Chapter 24
The sphere has shrunk to zero.
This is it.
I'm in my bed, my safe place, I've just woken up, and I'm shaking - violent as epilepsy - from head to toe.
I can’t stop it.
This is it.
This is where it ends.
I try to make my body like a board, tensing up - to make it stop - but it’s completely out of control.
I shake and shake and shake and I can’t stop it.
I’m panicking. And it gets worse, I shake harder.
I shake till it hurts.
It keeps hurting...
Then it’s over...
It comes off.
I need to leave. I can’t stay another day. Not another second.
Or I won’t make it home...
I get out of bed and I’m still getting aftershocks. My hands won’t behave.
I book a flight for 4pm. Today.
Now.
Cape Town – Johannesburg. Johannesburg – Home.
I pack my stuff. Give away my tent and my padlock and a few bags to a young bloke at the hostel who, after hearing my stories, reckons it’s a good idea to ride a motorbike through Africa. He’s even bought a cheap Chinese piece of shit that’ll do just fine. Good on him. Anyway. After handing on the baton to him, I grab a taxi.
My protégé gives me the finger and a smile as we pull away. I have to smile. Charming lad.
I sit in and try to hold it together.
Airport.
All I need to do is hold it off till I make it onto the second flight... Well, half way through the second flight... Well, however far the plane needs to go so that they won’t turn it around and head back to Johannesburg when I start shaking and losing it.
I can’t stay in Africa.
I can’t let them hold me back. All I need to do is keep the lid on till then... Second flight...
Breathe. Just breathe.
Boarding - Cape Town.
I’m ok...
My heart is smashing and my body is swooning and I’m panicking... But I'm ok...
Buckle your seatbelts.
All I need to do is sit here...
Just sit. Let the plane do the work.
Joburg.
I brush my teeth and buy a bottle of wine for the family.
Boarding...
Buckle your seatbelts.
Lift-off...
And that’s it.
Africa.
The Shrike.
Gone.
But I’m still me.
Nothing’s changed.
Epilogue
Home. In the airport.
I made it.
Taking a piss before picking up the bags, there’s an advertisement in front of my face while I relieve myself:
“I am the hot and cold flashes that confuse you when you’re already confused enough”
“I am the tightening in your chest”
“I am the snowballing worries that become an avalanche in an instant”
"You need to know anxiety to be free from it. #knowanxiety"
"BeyondBlue."
That all sounds very familiar...
This is way, way beyond just anxiety though. This is a complete breakdown...
I go get my stuff. They let me back in the country despite my bags and my riding gear still being covered in shit from all the way back in the mud baths of the Congo, and despite Australia being the most highly strung country for quarantine on the planet, they wave me through. Not sure how I feel about that...
Cab.
Home.
Old home.
Two in the afternoon on a Wednesday. I’m not going to be able to get in; no one knows I'm back.
I knock on the door.
My younger sister answers the door and it’s weird.
Maybe it’s my face...
It's like neither of us knows quite what to do, it all feels a bit unnatural.
She seems more shell-shocked than surprised.
She was about to head out the door - kind of in a rush, probably late, if nothing’s changed - so off she goes and the house is just empty.
I lie on the floor, looking at the ceiling. On the carpet of the house that’s familiar to me.
This is home.
I feel nothing.
I was so sure that home would change everything...
But I’m still me. Same skin. Same brain. Same eyes.
Nothing’s changed.
My silver bullet. A blank.
Nothing.
I lie on the floor for a few hours.
Dad gets home.
Shits his pants a bit - he wasn't expecting a grown man in the house - but once he realises it’s his son he gets very excited about it.
I don’t know why I was expecting everyone - including myself - to be emotional, but no one is. I’m not. In my head I thought it was going to be so much more. I think it’s my face; I must look like shit.
There's no tears, just surprise.
I reckon everyone’s just shocked.
Mum gets home to find me and dad talking in the kitchen. She’s confused for an instant, but then she recognises me.
