We were driving through the mountains in Maine.  Steep forests of pine closing in on the winding roads.  This was a vacation.  This was going to be fun.  This was family time.  Except I couldn’t breathe.

The walls of green trees were clearly unstable and likely to collapse at any point- same as my lungs.  Turns in the road seemed less intentional and more like haphazard attempts to avoid impending doom.  Were we driving too fast?  Was my seat belt working?  Why were my little sisters being so loud and I was the only one who noticed?  How come my mother couldn’t hear me screaming from the passenger seat that I was dying, we were all dying, the mountains were all wrong and everything needed to stop?

She did hear me eventually- once I actually started making noises outside my head.  I cried, hyperventilated, yelled- the whole show.  And we did pull over and stop everything because clearly there was something wrong.  I scared my sisters but hey we look- we’re at a scenic trail stop.  We looked at a brook from a sweet little bridge in the woods and still I had no explanations for my mother’s questions.

I remember walking around a gravel covered area by myself and trying  to focus really hard on the teeny, crushed rocks.  All they did was remind me of the massive effects of calamity.  A boulder crushed into quarter size chunks.  What size would I be when the mountains fell?

Eventually there was no more stalling- nothing else to see, no more trails marked by wooden signs with animal footprints burned into them.  It was time to continue our happy vacation.  It was time to get back in the car and squeeze between the carved out mountains all the way to our lakeside vacation destination.  Happy.  Fun.

I remember other things about that trip and my mother should be pleased to know that some of those things make me smile or laugh or just feel warm.  But mostly I remember that trip as the time I sped through a mile high alley walled with pine needles to poke at me as I held my breathe and salt water spilled from my eyes.  I remember my lungs collapsing and the confusing inability to scream effectively.  It is my first memory of a panic attack and at the time I didn’t even have that name for it.  I must have been 12 or 13 but nobody did anything, nothing was changed except for the new sound of tiptoes around me until a rheumatologist passed me along to a therapist when I was 15.

Here is an odd thing: That place where my mother had to pull over, probably terrified herself, because I was frightening to watch and listen to- the bridge, the stream, the trails and wooden signs are so fresh and real to me even now.  As long as I pretend I can’t see the gravel- I love that spot.  I want to look over the rails at the water tumbling aimlessly over the river rocks, pulling leaves and twigs at will.  I want to follow a trail into the woods just far enough for it to get a little bit too dark and then I want to come back.  That spot- and I have no idea where exactly it is or even how to find it- was the first place I remember finding relief and refuge from that particular type of terror that I now know better than the alphabet.

In spite of its awfulness I sometimes like to think about that day.  Because it was so new and a stranger to all of us the only remedy was stopping the car and absorbing nature for awhile.  20 years later and the remedy is waiting at the pharmacy, is more attack than remedy or takes so much concentration and remembering of action plans and mantras that I can barely remember I am trying.  Have labels and sessions and stays and medicines made things better?

If that was the first time I thought I was facing imminent death- my first panic attack and we will assume it is because I don’t recall any others and I am a memory keeper, how many have I white-knuckled my way through in those 20 years since?  What would I do if I had all those minutes back?  I’m not sure I would even want them back.  Would they still be filled with panic or somehow fresh and clean, ready for newness and light?

When is time lost better off gone and when is it appropriate to mourn its absence?  I am very glad that I am too tired for math today or I would have some heavy accounting ahead.  And well, that just seems foolish to spend minutes counting up the minutes you have already lost, even if I do find it tempting to have my own badge of courage style panic tally.  Which would then lead to receiving the “Anxiety and Panic Gold Master Level” iron-on badge.

The mentally ill club isn’t the Girl Scouts but it would be so much nicer if we got to wear sashes.