Content note Describes anxiety and panic attacks.
Identification: It arrives without footsteps. Often in supermarkets, near the cereal. Sometimes in the third minute of a meeting, sometimes at 3 a.m., sometimes on a beautiful afternoon in the park, which is the cruellest habitat of all. It looks like nothing. That is its best camouflage. To everyone else, you are simply a woman standing very still with a box of muesli.
Behaviour: It begins in the chest, a small bird battering against the inside of a window. Then the hands go strange, pins and needles, as if they belong to someone further away. The floor tilts a few degrees. The lights hum louder. A voice inside you, very calm and very certain, announces that you are dying, right now, here, beside the oats.
Common misconceptions: That you can talk it out of coming. That it means you are weak. That it is about the thing you are looking at. It is never about the muesli.
Diet: It feeds on running. On fighting it. On the frantic search for an exit. It grows fat on the question what if this never stops.
How to survive an encounter: Do not run. Find something to hold — the cold metal of the shelf, the edge of the trolley. Name five things you can see. Breathe out longer than you breathe in, like blowing on soup. Tell it, silently, I know you. You have come before. You have always left.
Life cycle: It peaks within minutes. It always peaks. Then it ebbs like a tide going out, leaving you washed up and shaking and absurdly hungry.
Field notes: I have met it two hundred times. I have stopped counting. Last week I stood in the cereal aisle and felt it begin, and I put my hand on the shelf, and I breathed out like soup, and I said hello to it, almost kindly. It stayed four minutes. Then it went. I bought the muesli. I ate it standing up in the car park, in the sun, alive.
