Don't Worry, It Gets Worse

by Alida Nugent

  Which is why, one unseasonably warm night in January, at twenty-three years old, I was shocked to find myself awakened by my own screaming. It confused me. There was no blood visible, no dream of being buried alive, just me, soaked in sweat. I felt like my chest was closing in on me, or the room was getting smaller, and my eyes could not adjust to the darkness. Something was very wrong.

  It was the first time I ever felt like I was dying. Not the harsh, panicky nighttime realization that you eventually would die, but the very present, very likely possibility that any moment I would be “touched by an angel” and taken to the pearly gates of heaven or the pearly gates of sorry, nothing happens when you die.

  I lay and waited. I kept living. It took ten minutes of pacing and drinking water to convince me that I wasn’t going to die at the moment, but I still couldn’t comprehend why my body was revolting against me this way.

  Of course, the Internet would help me figure this out. The Internet solved all of my problems, except the one about how to leave the house. I typed “What if you feel like you’re dying?” which was an odd way of putting it, but screw it, I’m not Doogie Howser or even Neil Patrick Harris, who I felt might have some insight because he seems smart.

  According to WebMD, I was either already dead or having a panic attack. Great! Finally, I had leveled up in my never-ending game of “Who Wants to Move to New York and Embody His Neurotic Highness Woody Allen?!” My body had bowed down and succumbed to my socially anxious brain. Great job, body.

  WebMD said you have panic attacks when you “displace or are unable to handle [a lot of] stress.” I call bullshit on this, WebMD. I was totally aware of my stress all the time. Things that made me nervous on a daily basis: that the deli will get my sandwich wrong and I will have to send it back, that somebody will get mad at me if I bump into them, if somebody will ring my doorbell when I’m home alone, if there will be mushrooms in my Mexican entrée, if my future husband will be someone who has posted mean comments on YouTube….

  I had always been perfectly capable of handling stress or nerves or panic. It had been my cross to bear for years, a cross that gave people like Jesse Eisenberg incredible careers and people like me a lot more sweat. When I thought about my life as a whole, though, I realized that that was the problem. My life was the issue.

  Sometimes, when I looked at who I am and where I was going, I think of Tom Hanks in Sleepless in Seattle when he finds his kid standing alone at the top of the Empire State Building. Frantic and upset, Hanks looks the little shit in the eye and says, “We’re doing okay, right?” The kid sniffles and nods and the audience is supposed to think two things: (1) yeah, you kind of are okay, and (2) good thing Meg Ryan is probably going to appear in the next shot to save them, because you guys are so fucked right now.

  This is how I constantly felt about myself. Most of the time, the day went by smoothly. I didn’t die. Sometimes I’d step on a piece of glass and bleed, or somebody is rude to me, but nothing too bad. However, when I think about five years down the road, even two years…I get tired. It seemed too much, like a climb up a very long staircase. How could I possibly reach any destination? How could I possibly make enough money for two more years of living in the city, or two more years of buying pants, or two more years, period? How would I be able to keep up with a job and not get fired, or start a career and advance in it? How could I possibly be able to progress? Where is my metaphorical Meg Ryan?

  The most frustrating thing was that there was nothing I could do about it. I couldn’t just “stop being scared of my future,” so instead I had to deal with the frequent panic attacks I had—almost every night for the next couple of weeks. It made me feel like I was being dramatic. I wasn’t starving. I wasn’t sick. And here I was, pacing back and forth at night so I didn’t have to wake up in desperate, clawing fear. My roommates joked that I looked like a raccoon. I stopped going out as much. I started to dread sleep. I found myself very, very unhappy.

  My unhappiness has different levels, depending on who I am talking to about it. If it’s my parents or direct members of my bloodline, I must be very happy because I was not doing needle drugs or becoming a stripper. According to my friends in California, I seemed reasonably happy. To them, I lived in an area where the weather sometimes sucked, but how could I not be happy when I ate bagels and drank tasty tap water and rarely sat in traffic? According to my circle in New York, I seemed totally okay with being the creative single gal, always cracking a joke or making topical references and halfheartedly doing wellness juice fasts and whatnot. My best friends know my brain was a minefield of terrible guys I shouldn’t be thinking about, existential moments where I questioned the universe, and slight insecurities about my love handles. But by all means, I seemed generally okay to them.