Her face scrunches up and her body goes into a standing fetal position as she starts to sob and sag halfway to the floor.
It’s the only time I’ve cried.
It feels more like home now.
I tell them everything.
That I’m not ok. That I think I’m very sick.
They want to help but there’s nothing that they can really do.
Mum gets free access to social workers with her job, so we book me in for some of that.
Mum gives me a fistful of Valium and I sleep.
Nothing’s changed.
Except that I’ve lost my safe place; sleep has become rolling episodes of smashing heart, fizzing head and utter terror.
It’s getting worse...
I'm home, and it's not going to stop...
I go to the social worker. She listens to me while I spill my guts. Everything comes out over forty minutes of me just giving it the verbal diarrhoea. I can’t stop talking till finally I feel like I’ve told her every factual thing about what’s been going on, anything that could be of value, every last detail.
I pause.
She tells me that I don’t have enough magnesium in my diet.
I’m going to black out...
Magnesium?? Is she fucking serious.
I tell her what I think of that...
But on the way home I go and buy the biggest bottle of magnesium tablets at the pharmacy I can find. I might as well be thorough... Can't hurt...
I look up online that BeyondBlue thing I saw at the airport, and I identify with everything that they say. Every fucking word.
So now I have a word for it. I’m calling it.
It’s Anxiety.
I hate the word. It’s not appropriate. It’s too fucking innocuous for what this is.
Being anxious doesn’t sound anything like what I’ve got.
What I am is fucking crook.
Anxiety, to me, is when you’re a little stressed out, or nervous, or I don’t know... anxious... I've never thought it was a big deal.
It should be called "the Death Spirals". Or "Standing Mortis". Or the "Oh-Shit-You're-Fucking-Dying syndrome". Or "Brain Paralysis".
Anxiety? Pffft... Needs a rebrand.
My episodes, they’re called panic attacks. Again, not strong enough.
But every word of what it is, the actual what of anxiety and panic attacks, resonates with me in a way that I know that this is it.
What I’ve tried so hard to describe, it’s all here. That feeling...
I book in to see my doctor, because that’s what they tell me to do.
I can’t drive myself. Can't even get into a drivers seat.
So, mum drives me.
All the places I’ve been... All the miles through all that slog... Africa! All of it. And I can’t drive for fifteen minutes to get to the doctor just around the corner...
For fuck's sake.
What’s happened to me?
I’m sitting in the waiting room next to my mum. I haven’t done that in a decade. But, unlike a decade ago, I’m happy she’s sitting next to me.
“Luke Gelmi”.
I don’t recognise Doctor James. It's been half my lifetime since I've been here. I don’t reckon he recognises me either... He reckons I look like my dad. Spitting image, apparently.
After practising my speech with Mrs Magnesium I give Doc James the summary, and my self-diagnosis.
He reckons I’m right; It’s Anxiety.
That’s all.
Anxiety.
I don’t know if I believe it yet... Doc James doesn’t either. So, just to be sure, it’s a full battery of blood tests and a brain scan.
If that comes up clean, says Doc James, then it's Anxiety for sure, and we can treat Anxiety medically. Take tablets called "beta blockers". It’ll stop the symptoms.
"Don’t worry, you’re not unique - it’s very common - and it’s very, very treatable."
Not arriving in Cape Town; not getting on a plane; not my family; not anything could give me relief. Finally. I have it. Relief. It’s going to be ok.
This is what I’ve looked for. Been dying for.
Doc James is still talking...
"...can medicate but I'd recommend the non-medical course, which is getting therapy."
I don’t want to depend on tablets for the rest of my life just to be ok either... Therapy suits me to the floor.
Thank you, Doc James.
Coming out of the doctors, nothing’s changed, but everything’s different.
After months of guessing, of worrying, I have a name. It’s a thing, it’s an actual thing that exists, I’m not making any of it up, I have it, and I can get after it.
