Something Wants to Kill Me

By Sarah Phillips

I know I’m having a panic attack because of how uncomfortable I feel. I think my skin is crawling off my body and I can’t stay still. Sometimes I close my eyes and try to focus on my breathing but the thump of my heart makes me think a monster is coming to get me. Then comes the blindness, starting at one spot for what feels like an eternity, until a sort of reconciliation comes. Not calm, not panic, just enough for me to get up.

Sometimes the monster that I feel is chasing me doesn’t feel metaphorical exactly. It feels physical. It feels tangible. I feel like it’s right in front of me, chasing me, mocking me, plotting my downfall and eventual death. Sometimes my brain has to come up with a tangible threat to make my anxieties seem valid.

When I was five to when I was about eleven I always slept with a baby blanket over my head. I believed this would protect me from getting shot in my head if an intruder broke in. I knew a gun would break through a blanket but I still believed that this offered me at least some defense in a situation where I am unable to control anything. Most of the strict rules I lived by made no sense. But to me they all boiled down to this: someone wanting to harm me.

I had my first panic attack when I was twelve after running the mile in P.E. I hated running. How slow I was. How it made my muscles feel. How the teacher huffed and looked with disappointment when he wrote down my abysmal time. The only reasonable response was to stop breathing, to feel my heart beating and the monster chasing me once more.

All of this may seem melodramatic. However, when is panic not melodramatic? It’s an amalgamation of fear and inner turmoil, which sometimes can only be conceptualized in

the mind as a physical threat. When I’m anxious and panicking, it’s always over something specific. Something that, a lot of times, doesn’t even make sense to the unanxious mind. A lot of the time, they don’t even make sense to me.

Living life by arbitrary rules is a mind boggling experience. In a way, there’s still that anchor to reality. Or, I know full well I’m being “crazy”, but there’s always that threat of what if that lives in me, taunting me, and causing panic. The what if that fuels the monster that I believe is chasing me and fuels that endless cycle that is so very hard to be released from.

Is there a release? Or is it an endless cycle of panic and comedown until we all meet the same fate?

Something wants to kill me. I don’t know who or what, I just know it’s there and it seems real enough to touch. It may just come for us all.