  Usually, they were right. I’ve always been—despite my deep desire to become one of those writers who actually felt the immense weight of suffering—a fairly optimistic person. Even when I was kicked to the ground by some bad week, I’d try my hardest to wallow and found that I wasn’t very good at it. I kept pickin’ myself up. Now, I wasn’t sure. I didn’t trust myself. I didn’t like that although I felt okay, there were parts of myself, parts I couldn’t see, that feared some unknown thing I could not get rid of, could not run from, could not seem to stop.

  * * *

  The moment I started telling people about my panic attacks, they got really excited. Their eyes lit up. They dropped some fuckin’ knowledge on me.

  “Oh, hell yeah! I have panic attacks all the time. You’ve got to stop overloading on caffeine, and you probably need more than ten hours of sleep a week. Come on, Alida. Get off the Internet, take care of yourself.”

  “Jesus, Alida. Everybody gets panic attacks. Have you seen this economy? And come on, you live in New York City. You’re not a New Yorker until you kick a cab, get mugged, or have an existential breakdown in a crosswalk.”

  “Panic attacks? My life is just one loooong anxious wait for death. Seriously, get used to it.”

  There was no pity—only camaraderie, an acknowledgment that most of us twentysomethings are pretty anxious about our lives. Come join the club, they all begged! The water is clammy and harsh and unforgiving! We’ll all die in here!

  My friends, well versed in the kind of screaming panic I was just getting used to, had some remedies. Because nothing I was doing was working, I decided to try them out, to varying results.

  Things That People Suggested I Do to Ward Off

  Panic Attacks, and Results of These Experiments

  1. Drinking

  The first panic attack advice I followed was from a self-proclaimed expert in them. “The secret? Never go to bed sober,” he told me. He was the kind of guy who drank a glass of whiskey every night before bed, something I both admired and feared, like people who still use AOL.

  “And…drinking helps the panic attacks go away?” This seemed like a great way to jump-start that drinking problem I’d been meaning to get.

  “Trust me. Alcohol will cure this. You just have to drink alone. Don’t go out to those FUCKING BARS, Alida. That’ll just make it worse. It’s depressing watching all those idiots try to drink away their goddamn problems. Just do it all by yourself, with nothing but you and your irrational fears and your demons. Just come home and pour yourself a drink at the end of the day.”

  “My demons love the taste of gin, I think.”

  He rolled his eyes. “You don’t drink gin, what are you, a divorced mother who is abandoning her children? Jesus. Pour yourself a glass of wine, or whiskey. So do that, feel yourself getting a little drunk, let your head hit the pillow, and I promise you’ll get a full night’s sleep.”

  He was adamant. I was getting debriefed like I was Jason Statham’s tiny half-Latina sidekick who was just “along for the ride.” I would follow his instructions to a T, lest I would DIE by some Russian sniper.

  The Result

  The day after our conversation, I went to Trader Joe’s and purchased thr
ee bottles of Two-Buck Chuck, a loaf of French bread, and a block of three-dollar brie. I plopped my purchase on the counter and looked at the attractive-but-also-a-white-guy with dreadlocks, begging him to comment on either how very French or very sad I was.

  That night, I opened up my Charles Shaw shiraz in my ratty T-shirt and Old Navy pajama pants. The sipping eventually eased into chugging from the bottle as I sat cross-legged on my bed, reading an Anthony Bourdain book. After a while, I started getting restless and began to do a very stupid thing: watch various YouTube videos of Adele covers. Obviously, I started crying a little bit because the combination of wine and Adele is pretty much the biological go sign for releasing tears. Then, I began to smoke cigarettes out my window and look up a bunch of my exes on Facebook. Eventually, I looked up the ending to Toy Story 3, Skyped my best friend while crying, and couldn’t get the wine stains off my teeth despite vigorous brushing. This experiment was not going well.

