I hadn’t had one in ages, but suddenly there I was on an airplane, trapped in a small space thousands of feet in the air, when it occurred to me that I should probably completely freak out over the situation. It was immediately one of the most overwhelming panic attacks I’d ever experienced — I couldn’t breathe, I saw flashes of light, my heart raced and I felt like I was about to blow into a million pieces if I didn’t escape right now — but also one of the most brief, because I remembered two simple things.

1.) Call it anything but a panic attack.

2.) Focus on the worst thing that could happen, as opposed to the worst way that thing would make you feel.

On calling it a panic attack. Two words I can’t stand under the circumstances — panic is an alarming choice on its own, but attack? Bears attack, rabid bitey rodents attack, hearts attack. There’s nothing to be done and you are about to get fucked up, so just emulate a rock and try not to cry, dude. But this, this is just you, your mind, making silly connections that have little to do with reality and statistics. Settle down.

I prefer to call it “wigging out”, because I think that expression is perfectly goofy, even insulting to the feelings I’m experiencing. Don’t glorify your bullshit! Condescend to it!

Granted, this is all personal, and you may find some other expression more hilarious/effective. Get into a tizzy? Feel perturbed? Throw yourself into a swivet? Spellcheck doesn’t even know what the hell you mean!

So, while I used to think “shit, I’m about to have a panic attack” and want to curl into a fetal position (This is a medical condition! Pity me, why aren’t I on medication? Attack attack attack!), now I think “well Christ, I’m about to wig out” . . . and then I snort a little. Shit, I’m going to feel hella perturbed if I don’t

Reassess the root of this. You can tell yourself it’s all in your head, silly connections and all that, but if you stop there you’re bound to get frustrated. Yes this is my own doing! God! Why do I have to suck?

I had a book once called DON’T PANIC. (Literally, in caps like that.) I say “once” because I got rid of that book, due to the fact that it ruined my life for a few months. Its whole theory was that you should take your anxiety to its limit, let yourself feel as awful as possible, and this would help you realize that your anxiety wasn’t that bad. This book was clearly written by a doctor who’d had no patients. What’s the worst you could feel?

You’re probably already aware that the answer is “pretty freaking awful.” And you could go there if you wanted, “take it deeper,” and hyperventilate on the plane if you think that would help. You could grip the arm rests and pray for a time warp that magically delivers you three hours into the future, for the entire flight, if you wanted. You could faint or throw up while dudebro slumbers next to you. You could be miserable and sweating the entire time, eyes bulging. But, really, why would anyone choose that?

On the other hand — and using one verb only — what’s the worst thing that could basically happen?

Because I find the answer is nearly always “well, I would die.”

Maybe I’m a sicko for being comforted by this. But compared to the intensity of the adrenaline running through your system, death really seems kind of stupid. Is that all? Just my death? (Okay, and maybe fifty others — but let’s be honest, the cause of a panic attack is rarely due to a specific concern for someone else.) Because it feels like the world is literally going to explode and it’s my job to stop it.

Oh god oh god oh god, what if the plane just began dipping to the ground, and we were plummeting to the earth and I would clamber over passengers and the feeling of falling and the feeling of force and the feeling of desperate hopelessness it would all be so terrifying and —

Oh, wait. What’s the end result? What’s the point of this fight or flight response, rushing through your body at incredible rates?

Just . . . death. Which is going to happen some day, anyway. Quit wigging out, you’re fine.

I’ve told this story before, but figured it warranted retelling, especially considering The Fray‘s current call for submissions. Sex n’ death! Yeaaah!

* * *

I was seventeen years old, and we had just gone to the circus. Not some two-bit, tired-elephant circus either, but A Circus, hailing all the way from France with its haunting melodies and impossible contortionists. A single ticket had been two days’ pay at the gift shop where I’d waited away the majority of my summer. I had been half-pining for him from behind those glass counter tops in Minneapolis for two months while he’d spent the summer at Jewish camp — where, as he would later confess, he had dated someone else. Someone more Jewish, which I suppose could have incited jealousy in my shiksa heart. But at the age of seventeen I was much more casual about these things.

“So, are you still with her?” I asked simply. “Nope,” he said.

After all of the acrobats had finished twirling in the air and erupting fireballs from their painted lips, Noah* drove me deep into suburbia, Minnesota, where I’d planned on sleeping over at my friend Melissa’s place — past the glowing Mall of America and still further along that dark, stretching highway. When he pulled into the empty parking lot and I reached into the back seat of his parents’ car to grab my purse, he suddenly kissed me: a lovely, long soft kiss. I nearly fell onto the asphalt as I closed the door.

“Melissa,” I would later announce, standing on the soft, snowy carpet of her room. “Noah and I . . . just . . . kissed.”

“Is he your boyfriend now?” she would squeal.

“I think he’s my boyfriend now.”

She would clap and jump, and I would clap and jump, swoon on her bed, and smother myself with pillows, and lose myself in daydreams, and relive that kiss, over and over and over. It was in fact a very nice kiss, even by current standards.

Suddenly I sat straight up. “Oh my God,” I said. “Melissa, I have a boyfriend, and I don’t even know what a penis looks like.”

She screamed.

“I mean, I’ve seen drawings — like, diagrams or whatever, with the vas deferens and all that. But what will I do when . . . when . . . I don’t know . . . ”

“When you give him a handjob or something?”

“Aaagh!” I cried. “And I don’t even know what color they are!”

Melissa instructed me to calm the freak down.

“We have the internet here,” she said. “We can just do a search for . . . penis.”

Or, How I Learned To Stop Resisting Conformity And Love Life
It was for the standard little-girl reasons — prairie life, petticoats, ponies — that my sister and I loved watching Doctor Quinn, Medicine Woman. But perhaps equal blame should be assigned to Laura Ingalls Wilder and her irresistible boxed set of books. She’s the one who had a theme song first. She’s the one with the show broadcast during summer afternoons, when we were all otherwise restless with mosquito bites and squinty-eyed with sunshine. Losing interest in games outside, a land of dog poop and concrete and melting popsicles, we would inevitably settle into cool basement rooms and flip on the television.

It spread slowly across the continent like hostile African bees. Little girls started saying “maw” and “paw” in offensively-imitated twangs. We layered our parents’ paint clothes to look like farm women from the nineteenth century. We hauled out plastic buckets and stirred stone stews, keeping an eye out for swarms of locusts. Laura Ingalls Wilder gave Ye Olde Rural Life its cult-following amongst the young ladies, and I blame her for my eager acceptance of Doctor Quinn, Medicine Woman — and, thus, my discovery of sexy men.