When I dreamed, the past was so clear, but then I’d start to wake up and start gasping for breath and feel like I wasn’t able to breathe. It was like my body could still remember what it had been like
to be underwater and almost drown.
“No!” I screamed as I woke up sweating and holding my chest.
I couldn’t breathe. I hadn’t been breathing. As I woke up, my breath was labored and I felt dizzy from the lack of oxygen. My dream had been so real that I had actually been holding my breath. It had been happening frequently to me since I didn’t have drugs or alcohol to knock me out for sleeping.
My body was in a fight, and I felt like I was losing. My hands clenched my chest as I desperately tried to breathe but never felt like I was able to get much more than a tiny breath in. It was like torture. I was going to die, I just knew it, and no one would be there for me. I bet even if I actually died, my own father and brother wouldn’t bother to show up.
Before I knew it, my therapist, Jarrod, was sitting at the end of my bed trying to comfort me. I knew I was actually breathing and my breaths were labored, but I still felt the overwhelming feeling of not being able to breathe. The room was spinning. My hands shook. And Jarrod, with his calming voice, was all I had to focus on.
Therapists had never seemed that useful to me in my life. Even in the few days that I had been at the facility, I wasn’t all that sure I needed one. It seemed like they basically made me do all the work, but I had to pay them for it. But in that moment, as panic rushed through my body, I was happy Jarrod was there with me.
“You’re having a panic attack, Erik. Try to take a few deep breaths. Look at me,” his deep voice said.
“I…I…can’t breathe,” I managed to say.
“You can breathe, Erik. Look at me, take in a deep breath like I am,” Jarrod said as he inflated his lungs and looked me in the eyes. “Slowly, let your lungs fill up. Don’t worry about anything, don’t think about anything. Just follow me.”
His calming voice had so much faith in my ability to breathe that I even believed it. Soon I found myself pulling in a deep breath and letting it out again. We continued to sit there on my bed just breathing. Jarrod kept me focused as I took in breath after breath and let it out again. I felt my heart rate slow, my sweating stopped, and the shaking in my hands let up.
“Thanks,” I managed to say as I felt my body coming back to me.
“Have you had panic attacks before?”
“Not like that. I really felt like I couldn’t breathe. I was in a dream, and then before I knew what was going on, I woke up and felt like someone was choking me.”
“Your body is going through a lot right now, Erik. You’ve got to listen to it. Have you had breakfast yet?”
“No. I was too sore. I decided to sleep instead.”
Just then Cassidy came into the room with a breakfast tray. She set it down next to me and looked on with pity in her eyes. I didn’t want her to feel pity for me. I didn’t want to look weak to her or anyone else, but in that moment, there wasn’t anything I could do about it. I was weak and there was no denying it.
It was funny to me that I was so afraid of looking weak to people, yet for months I had been getting so drunk that my friends had literally carried me up the stairs to my room. One night, a girl had been waiting in my room fully naked and I couldn’t even remember if I managed to get myself together enough to screw her. She had disappeared by morning, and it wasn’t like I knew her name, so that was a mystery I would likely never know the answer to.
“Go ahead and rest up today, then tomorrow, I want to see you out more. Deal?” Jarrod asked. “And you have to eat something and drink some Gatorade.”
“Yeah, I’ll do my best.”
“That’s all any of us can do.”
Jarrod left and Cassidy followed him. I liked her, but as time went by, I started to like her for real reasons, not just because she drove my body crazy. She was obviously a bit of a misfit, with her bright red hair and tongue piercing, yet she seemed to fit in with everyone. That ability made me jealous. I was a regular guy with brown hair and brown eyes – nothing about my physical appearance stood out, yet I always felt like an outcast.
Never had I been in a room of people and felt like I truly belonged; well, not since my mother had died. She was the last person who I had truly felt like myself with. With her death had come the death of my own personality and happiness.
It didn’t happen because I wanted to be misunderstood, like many other teenagers did. I actually wanted friends; I wanted people to care about me. I searched out that feeling of love by giving people things. I threw parties so people would surround me with their version of caring, yet none of it ever filled me up.
As I lay in bed, still drenched in sweat, I hated the person I had become and the emptiness that filled me up. None of these people could understand what it was like to be happy on the outside and devastatingly lonely on the inside. The other people at Paradise Peak were rich and had people in their lives. They knew more about love than I could even imagine, and I didn’t want to let them see how uneducated I was on the topic.
I closed my eyes again, but not to sleep. I just wanted to lay there and take in the calmness of the moment. For months, even years, I had been constantly running around trying to prove I was worth being loved. It had been exhausting, and look where it had landed me.
I didn’t know the answer to get out of my own despair, but for the first time in a very long time, I was all right with not knowing. Whether Jarrod knew what a good therapist he was or not, I wasn’t sure, but I appreciated his focus on me in those moments. I had felt worthy of it, and appreciated it.
“Do you want my pancakes?” Brad asked as he carried a stack of hot pancakes in his hands toward me.
“Um, I have some, but thanks,” I said as I sat up and pointed to the tray Cassidy had brought into my room.
“You’re not supposed to eat in your room.”