  My roommates were waking up to the constant sounds of my padded feet going back and forth to the bathroom or to the kitchen to eat huge bites out of a small block of cheese. I drunkenly imagined what they would say during my Intervention episode. “Your addiction has affected me in the following way: You’re being weird.”

  That night, I fell asleep with purple lips and dreamed about burning planes.

  2. Yoga

  Obviously, drinking before bed was not the way for me to solve my never-ending panic. Going to sleep to the images of planes going down was so Garden State of me, and thus exactly what I needed to stay away from.

  A lot of people recommended yoga, which wasn’t something I ever wanted to do because I hate to clear my mind, and also, I don’t like anything Julia Roberts tries to do in Eat Pray Love. But my “rich friend who pretends like her dad doesn’t pay for all her credit card bills” told me that she relieves her tension by masturbating or yoga. I have done one of these enough to know that sometimes solutions are fleeting and maybe you should get off your back and try yoga every once in a while.

  The Result

  It was 4 P.M. on a Saturday when I’m trying my damnedest to learn a pose called “Happy Baby.” It was not. Going. Well. I rolled around and tried to come up with a soothing chant to get me through the class. Guy who looks nice in suit, guy who looks nice in suit, beard, beard, two more seasons of Community, two more seasons of Community. While this rolling around made me giggle, it also made me twist my hamstrings in a way that I do not approve of. I’m not a fan of physical exertion when I could be sitting silently like a slug, doing absolutely nothing.

  The classroom was cheery and brightly lit and filled with mirrors, which are three things that do absolutely nothing for my concentration or peace of mind. All the women in my class were wearing Lululemon and smelled like tea tree oil or Burberry Brit—I had on a Beatles T-shirt and smelled like the bottom of my closet. They all raised their hands up to the sky, wearing silver jewelry they didn’t lose at bars, looking calm, like they worked hospitality at hotels or retail at an expensive bag store. People who do yoga never look like they need to do yoga, or be calm, or learn any of that.

  I tried to focus at the task at hand: clearing my mind. This was a hard thing to do for someone whose problem was thinking of a lot of things at once. I breathed and tried to remember yoga wasn’t about Phish and granola anymore, but urban ladies who knew all their chakras and had clean bedsheets. I can be this lady, I think! It’s not my fault Namaste is such a funny word!

  After the class ended, one thing was clear: Improving the body and dulling the mind officially did nothing for me. On to the next one.

  3. “Ignore the panic attacks and go shopping and continue to dwindle your savings because eventually, it will all work out.”

  The Result

  HAHAHHA. This worked well.

  Drugs

  Finally, there was Xanax. Everybody knows somebody who has prescription medication available. Pills are often passed around like candy, but the kind of candy you hopefully don’t want too much of, like Good & Plenty. I briefly ran over the idea in my head to go to the doctor to get a prescription, but that seemed annoying and like something I wouldn’t want to do—find a doctor, go to the doctor, tell the doctor something, go to the pharmacy. Too many steps. Too little health insurance.

  When my friend offered me a couple of her little white pills, I accepted immediately and with great excitement. (Note: Yes, I know this is a crime. Yes, you should go to the doctor, pay a co-pay, try to slip in that you have panic attacks or get nervous on airplanes or whatever it is you need to do. Get a prescription and fill it at the CVS. Buy some toilet paper, maybe a magazine, meet a guy there, date him, get married, live a pure life of legality.)

  I should say, I’m by no means a “drug person.” To me, marijuana seems like something you do in college if you have so much time on your hands, you want to fill those hands with Xbox controllers and Doritos because nobody thinks you’re going to contribute to society while wearing that hemp necklace. Cocaine seems like an expensive way to act like a douche bag. Ecstasy is for people who enjoy having sex to laser lights. However, pills were appealing to me because of its simple promise: You take one and you function normally for a little while.

  The Result

  When I took my first pill, I felt the unfamiliar waves of nothing. I felt nothing but in the moment, the reading of the book, the gentle music playing in the background, the decision to put my hair in a ponytail. The world was no longer crashing down at my feet. It felt like…being normal. The Xanax had worked. Of course they worked, they’re drugs designed to stop panic attacks.

