I remember when the Y2K craze hit the world. Everybody thought the world would end in year 2000. My family and I watched the news as people jumped off buildings, others drank poison and I vaguely remember others even lighting themselves on fire. The one thing that I remember clearly through all this was when my mom told us, “The world ends for you when you die.” This really drove home the old adage, “Live everyday like it is your last.”
On Sunday, I came home from a group meeting with my team mates in school feeling really stupid and incompetent. Since I don’t talk much, my teammates tend to ignore me when I do. One of the girls is a real bully who got worked up one day disputing my ideas, only for us to present our project and have the class ask all the questions I had told my group we need to address.
When I got home, I decided that I pay full tuition at the school and so I had every right to be heard and to ask questions. I also decided even if my teammates ignore me, I was not going to go down without a fight. I could no longer afford not to be assertive. I also decided to extend this new found confidence to other areas of my life. I excitedly pulled out my journal and declared war on a mediocre life, and verbalized my quest for an all around excellence.
But when it got time for me to go to bed, I had a full blown panic/anxiety attack, my very first one. I always wondered how people can confess to having panics and anxieties attacks. Now I know how real they can be. It was the strangest of feelings, my mind was racing a mile a minute, somehow, even though I was not in physical pain, the emotional pain felt all so real, and much more painful than the physical kind. I wished for someone to talk to, someone to hold me soo tight and squeeze air out of my lungs. I longed for sleep, release. I prayed out loud because I thought I was a goner. I did eventually drift to sleep.
Analyzing the attack the next day, I realized that was my old self trying to resist the new and improved me. The fact that I had declared war on timidity and low self esteem didn’t fly well with…me! I also realized that this change was not going to take place overnight. As usual, whenever I make a declaration to the universe, I get tested.
The main factor that led to this attack was fear, fear of the unknown, and fear that I was finally going to be the me I’ve known I can be all along. That I had given myself permission to behave badly....to say “fuck it!” and still wake up living and breathing the next day.
And so my mother’s words, “The world ends for you when you die” put the whole matter into perspective. I didn’t have anything to lose by finally standing up for myself. In fact, if I am to be all I can in all areas of my life, then I can say I have lived an examined life, which is the only life worth living. For some strange reasons, since the anxiety attack and finally realizing that I do not have to apologize for living, I have an inner peace that had eluded me before.
Have you ever felt like the world has ended for you? How did you live through it and what did the experience teach you about yourself and life in general?
