He was a study in contrasts.
Aged and wizened, with a lifetime of experience etched into the lines on his face.
Yet the wisdom did not grant him serenity and peace, but instead clouded his mind with a perpetual stream of worry.
His thinning grey hair and pale skin gave him an almost translucent quality, like a ghost that had lingered too long in the world of the living. His light blue eyes were the only things that seemed to shine with any real vitality.
But it was his fingers that caught my attention the most. Arthritic and bent, they twisted in the wrong direction at the joints.
It was no wonder he could no longer do pottery, a hobby he had once loved. The clay would slip through his grasp like sand, his fingers no longer able to hold onto it with any kind of strength.
His official diagnosis was anxiety, and it was clear to see why. His mind was a whirlwind of thoughts, each one racing through his head at a million miles an hour.
Human memory, I recall from the Cognitive Psychology lectures, is stored through association. The brain looks for connections or associations between different pieces of information, which holds it together to form a network of memory.
A brain on anxiety is constantly raking up thoughts and memories at hyperspeed. Darting from one corner of the memory storage to the next, looking for one association after another.
That unending buzz of thoughts was what lead him to lose sleep for the past 13 days. His desperation led him to the hospital, where he has been hospitalized and medicated in attempts to calm his mind.
“What triggered your anxiety?” I asked.
“My physical condition,” he replied. “I haven’t been able to go to the toilet since Christmas. But the doctors couldn’t find anything wrong with me…”
Frustrated and desperate, he had turned to holistic healing, trying acupuncture for the first time. It had cost him a fortune, but it had given him relief, and he trusted the acupuncturist to make him feel safe.
Alas, that feeling of safety was only a short visitor.
“My mind feels fried right now.”
“Is there anything that can make you feel better?”, I asked empathetically.
“All I want to do is go to an island and sit there alone for six months. Just so nobody can bother me.”
I could see a glimmer of panic in his eyes as he spoke. I asked him whether he felt an onset of a panic attack. He chuckled, and reassured me that a panic attack is a thousand times worse.
“A panic attack feels like the ceiling has just collapsed on me.” He explained.
“What happened the last time you had a panic attack?” I asked.
“I had to fight for every breath.. It took every ounce of me just to take the next one.
For the two hours we spoke, his thoughts circled endlessly around his own worries and fears.
His mind was not a safe place, and I could only imagine the torment he must have been going through every day.
But there was one thing that made him feel safe, one thing that had been a constant throughout his life: his wife.
They had been married for 45 years, and he had slept next to her every night.
“She is my rock. Without her, I would have been dead.”
Note: This story is a fictionalised account inspired by my encounters with mental health lived experiences.
This article was originally published on Medium.
