It used to be a daily occurrence for me. Pounding heart, sweaty palms, churning stomach. The inescapable feeling that something bad was about to happen and that there was nothing I could do to stop it. Sounds fitting for a stunt-woman character in an action flick. Not so much for a skinny high schooler with a perm.

I didn’t know it at the time, but I was suffering from severe anxiety. More specifically, panic attacks. I had always been a nervous child, experiencing frequent stomach upset for most of my life though it came to a climax once I reached senior year. Suddenly, upon waking up for school, I would experience a crippling body weakness and nausea. My heart would be pounding so hard I would have to crawl around my room on hands and knees to get ready, because standing up was too painful. The feeling of dread and panic would last for about five hours, leaving me shaky and drained for the rest of the day. I couldn’t eat much because of the nausea and I lost weight quickly. My life was reduced to simply “surviving” the day.

The only way I can describe it to someone who has never experienced reoccurring panic is that it felt like I woke up at the foot of Mount Everest every morning and was told I had to climb it alone, without equipment, before 3pm. From the base of that mountain, looking up from its shadow at 8 am, I was already exhausted.

As the anxiety went on, I noticed what my “triggers” were. Not getting enough sleep was one. Another was being faced with a new situation or environment. And sometimes unfortunately, they came on for no reason at all. I remember it being so severe that at one point, during my first week of community college, I had to excuse myself from class to go to the ladies’ room. I lay on the floor gasping for air like a fish, sure that the world was falling away from under me. Because of this, I became a master at concealing my emotions. Obviously even if you feel like gasping for air and laying on the floor, it’s embarrassing and inappropriate to do in the middle of a classroom.

My parents were concerned, and they did their part to help me seek treatment–counseling, medication, and the like. I feel the counseling really helped because it was through that that I discovered where my anxiety stemmed from. I was lucky because my mom had gone through the something similar and was very understanding. I realize that my experience would have been much harder if my parents were the “just calm down” type.Telling someone having a panic attack to just calm down is like telling an anorexic to just eat. Anxiety doesn’t work that way, and anyone who believes that it does are those lucky enough to never have had to experience it.

Medication, however, was a different story. I tried many anti-depressants and anti-anxiety meds, to no avail. I didn’t care for how they made me feel (or not feel). One made my already weak appetite completely vanish. One made me feel “foggy” all the time. The worst one made me into a zombie, entirely apathetic to everything around me. I didn’t feel anxious, sure. But I also didn’t feel anything at all. I decided about six months into this trial and error experiment that I didn’t want to be on medication anymore.

As time passed, and I became more knowledgeable about how to deal with/avoid my triggers, I began to experience panic attacks less and less. I learned that since I had a family history of anxiety, I could expect them to decline with age– which they did. I also realized that just because I felt anxious, didn’t mean anything was actually happening. A feeling is something that is isolated within you, not shared by the whole world. Just because you feel like something bad is going happen, doesn’t mean it’s going to.

I’d like to tell you that today I’m perfectly calm, that I never feel worried, and that my heart pounds and my palms sweat only while watching a good movie. But that’s not true. Sometimes I get bad news and my first instinct is to lay in bed and sleep, to send my consciousness into oblivion for a few hours as a means of escape. Sometimes a loved one says something off color and I over-analyze it until I’ve made “nothing” into “something”. I live with the anxiety like anyone lives with an affliction. But the point is, I live.

I encourage anyone that is experiencing untreated anxiety to seek help. It is much more common than you would ever believe. And just because medication wasn’t the appropriate course of action for me, doesn’t mean you should stop it if it works for you. Having a supportive social network was my biggest saving grace, and I advocate that everyone dealing with anxiety please reach out to those around them.

We all have different hardships to bear, and I consider myself lucky that this is all I have been given. So now, instead of looking up at the mountain–wondering how I could ever hope to scale it on my own–I just give it a friendly nod and a wave, acknowledging it as I walk on by.