My Panic Attack III

It took a term for the novelty to wear off. The feelings of anxiety which had been pushed below the surface began to trouble me once more and I felt increasingly trapped. Sleeping in a dormitory with rigid rules about not talking after lights out and no reading in bed left me with too much time alone with my thoughts and my out-of-control imagina¬tion. Mealtimes meant more rules and there were no accept¬able excuses to leave the table. Eating became a problem with so many people watching and noticing my jittery behaviour.

At first I was able to cope with services in the school chapel (two each day and three on Sundays) but, inevitably, as the panicky feelings began to recur I found it more and more difficult to sit still until the end of a service.

Lessons were becoming an ordeal too. I would watch the clock: twenty minutes until the bell goes ... ten minutes ... five minutes. Little wonder that I started to slip behind with my school work again when sitting through a forty-minute lesson was purgatory. The feeling of being trapped built up even when I was sitting near a door. There was, of course, no chance of asking to be excused; you might get away with it on one occasion if you could plead an emergency - but not a second time.

i The last straw came when I was told that I had to propose a vote of thanks to a visiting lecturer. It meant standing up in front of the whole school to speak and I knew I couldn't do it. For days - and worse, for nights — beforehand, I lived with this terror, visualising how I was going to make a fool of myself, forgetting what I had to say, breaking down in front of the whole school. My imagination was as usual running out of control and I knew I would not be able to walk on to the stage, smile sweetly and say my piece.

On the day itself I was sick several times and the terror built up and up. There was no way I could tell anyone that I couldn't go through with it, and as the time approached I felt even worse. I ran away from school.

I went back, of course, and I won't go into details of my punishment and disgrace. This was fifty years ago, and no one then would have considered that I might actually have needed help for a psychological problem.

I asked my parents to take me away and let me return to the local high school. Panic attacks and daily assembly would be preferable to a twenty-four-hour school environment. I said I was unhappy at boarding school and told some lurid stories about life in that eminently respectable establishment. Being unhappy was reason enough where my sensible parents were concerned, but I was grilled by the headmistress, house mistress and other members of the staff who insisted on being told why I wanted to leave their precious school.
Was I leaving because I was unpopular? I was indignant about that as I had many friends. Anything wrong at home? Death in the family? Bankruptcy? Divorce? I looked at them blankly and then explained that I was suffering from delayed shellshock after my - mostly imaginary - experiences during the Blitz. Did they believe me? I never found out.

It was such a relief to make yet another fresh start that I felt practically normal again. It didn't last, of course, but as the old feelings crept back, the time had come to do something about the problem. Hauled up before the head, I found out that at the age of sixteen I could at last explain why I was invariably late for school.

At last the adults were sympathetic. During assembly I was allowed to slip into one of the side rooms if I felt unwell. Better still, I was not forced to attend assembly at all but could wait in die classroom until the other girls returned. My form teacher let me sit near the door and I had permission to slip outside the class for a few moments if the tension became unbearable. Would you believe it, as soon as I ceased to feel under pressure I found many of the hitherto impossible situations I had avoided before became tolerable; now I could talk about the things that bothered me and tackle problems such as standing on my head in PE or hanging upside down on the wall bars in the gym, both of which activities invariably made me feel sick and dizzy.

I would take a packed lunch instead of eating with the crowd; but that didn't last long, as I found I was missing out on most of the news and gossip, so I was soon back lunching with my friends. The best thing was that nobody thought there was anything peculiar about me.



If You Want Immediate Anxiety Relief, Check Out Our New Natural Technique To Stop Panic Attacks and General Anxiety Fast!