadn’t been one before.
And then something happened that made all of those small signs impossible to ignore.
That is where the next part begins.
I call it “The First Encounter With the Monster.”
Discussion prompt: Looking back, were there small changes or new fears that you ignored because they didn’t seem important at the time?