Petersen - On edge: a memoir of anxiety

Fear ambushes me.

It is early on the morning of December 5, 1989. At least early for a college student, which is what I am. A sophomore at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, a bucolic campus of creaky A-frame houses, earnest politics, fraternity sweatshirts, and dollar pitchers of beer.

I am in the basement of a 1940s academic building staring at a wall covered in long sheets of dot-matrix printer paper detailing which classes have slots for the upcoming semester: Economics 101, Introduction to Buddhism, a Jane Austen seminar. Other sleepy students, jeans-clad and tousle-headed, are scribbling in notebooks nearby.

I feel fine. Groggy from a late night of studying, yes. Touched by a bit of that midwestern late-fall dread, anticipating another long winter of fierce winds and sleeping-bag-shaped coats. But Im fine.

And then, a second later, Im not.

A knot of fear erupts at the base of my spine and travels upward. My stomach flips, and I break out in a thin film of sweat. My heart rate shoots upI feel the erratic thump thump banging against my ears, my stomach, my eyes. My breathing turns shallow and fast. Fuzzy gray blotches appear before my eyes. The letters before me warp, words dip and buckle.

There is no warning, no prodrome. The onset is as sudden as a car crash. Something in my body or brain has gone dramatically and irrevocably wrong. My noisy internal monologueusually flitting from school to boys to a laundry list of insecuritiescoalesces around one certain refrain: Im dying. Im dying. Im dying.

I flee the building and somehow make it home, crawling into my bottom bunk in the room I share with two other girls. I hug my knees into my chest and huddle against the cinder-block wallmy breathing still shallow, my heart still racing, the hot terror still there. Remarkably, it seems, I am alive. Any relief that gives me, however, is short-lived: If Im not dying, I must be going crazy.

Crazy like my grandmother.

Like the woman who clutched knives and thought Catholics were trying to kill her. Like the woman who spent three years in a mental institution, had electroshock therapy, and tried to burn the house down with my nine-year-old father and his brother and sister in it. Like the woman who died in my grandfathers arms when I was two years old. She had suffered a heart attack but was too terrified to go with paramedics to the hospital.

Crazy like that.

I lie still. Perhaps if I cease all movement, even the tiniest shudder, become frozen, waxlike, I can quiet the torment. My insides feel noisy, in flux. Everything is revved upas if the blood in my veins were running faster and the synapses in my brain were firing, or misfiring, at warp speed. I can feel the loud, frantic presence of every organliver, intestines, spleen. The cells in my body are vibrating, it seems, knocking awkwardly against one another. If I move at all, I will shatter, scattering bits of blood and bone all across the salmon-hued sorority house. I am sure of that.