Imagine that feeling of dread that crawls over your body when you find yourself in a scary situation. Imagine the hairs on your arm raise, your pupils dilating, your heart beating much quicker and your muscles tensing automatically in preparation for what comes next. Now imagine feeling all those things when there is no danger present, when just a minute before you were relaxing and reading a book. The first time I felt this I was lying in bed, watching some random music channel. To explain why I felt like this, I have to go back a lot further in my life.

When I was around 5 or 6, I lived in a poor part of N.Ireland in a little neighbourhood that was affectionately known as ‘Beirut’. I always thought it was kind of ironic that people had chosen to name this place after a civil war torn city in Lebanon, because we had plenty of places to choose from in N.I considering we were still embroiled in a civil war in the early 90s. In the street we lived on, it just so happened that my family had been singled out as different but for reasons that were never really clear to me. My parents and siblings and I have a weird sort of silent agreement to never really discuss that stage of our lives so unfortunately I’ve never known the answer. Being Northern Ireland, I could reasonably assume it had something do with sectarianism; perhaps my Catholic mother marrying my Protestant father rubbed people the wrong way. Perhaps it was just because we were raised as Catholics.

But for over a year our house was constantly attacked. For me, the memories are mostly a blur of noise and fear and screams and nearly all of it was at night. I can remember a few specific incidents, like when someone smashed our front door in with their foot whilst my mother stood grasping a knife and I stood screaming on the stairs. Or how my older sister was watching tv in the living room when a brick crashed through the window and she had to go to the hospital to make sure no glass damaged her eyes.

Eventually we moved away and managed to find a nice home and some peace. For years, I never thought it affected me much. I was still a normal kid, I didn’t dwell on it much although I could never sleep properly. I’d sleep for 4 or 5 hours a night and only fall asleep when I was truly exhausted; a habit that I still haven’t managed to shake off. It wasn’t until I was 16 that I think the old memories came back to haunt me. This is just my own theory but there may be other possible reasons I haven’t been able to identify.

So as I described, I’m lying in bed, it’s a normal night like any other, and all of a sudden I think I’m in danger. Adrenaline starts to flood my body and I jump up quickly out of bed, making things worse as the sudden change in blood pressure makes me feel dizzy and heightens my fear. At this stage, my heart is beating as fast as if I’d been sprinting and all I can think is that I’m going to die. I think the most terrifying thing is that there is no way out. There is no danger to get rid of, so you become trapped in your own body and you feel yourself standing on this imaginary line between life and death and you’re slowly being tipped over that line. If you didn’t know by now, I was having a panic attack. At the time, I’d never had one before so I had no idea either, and my poor parents couldn’t talk me out of this state so they drove me 20 miles to a hospital at 3am, where a doctor confirmed it.

For over a year, I dealt with recurring attacks and kind of stopped living. My mind became fixated on this and I would walk around with this bubbling undercurrent of anxiety about having another attack. I’d sit with my friends and have to leave the room because I could feel the dread starting to crawl over my body again. That one single panic attack pretty much changed my whole psyche, I hadn’t really considered the nothingness of death before and how terrifying it is but those attacks made me believe every time that I was about to find out.

Now I consider life to be, for the most part, pointless. In the sense of there being no God wanting you to act a certain way, there is no predestined path for you in life, there is no correct way to do things. Embrace the chaos and the randomness of it all, roll the dice and see where you land.