  Even though I had a solution, I wasn’t really happy, because it wasn’t really solving the problem at hand, the problem being that I was scared of my life. And to that, there’s no solution. Death, maybe. But that’s a little much.

  When I was eight, looking a shark in the eye was the worst part of the whole thing. The climax. The part in Gladiator where Russell Crowe finally fights Joaquin Phoenix. The rest was just falling action. What happened to that kid? That kid who bravely stepped up to fear and said “Fuck it,” right in its face?

  Now, there is just the panic. The idea there might be something in the water, the idea that you might never find land, the idea that you’ll never paddle anywhere. That’s what was keeping me up at night—not the shark, but the swim. An ocean of bills and trying to be happy and the idea that you had no lifeboat, and that this stuff wasn’t just in an amusement park in Florida, but a real thing one had to deal with in order to move forward. I could get through today, I think. And then when I get through today, I’ll get through tomorrow. And eventually, it will be five years from now, or, as I see it, “a fuckload of tomorrows.”

  A shark never sinks if it doesn’t stop moving.

  I put the second pill down. I get ready for bed.

  Lots of people are scared of the water. It was about time I got in, anyway.

  Liam Neeson Is Probably the Reason Why I’m Still Single

  For as long as I remember, to all of my friends and my enemies, I have been known as “the single one.” It’s a role that I have proudly owned for several years, ever since I broke up with a boyfriend who spent all of his time playing Xbox and asking for me to go pick up his Chinese food. Being in that relationship left a bad taste in my mouth (literally and figuratively), so I gave up on dating and put my energy into becoming a single-person expert, like Carrie Bradshaw minus a million so this got me thinking. I was the four-eyed spokesmodel for leading a satisfying and sassy life while waiting for somebody special; because, ladies, you don’t need satisfaction from just any man. Even friends in relationships found me inspiring and talked to me about their love issues. Why people listened or took instruction from somebody who had not dated anybody worth mentioning in years, I’ll never know. Oh. Yes I do. Because people love talking about their relationships, even to their very single, very alone friends.

  And alone I was. Alone and available, the single friend you cou
ld rely on. Need a friend to be your wing woman? Call on me to be the wise-cracking, slightly rude Louise to your much more datable-in-comparison Thelma. Want to vent about the shitty thing your boyfriend did and don’t want other in-happy-relationship friends to judge? I’ll offer you the best advice, and by best I mean drunkest, and by drunkest I mean something heartfelt where I offer to punch him in the kidneys until he remembers to text you more often. If I were on a reality television show, I would wear a flowy chiffon top and say lines like, “I may be single, but don’t count me out just yet!” or something else tragic and alcoholic and mildly hopeful.

  Now just because I was never in a relationship didn’t mean I was Julie Andrews pre–von Trapp family. I didn’t date seriously, but like a lot of young women of this generation, I “hung out.” I made out with people at house parties. I had month-long, uninvested flings with the kinds of men who looked like they went home and wrote things on their walls with Sharpies. Traditional dating, as a practice, was nonexistent to me. No Thursday-night rituals of meeting another investment banker who describes, in detail, the first Negroni he had in Italy. No Wednesday-night napkins on lap, hand-holding through cobblestoned streets, and a rotation of kisses by the subway. And you know what? For a while, this was pretty awesome. I spent all my time going to happy hours with my friends and licking my fingers in public and telling them about how I sat awkwardly on the couch to watch a slasher film with another tattooed stick who had mismatching furniture.

  Over time, there were certain disadvantages to my lifestyle, like, I don’t know, forgetting what it was like to have nice feelings about somebody. My heart was becoming as hard as a game of drunken Jenga: in other words, really fucking hard. On the exterior, I was totally cool with my single status, but deep down, I was beginning to think I would never love again and that my sexy underwear collection would start to disintegrate into a pile of crushed dreams in my top drawer. And, of course, my social interactions were suffering because of this. I was losing the ability to relate to my peers because I began to associate romantic relationships with drilling out the part of your brain that craves independence. Whenever people started talking about their dating lives, I would shake around like I was a forty-year-old dancing at a Florence and the Machine concert. The “Dog Days Are Over!” Get me out of here! A conversation might go like this: