Personal Narrative: My First Anxiety Attack

My heart would palpitate while my skin flushed. I could feel myself getting hotter and more nervous as thoughts raced through my head. They weren’t connected, but they felt tied together, stuck. I felt as if my life was on a video reel but the sounds were distorted, and the film was held together by a shaky hand. My teacher looked at me, saying something but all I heard was unintelligible speech, the other students were staring at me while I prayed silently for a sinkhole to open up and remove me from the situation entirely. This was the day I had my first anxiety attack.

At the impressionable age of thirteen, I had never experienced anything like an anxiety attack before. I had heard of them, but going through the feeling of the world being seen through a kaleidoscope is vastly different than what I assumed. It was scary, suffocating, and nauseating. At the time, I didn’t know this was an anxiety attack. My mind drew a blank at attempting to categorize what happened at school. I tried WebMD-ing what had happened that day, but after receiving a plethora of

Although this quote describes Catherine’s anguish about her health and her obsession with the novel’s antagonist, Heathcliff, it’s prevalent for feelings of social anxiety as well. Contrary to common belief, social anxiety is not the incapability of speaking to people, shyness, or just makes people nervous with crowds of people. Social anxiety is nervousness in social situations, but it affects the body both physically and cognitively. Social anxiety can morph into paranoia, but for me, it stays within the territories of over-thinking. For one, anxiety differs for each person, while the traits may be similar, the experiences are