The Voice in My Head...

When I woke up in the morning, I was ‘feeling low’. I didn’t feel like going to work. I couldn’t get out of bed as much as I tried. So, I texted my boss that I wasn’t well and I couldn’t come in. He didn’t read the text right away and every passing moment scared me some more. I dropped a few more texts in my team Whatsapp group asking for certain reports and stuff, things I do every day. And then kept staring at the phone waiting for that text from my boss. After a while, his screen indicated that he was typing. I started panicking. What if he asks me to give more details about what was wrong with me? I was bad at lying, I had always been bad at lying. The phone pinged and he’d sent an “ok”. I breathed a sigh of relief and collapsed back on my bed.

An hour later, I woke up from a bad dream. That’s when I got a call from one of my stressors. “Stressors” are people/things that invoke anxiety in me. A term I learned from my psychiatrist back in 2015. I suffer from an anxiety disorder, which means stressors are all around me. This call I received was from a person who was asking me to make a decision which would affect my career and life ahead. And while I handled the call calmly, inside my head I was going bonkers with nervousness. There were just so many decisions that I had to make, which would affect my life and I was panicking. My hands felt dry and my throat was parched. Even sipping water didn’t help. That’s when I received a text from a friend asking me if I was okay. I told her I was stressed out and she suggested I calm down. I didn’t. 

After a while, I got up, intending to go brush my teeth. It was already 11:30am. I went to the washbasin in the bathroom and stood there for a while. I couldn’t get myself to squeeze some toothpaste on to the brush I was holding. I gave up and placed the brush back in the holder and went back to bed. In my head, a constant dialogue was running now. My brain was calculating the outcomes of the various choices I had to make, comparing each against the final state that I wanted my life to be in. And each outcome scared me because I wasn’t sure if it would play out the way I was thinking it would. I was stressing about a scenario in my head not playing out like another scenario in my head. I realized I was having a panic attack.

So I got up, paced around, anxiously. And I texted a few more people nervously. I needed assurance or some semblance of control over the various decisions I needed to make. I called my boss up and discussed the various options I had, then I called another colleague and both of them gave me two different paths of action to pursue. I was getting more and more worked up. I called up an old friend to collect some data that could help me make a better decision. I have noticed that knowing certain variables helps in these situations. That’s when my chest started hurting. I tried to distract myself by watching some videos, but my mind wasn’t in it. 

I started sweating profusely, even with the air conditioner running at 16 degrees Celsius. I tried to distract myself by doing some calculations in my head. It didn’t help. That’s when I looked in my drawer for Zapiz 0.5mg tablets, which had been prescribed to me for situations like this. It had been ages since I had felt this way. Not being able to go about your daily day was a sign of depression. And the chest pain and inability to concentrate on anything because of the stress was a panic attack. Ideally, the two shouldn’t exist together, but lately, I have been affected due to the uncertainty that my life is going through. 

Instead of Zapiz, I found a strip of Rexipra 10 mg. Rexipra is an effective drug for the treatment of anxiety but it could be addictive and hence I avoid taking it. So, I hesitated for a while but when I couldn’t calm down for another fifteen minutes, I popped a couple of pills and looked up its effectiveness. The screen read “The peak effect of this medicine can be observed in 5 hours after multiple dosing”. Now I started worrying about the medicine not being effective and what if I were to die right now? Another part of my brain kept providing solutions to this part which was freaking out. “Nobody dies from anxiety, you’re fine. The medicine will kick in soon. You just have to breathe, drink some water and everything will be okay,” my brain told my brain. I sat up on the bed, breathed in and out for a few minutes. An acute headache was developing at this point from all the to and fro internal dialogue.

That’s when I started writing this article. My hands were trembling by this point. I hadn’t had an episode like this in a long time. And as luck would have it, I was all alone today, no support system. I am treating this article as a conversation with my psychiatrist, a therapy session. Talking helps, so maybe writing would too. I have noticed a few more physical manifestation of my anxiety, like a pain in my muscles, involuntary spasm in my hands and dizziness, but because I am being objective about these, I find it easier to overlook. Not control, just overlook. Let’s hope posting this article would give me the rush to get over this panic attack. Even if it doesn’t, the medicine should kick in any moment now.

Writing about this is hard. I am usually not very vocal about these things because the awareness towards mental health issues is very limited among the people of this country. And I don’t want to be construed as someone who’s crazy or can’t be entrusted to important jobs because of anxiety issues. Because that isn’t true. Very high-stress situations at work usually don’t trigger these symptoms in me. This time around, there were more than a few triggers, the amalgamation of which invoked this episode. But hey, I am a fighter and highly resilient. How long can you pin me down for? I will get up and I will punch back.