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Panic Attacks, Prague, and Packing Light
Remembering how to be a person abroad
How does one cross the ocean with horrific flying anxiety? Slowly, painfully, medicated, and in premium economy. That’s how. …and ideally with some Harry Potter movies.
I used to be fearless. Like, to a fault. I look back on some choices I made in my twenties and think, “Wow, yeah, that could have ended pretty badly.”
Choices like getting in cars with strangers, and a few hard drugs. Another was letting other strangers spend the night in my apartment (I was a host on Couchsurfing). Going to bars alone. It just did not occur to me to be afraid.
I laughed at people who had the same anxieties I do now. I would shake my head and think, “Wow, how sad, that’s no way to live your life.”
And it’s not. But a few years back, I developed some very annoying irrational fears. Questions like, “Oh, what if I go blind tomorrow? Is this headache a brain tumor? What if a bowling ball falls from the sky like in a cartoon and that’s how I go?”
To be fair, if that is how I go, I think that was just fate and I have to accept it. Every freak accident that could possibly happen will probably happen to me. I’m convinced of that. And it’s really tiring. Can’t my brain just take a few days off?
