dailyprompt-1957

I Know You

/ animar64 / 2 Comments

Daily Writing Prompt: What fears have you overcome and how?

Andrew Wyeth, Perpetual Care, 1961,

When I was in my early 20’s I had developed severe- crippling anxiety attacks.

When I had these attacks, I felt like I was going to have a heart attack and that I was going to die.

The thing is, I wasn’t afraid of having a heart attack ( even though it felt like my heart was going to bust out of my rib cage like the monster in ” Alien ” ) what scared me the most was the death and dying  thoughts  that were pounding their way into my school and making it so that I could not breathe.

And then for some reason, after years of going through this I got it into my head that if I could recognize death and what it did- what it looked like- that I would know that was NOT what was happening to me and I wouldn’t be scared anymore.

So, I read books like Vampires, burial, and death : folklore and reality by Barber, Paul. I read books on embalming, I read books on forensics. I read books on funeral customs and I’m not sure why-cannibals. When I look back at the books I read and the notes I took, the amount of work I put into this was breathtaking.

What I was doing, I learned later,  was something called Immersion Therapy- lucky for me, it worked.

After I made it my business to get to know my Fear- aka The Grim Reaper- not only did I never have attacks that bad again- I had learned enough to land a job in a Funeral Home and that body  ( see what I did there? ) of knowledge I had gained  added spice to my writing- in my stories Death isn’t some abstract thing draped in black- it a real entity that people know – like a next door neighbor or the guy you see walking his dog at the same time every day and that for better or worse you can confront it.

Sometimes I still do have anxiety attacks. But the attacks nibble at the edges of my mind and when it happens the thought that I’m not going to die never enters my head and when it’s over I pat myself on the back.

I deserve it.

amm

The Monster

/ animar64 / 1 Comment

WP Daily Prompt asks What fears have you overcome and how?

Photo A.M. Moscoso

I used to have panic attacks and during these panic attacks I was convinced that I was going to die.

I couldn’t breath, I had tunnel vision and my chest felt so tight I was sure that not only could I not be breathing, I was sure my ribs were going to crack.

Nothing triggered my attacks, I could be having a great day and then all of the sudden my heart would start to race and before I knew it I was looking down a long dark tunnel and then I couldn’t take a breathe.

It was like drowning on dry land.

It was a terrible way to live- it was like Death was sneaking up on me and just giving me a taste of what was in store for me.

After one attack where I ended up in the hospital,  the Doctor showed me my blood work results which showed my blood was getting enough oxygen. He showed me the results of my EKG- not only was my heart not racing during my panic attack, it was actually strong and doing what it should be doing when you are a healthy 25 year old woman  and my blood pressure? You’d think it would be through the roof, but it wasn’t.

Of course the writer in me was curious- if this wasn’t death that was playing with my head, what was? Was it me? Was there a monster with no name living in my head?

After that day I immersed myself in learning about funeral customs, I read book after book about forensics, forensic anthropolgy and of course I gave myself a crash course in what the body went through as it was dying.

Now you would think this would make my condition worse, but it didn’t. I felt like if I knew what Death was, I could separate that  from whatever it was that was causing my anxiety attacks.

It worked. About two years after giving myself a crash course in Death and what it looked like to people in different cultures and what they did to understand it, I never had another panick attack again.

I wouldn’t recommend that someone who is having panic attacks where they think they’re going to die go about things the way I did. I think this process worked for me because I am a writer and the writer in me who wrote about monsters understood that the best way to bring a monster down was to drag it into the sunlight and pound a stake through it’s heart.

So that’s what I did.

Stephen King has said that “Monsters are real, and ghosts are real too. They live inside us, and sometimes, they win.”

The truth is sometimes they lose and we win and those victories are the sweetest victories of all.