1. INBETWEEN ANXIETY
A song to fill your ears with whilst reading - Intro - The XX
I had my first panic attack when I was 8 years old. Nothing could have prepared me for that moment. As I crunched on a popcorn kernel, I watched Tom Cruise shoot a villain to his death in a dark and crowded movie theatre. Death. What a terrifying thought. My mind instantly switched to memories of my aunty. She was in her 30s when the doctors missed the cancer that made a home near her right breast. I remember my mum telling my sisters and I to pray for her. I remember feeling muddled, looking from side to side eyeing my sisters secretly because I didn’t know how to pray. I remember my aunty staying with us in her final weeks and walking around our house in her grey robe, disguising her fear with forced smiles. That’s the final memory I have of her. She left us a couple of weeks after that. She was my dad’s youngest sister and he couldn’t accept how much the situation was out of his hands. He was never one to show emotion but I have distant memories of him sitting down at her wake staring at the ground, his eyes watery. My family and I recently found out that he secretly visited her grave every day for 2 years after that, to escape as he wept in private.
This had been my first encounter with death and my mind seemed to connect the two events. The one from my past and the one I was living in presently. I sat there, my mind becoming busy with thoughts about death. What happens when we die? What happens to your dead body as it decays in a tiny box metres beneath the Earth? Darkness closed around me and I couldn’t take another full breath. I was convinced that my heart was about to fail due to the rapid speed it was beating at. I turned to my sisters with a worried look on my face relaying the fact that I was struggling to breath. They rushed me out of there quickly. They were leading me out because I was disorientated. I was bewildered and confused as to what was happening to me. I vaguely remember my sisters holding me to the car. They sat me in the back seat while I shivered and took my temperature with an old school thermometer that was kept in the glove compartment.
After this incident, I couldn’t return to a movie theatre for a few years. Scarred from that unpleasant feeling. That darkness that filled me whilst being surrounded by darkness. I didn’t realise until recently how young I was when my anxiety started. Maybe since then the fear of death became my motivator. Knowing that everything was impermanent so I wasn’t going to spend my time living a repetitive life. I experience various other anxieties but one that is also prominent and has been a domino effect from this experience is definitely claustrophobia. The fear of being stuck, trapped in confined spaces, rooted. Maybe this not only psyched me out literally but also metaphorically too. Because maybe all of this is how I became to be an Inbetween Girl.