By Amanda Knox

Towards the end of high school, something rare and unexpected happened. A guy—a handsome, popular, football-playing math-genius who was way out of my league—asked me out on a date. It was a fluke. Had he gone to my high school, he would have known how boy-awkward and nerdy and weird I was. But he didn’t, so here we were, sitting across from each other at a Mexican restaurant in the Alaska Junction. It was going alright, I thought. We were talking! Although, after a bit, I did notice that I was doing pretty much all of the talking. Crap, was I babbling? He looked distracted, turned inward even. “Everything alright?” I asked, and then immediately thought, “Stupid question! You shouldn’t have to ask that question!” He didn’t say anything. He vomited his whole enchilada back onto his plate.

On the date that followed, I learned that he suffered from an anxiety disorder. He threw up whenever he was faced with something important—football games, tests, dates. A panic attack had seized him in the middle of our first date, and just when he thought he had choked it down, it violently came back up. I felt for him, though I didn’t understand. I knew the feeling of insecurity and awkwardness, but I had never before been seized by my emotions to the point of losing physical control. I empathized with his post-vomit embarrassment, but I didn’t really get how he came to point of vomiting in the first place.

Over a decade later, and after prolonged exposure to extraordinary stress, I get it. Occasionally, and seemingly without provocation, my thoughts fail to coalesce. My insecurities swell out of a proportion. My negative emotions, like debris settled at the bottom of a bucket of water, are suddenly stirred up. A panic attack seizes me—it’s like be squeezed and hardened—and being distracted by it only exacerbates it. Depression sets in. I feel like there’s no use and I’m not worthy of any good thing in my life. Even though I know the attack will eventually pass, and I know I’m not entirely helpless, because there are little things I can do that will encourage relief (take a walk, receive a hug, take deep breaths), as long as the attack persists, I feel stuck, and struck down.

Great. One more dysfunctional person. The end.

Except, there’s something else. When I’m having an anxiety attack, I feel like I’m in one of those nightmares where you’re watching yourself from above. I can’t escape from the nightmare, but I am an emotional step removed, and that shift in perspective opens doors to previously impossible opportunities. It allows me to find humor. I can laugh at the fact that, right in the middle of an anxiety attack, my friend invites me to prison-themed social game where a group of me and my friends have to solve puzzles in order to escape from a cell. Who’s to say? Maybe one day I’ll be capable of taking part in something like that without collapsing into the fetal position in the nearest corner and sobbing. Until then, I can laugh at how ridiculously out of reach something so innocent can be.

I’m in ever in awe of how complex the human mind is, how we can be so capable and incapable at the same time. I’m in awe of how functional it seems to be able to sit down and examine my own dysfunction, even when that dysfunction is so obtrusive that I can’t possibly examine anything else.