By the time my first panic attack arrived, anxiety had already been leaving small clues.
There had been the strange sensations in my body. New fears. Too little sleep, irregular meals and a lot of work stress. I noticed those things, but I didn’t yet understand them.
Then, within about three months, three major things happened one after another.
My wife had a miscarriage. I lost my job. And then I found out that my father had cancer.
Even writing those three sentences next to each other feels heavy.
At the time, though, I was still doing what I had always done: dealing with the practical part of life and moving forward.
Years later, when I tried to understand that period, I came up with a simple picture in my head. I imagined emotions moving through a pipe. Things happen, emotions enter, and somehow they need a way out. Some people seem able to process difficult events and let them move through. Others hold on to them for much longer.
I have always been much closer to the second type.
That ‘emotional pipe’ is only my own metaphor, not a scientific explanation. But it still describes how that period felt to me: one difficult event after another, with very little space between them.
And then came an ordinary summer Saturday.
I had eaten a very heavy, salty breakfast and drank a lot with it. Later, while driving across the city with my wife, I began to feel pressure low in my chest and noticed my heart beating faster.
I didn’t know what was happening. I stopped the car, walked around for a moment, drank some water and then continued.
After we finished what we needed to do, we stopped at a café because I still felt uncomfortable. I ordered a Coke, thinking it might settle my stomach.
Instead, I felt worse.
And that was enough for my thoughts to change very quickly.
I remember one thought clearly: I sat down to rest and now I feel worse. This must be something serious.
From there, fear took over. My breathing changed, I felt drained, and within minutes I was convinced something terrible was happening to me.
The café staff tried to help. My wife called an ambulance.
And then something happened that I would only understand much later.
The moment the ambulance arrived, I started feeling better.
Not completely. But noticeably.
I was suddenly surrounded by people whose job was to help me. I was being taken somewhere safe. That feeling of protection changed something immediately.
At the emergency centre, I was examined. Neurological checks, cardiac checks, the things you would expect after an episode like that. Apart from somewhat elevated blood pressure, they did not find anything alarming.
I went home relieved, but confused.
I told myself it had been a one-off event.
The next day, my wife and I went back to get the car.
On the way home, when I reached the same part of the city where everything had started the day before, my heart began racing again.
The thoughts returned almost immediately. So did the fear.
I stopped the car again, and we took a taxi toward the emergency centre.
But when I stepped out of the taxi in the park in front of the hospital, the symptoms faded.
I didn’t even go inside.
Just being there — close to the place I associated with safety — was enough.
Looking back, that moment taught me something important about my own experience. The medical examinations from the previous day had reassured me, but fear did not disappear simply because logic said I was okay.
My body and my thoughts had already started learning their own pattern.
The first panic attack was frightening. The second one was, in some ways, even more important — because it showed me that the fear could return in response to a place, a memory and the expectation that something might happen again.
I went home that day without understanding much of this.
I only knew that I no longer trusted being outside in the same way.
And that is where the next phase began.
Home started to feel like the only place where nothing bad could happen to me.
Discussion prompt: After a frightening experience, did you ever notice yourself starting to trust certain places — or avoid others — even before you fully understood why?