Dealing With Panic Attacks & Being You

Hello, my lovelies!

I’m feeling very nervous about today’s post as I’m sharing something personal with you all. I wanted to put two things together in today’s post; dealing with panic attacks and being yourself. Usually, I don’t take my blog incredibly seriously as I just see it as something that is an entertainment to you guys reading it and to me writing it. However, today, I think I need to address these two things a little more seriously than I normally would address most other subjects so I apologise if you are not entertained, but I’m equally hoping you all take it seriously too.  Anyway, I’ll get to it.

I understand that the majority of you guys reading this are people I know and could be quite close to and so you probably know that I suffer from panic attacks from time to time and, if I’m completely honest, they are not very nice. At all. From what I have researched, I have gathered that panic attacks can range from being quite mild to being very serious. I wouldn’t say mine are serious but they aren’t mild either.  Whenever I have a panic attack, it will start as butterflies in my tummy, then I get a slight headache which becomes progressively worse and feels like there is a large weight in my brain rolling from one side of my head to another. My butterflies then travel through the rest of my body making my heartbeat faster than normal which sometimes makes me feel quite stiff or sometimes makes me feel quite sick. Sometimes, my hands will start to shake if the panic attack is bad. If I were in an exam or an assembly when I first got panic attacks, I would have just sat there feeling nauseous and dizzy and I would bite my lip or pinch my stomach to distract myself from the thought of being sick. If I were at home, I would sit in my room and cry until it went away.

I would get panic attacks for the most stupid reasons. Before I went into exams in school, I would refuse to eat most of my lunch because I felt so nervous and scared of puking it up and so I would go into the exam room hungry. Then, right in the middle of an exam when it was deafeningly quiet, my stomach would rumble and would trigger my panic of someone hearing it. I would also panic when I had to sit still in an assembly. I would panic when having to present something to the class, when in a music lesson my teacher would let us all know that our recordings of us playing instruments and singing were up on the ‘Shared Drive’ for everyone to listen to each other’s work, and when I was (on very rare occasions) getting told off. Another thing I would panic about would have been if I had an argument with someone I love and felt like I hadn’t said all I had needed to say which sounds horrible but it just made me panic! It might sound stupid to some people and I completely understand that reaction but I can honestly from the bottom of my heart tell you that a panic attack is not something I would wish upon anybody.

After the early stages of my panic attacks I knew I couldn’t cope any longer without dealing with it and luckily, I was supported. I went to a place in my school called the ‘LSU’ where I became friends with a girl who suffers with panic attacks like me and we were both supported by a really lovely teacher who I am incredibly grateful to. Instead of sitting in the middle of the hall for assemblies, we would sit at the back near a door for reassurance that we could leave if we needed to, but we didn’t because by doing this, we felt safer. We were given the option to sit near a door in the exam room too which I passed but I wish I didn’t now. We were also given the advice to buy some lavender oil (which if you’re interested, I got it from Boots) which we would either put in our baths the night before an exam or put a few drops on our sleeves as a comfort smell throughout the day. I began to eat a little more in the mornings after having all of this advice given to me and I felt a little better. However, I wish I had been to get this help a little earlier on as my exam results did drop some of my overall grades for GCSE down slightly.

After having all of this help and support, I rarely get panic attacks but I have taken to seeing the head of exams at my new college asking for a separate exam room for any A Level exams I have. My panic attacks have always affected the way I have seen myself and before and during my first stages of panic attacks, I didn’t feel like being ‘me’ was good enough. That’s not to say that I was depressed because I wasn’t. I just thought that my personality, the music I enjoyed, my love of being musical and creative, and everything else about me was wrong and weird. But I can now say that, after all of this support I have had, I’m not afraid of that anymore in the way I used to be. I have had this realisation that, if everyone else around me is being who they want to be and they are happy in their own skin, why can’t I be? Why do I feel that I’m ‘not good enough’ for people who I barely even know? So now, I’m writing a blog, I’m singing in front of the smallest of crowds (which is a huge thing for me), and I’m incredibly happy. I feel like I’ve said this in every blog post but I just can’t believe how natural it feels to state it.

So, the moral of this whole blog post is that if something or someone is getting you down and you feel like you can’t do anything about it, or that nobody cares about you, or that you are not just as important as every other being around you…you CAN do something about it, there IS somebody who cares about you, and YOU…YOU ARE just as important as every single one of the people on this planet. You really are.

So there we are guys. That was a part of my life that I’m so glad to say I’ve shared with you because I know some of you reading this feel the exact same way as I did and may have (hopefully) gained something from this.

For any of you who are experiencing panic attacks, or for any of you that know somebody who is going through them, I found an incredibly useful NHS article online which talks about dealing with panic attacks. Here is the link to that for you: http://www.nhs.uk/Conditions/stress-anxiety-depression/Pages/coping-with-panic-attacks.aspx

I love you all very much.

BIG MIDGET GIRL HUGS

Megan xx