Once I finally had words for what was happening to me, I made what felt like a very reasonable decision.
I know what this is now. So tomorrow, life goes back to normal.
Simple.
Except it wasn’t.
I went back to work and stepped outside the place that had become my safe zone. I managed to get to the office, but I wasn’t doing it alone. My wife worked nearby, and we travelled together. Just having her there made the journey feel more manageable.
Then, on that first day back, the familiar thought appeared.
What if my heart starts racing again?
What if I feel like I can’t breathe and I’m far from home?
And then it happened.
Another panic attack. At work. In front of my colleagues.
I asked them to call an ambulance.
Not exactly the triumphant return to normal I had imagined.
One of the hardest things during that period was trying to explain to other people what was happening. From the outside, I looked like the same person. Inside, I was reacting to situations I had previously moved through without thinking twice.
I also started noticing how much of my day was becoming organised around one thing: control.
Every time I left home, I wanted a plan.
An exit.
A way back.
A route where I wouldn’t get stuck.
I started taking stairs instead of elevators. I avoided roads where traffic could trap me with no easy turn or exit. Long tunnels and the subway were out of the question.
When I couldn’t avoid something completely, I carried what I thought of as safety items: water, calming medication, and sometimes simply another person I trusted.
In practice, the two things I relied on were the water and the person. I managed not to use the medication.
At the time, all of these choices felt practical. They gave me a sense that I was still controlling the situation.
But the price of that control was that my world was being redesigned around fear.
I wasn’t returning to normal.
I was building a new version of normal around everything I wanted to avoid.
That was the moment when I started to understand that simply forcing myself through situations wasn’t enough for me.
I needed help. I needed a different approach. And I needed to stop treating every difficult moment as something I should be able to solve through willpower alone.
That was harder to accept than I expected.
Discussion prompt: Did anxiety ever make you create small routines, routes or ‘safety plans’ that slowly became part of everyday life?