On Wednesday I'm going to the Philippines. Manila and Cebu to be specific. It's a trip set up through the travel magazine that I work for. I'm going for one week and I'm expected to return home and write an article about it.

My life seems a little too crazy right now to be jetting off to the Philippines on Wednesday but I'm actually thrilled about it. More than anything I'm looking forward to being in a place, half-way around the world, that I've never even been able to imagine being in. I'm looking forward to being away from everyone in the world that I know. I'm looking forward to being away from my computer and my dear friends and my beloved cat. I'm looking forward to being a 25 year old woman completely alone in the world.

The one thing that's been really surprising about my handling of my father's death is that I haven't had any anxiety attacks. I was a mess for years after my mother died, struck with panic attacks on a regular basis. They actually started before she died. When I first found out that I was going to the Philippines, months ago, and when I realized that my father was going to die, around the same time, I was sure that the Philippines would be a prime place for my attacks to come back but I don't feel like they will at all now.

The first time I ever had one was when I was eighteen. I was on a road trip with my highschool boyfriend and all of a sudden my heart skipped a beat...or it double-beat - I'm never sure what it feels more like. I completely panicked and got this fierce rush of adrenaline, absolutely positive that I was on the verge of a heart attack. I got light-headed and started hyper-ventilating. We ended up in an emergency room in Rhode Island and I got hooked up to a bunch of machines that monitored my heart beat. The doctor asked me a lot of stupid questions concerning drugs, none of which I did at the time.

A couple of years later when I finally realized that all this time I'd been having your average, garden variety panic attack, I was really angry with that doctor. He asked me so many questions about my body but nothing about who I was. If he had just inquired as to whether or not I had anything stressful going on in my life the whole thing could have been cleared up a lot faster. Why yes, Doc, I am a bit stressed. My mother is dying of cancer. My father is almost eighty. I'm 18 and about to move 1500 miles away to go to a school where I know no one. Sometimes I can't sleep at night because I feel terrible that I'm moving so far away in the midst of my mother's illness. But he never asked.

A year after she died and when I was living in Vermont the attacks came on heavy. I would stay up until four almost every night, frozen in a sitting position on my bed, sure that any minute I was going to have an aneurism. I got stuck on two things: heart attacks and aneurisms. Sudden death, I guess. I would sit still for over an hour, sure that if I moved at all I would trigger that fatal blood clot to break loose and end my life. It was terrible.

Even after I moved to New York, they continued. I remember waiting tables during the busy lunch rush and feeling like any minute, even in the middle of taking this nice lady's order, I was just going to keel over on her table, blood trickling from my ears. But it never happened. Eventually I learned how to control the attacks and to calm myself down even as they were just coming on. And the more I read about anxiety and post-traumatic stress syndrome, the more I understand about the how's and why's, the better I felt about it all.

But it's still strange to me that I haven't had hardly the inkling of an attack in these last couple of months. I feel like it either means that I'm better and I've grown out of that phase or that I'm not facing up to the reality of the situation here, that I haven't even begun to mourn my father.

Either way, I think it's going to be really helpful to take this trip on Wednesday. I think that it will be healing and thrilling and that it will give me a lot of perspective on myself and on the world.
9:13:15 PM     comment []