The feeling of utter fragility, that the slightest knock to my peace of mind could send me to the loony bin: Gone. Dispelled. Dismissed.
Blood tests done. Brain scan in one of those things that they tell people they’ve got cancer when the results come back from, done.
Brain scan reveals nothing...
No kidding...
I start going back into the world again; only my family has known that I've been back. I cried with mum on my first day back, I cry again with my best mate now. Seems right.
Doctor Kathy’s not a doctor, but she’s a doctor. Not "MD" doctor but PhD doctor. She's my therapist.
Everything’s been the same; symptoms haven't changed a bit, but the understanding - the why - has changed my attitude entirely.
I’ve been catching up with friends. I’ve been telling everyone who will listen that I’ve got an Anxiety problem. I’ve been so scared that admitting that I had a problem would open the floodgates, unlock a box of insanity, but instead it's opened the floodgates like a release.
Every time I talk with someone, it’s like sharing with them a piece of the burden that I've been carrying all by myself. It’s a tiny piece - they wouldn’t even notice it - but for me, spreading it amongst everyone I know has made a difference.
I’ve been having raging, heavy panic attacks. It still feels like I'm dying. It's probably even worse than it's ever been. But it’s ok. All the terror associated with that feeling, the not knowing what happens next, has been taken away.
All I want to know is what is my plan of attack... Should I do what my head is telling me to do? Go somewhere safe? Or do something else... Defy the feeling that tells me that I need to be somewhere safe? What would make it better?
I want to get better.
I head into Doc Kathy’s office still covered in a bit of sand from surfing this morning; I came straight from the beach.
I should call her Kath, and she doesn’t mind the sand...
Where’s the lie down couch? Where I lace my fingers over my chest and tell her about my childhood? Two plain chairs facing each other is not what I expected...
I sit, I tell her everything.
“Shit Luke, you don’t need magnesium, you need therapy!”
“Yes! Thank you!! Shit. Right?? Magnesium. Fuck's sake...”
By the time we’ve got to talking about magnesium the session - which run’s for an hour - is practically over.
She tells me that I’m not going crazy.
That I could walk into the mental asylum - right now - and they’d say “you’ve just got Anxiety, get out of here”. They literally wouldn't let me in.
It’s a big deal that’s not a big deal.
It’s going to be ok.
Panic attacks can’t hurt you. They come, they suck, they go. The body can’t support a permanent panic attack; it’s too exhausting. Ten minutes – absolute max.
So no matter how bad a panic attack is, understand that it won’t last, and that it can’t hurt you. That’s as bad as it gets.
When you do what the panic attack is telling you to do, you exacerbate it. You make it worse. If it’s telling you to run away, to hide, to find somewhere safe, if you do what it says it learns that that’s the correct response.
So, next time - whatever you’re doing when it happens - keep doing it. Just go on doing what you would have been doing had it not happened. Yes, it’s gonna suck, it’s going to feel fucking awful, but it can’t hurt you, and it doesn’t last. So, just keep doing what you were doing anyway, and watch it! Watch your thoughts, follow your thoughts, what are they saying? See where they go, watch what your head is doing, don’t suppress anything, watch how it feels and how you think as it comes, watch the feeling as it stays a while, watch the feeling as it goes. Watch it all the way to the end.
And stop checking your pulse all the time...
Don’t look for signs that one’s coming.
Just live.
After our fifth session a month later, and talking about the practical application of what I’ve learnt, it’s time to go.
“I pronounce you, 'cured'”.
I kind of knew it. I knew it a few weeks ago, if I’m honest. But these sessions have been the highlight of the week. It’s like I’ve been overflowing for months and months with the need to share everything with someone. It’s weird, but I think I’m in love with Kath.
Nothing’s changed. I'm still me.
But everything’s different.
Right.
What now?
I've taken all of the jenga out of my life... I guess it's time to start a new game... But first...
The Shrike.
THE END