Panic

On a recent trip, I met up with someone from my college days. It was wonderful just spending some time with someone I had spent so much time with back then. I loved my college experience. However, it was an emotional meeting for me and I was fairly drained by the end of the day.

As I’ve mentioned here before, I have felt pretty pent up in my expression of my feelings and I’ve had to overcome a lot of internal barriers to let me get honest enough with myself to let them go, to feel and to not push down every positive or negative thought. I want to know what I feel. I want to experience it, even if it isn’t all that comfortable for me.

As I was packing up, planning on going up through the mountains, I felt panic. It was a desperate pounding on my mind that everything is going wrong; everything is falling apart. I knew that feeling. I flashed back to when it hit before, 29 years ago. I was getting ready for the MTC (Missionary Training Center) and starting my mission. I knew, knew for months, that things were falling apart in my mind. It just wasn’t right. Nothing about this was right. Why am I leaving everything and everyone that ever brought me joy and love? I was going to a place that I didn’t want to go, doing something that I wasn’t sure I would ever be good at. Everything would be different when I got back. My friends would have all moved on, graduated and raising their families. A depression fell upon me then that turned me into someone I hated and resented. My mission was very traumatic for me emotionally.

And here was this feeling again, stronger than I had felt since. I just sat there barely vocalizing that “I don’t want to go. I don’t want to go.”

Like so many years before, I stood up, got my bags together and pushed through it. I can’t call it a victory; it is more of a failing that I feel so desperately out of touch at times. People like and love me. I have no doubt that some would give everything if I needed help and if I just asked, as I would for them.

As I went through the mountains, I did feel better, but I did feel alone. Usually, I use this time to purge the demons from me, get myself centered and in the solitude, reconnect with myself. Now, I just felt alone. I wasn’t sure if the demons had left me this time or if the full on assault happened in the motel room. Perhaps they had finally left me alone.

Alone is a strange term. We are rarely alone. I was “alone” in the mountains, but while looking at the river that coursed through and down from the pass, a car or truck went by every 10 seconds or so. But I was alone. I really felt alone. I looked off to the east and thought “The only people that care about me are 2000 miles away, that way.” Of course that wasn’t true, but I was absent of the feelings I have on my trips. It was if I had no direction in where to turn and where to go. It was an odd feeling to have. I hoped I wasn’t slipping into another depression because that last one cost me dearly.

I went and saw the things I wanted to see. It wasn’t quite what I expected. Perhaps it was that I was finding no joy in it right then. The experience of the morning was still shaking me.

I’m not sure of all the paths and directions that my life will take. I guess that is part of the deal. Some things I have felt sure of in the past are now folly to me. The plans I had made for my life seem inadequate to the person I now am. I am torn between the past present and future, not seeing clearly which way to go, which way to be. On that day, I kept looking at the map, hoping it would take me to something that would seize me, show me the direction for a little joy, a little wonder. It was one of the strangest days of my life, and one I really don’t want to experience again.

I’m not posting this in any way to depress or give the impression that I’m having problems. I write things down now and publicly acknowledge that I feel them. That is therapeutic in itself for me now. It was something that I picked up on a trip to Utah several years back. I didn’t make that public, but I did share them with relevant people. More often than not, people see me in a different way than I see myself. They see me as someone still and steady and I see myself as a storm of feelings and emotions and desires that I constantly have to bank and cool. Perhaps with what I write, you might get a better impression of who I really am, and that is what I want to express.