Last week I walked around the city at night. Maybe you'd call it deep night, I'm not sure. Whatever you'd call 2 am. I walked around the city all the time. The day leading up to that night I walked for probably a total of 6 hours intermittently. Sometimes with friends, sometimes on the phone with my family, sometimes alone. But walking around the city I've come to learn, you're never really alone. There are people everywhere, hundreds of them, heading in every possible direction. I think that's why I do it so much.
I hate being alone. I have a terrible fear of being alone. Not just in a friends sense or a romantic sense, though I guess I am a tad bit concerned no one will ever love me and I will end up truly alone in that way. But the kind of alone I'm most afraid of is the kind that forces you to go inside your own mind and start analyzing things. Your internal dialogue suddenly starts to list and convince you of every possible bad outcome that could happen to you in the next 24 hours, or 7 days, or whatever. When I'm alone, I’m most reminded of all the reasons I’m alone and I’m pretty talented at convincing myself that I’m the cause of all of them. I'm left with no choice—or so it feels—but to start fighting with myself, angry at me for being so weak or not having the ability to keep people around. Fighting long enough will sometimes lead to a panic attack.
It's very inconvenient to have a panic attack walking around the city at night. You can't put your sunglasses on like during the day to cover it up. There are less people in general so you stick out more to those who still are out and about. The whole comforting aspect of never being alone when you walk in the city vanishes at night and that was something I was not prepared for. One of the weirdest things is that the only people who ask if you're okay are the homeless sitting on the curbs. And then you begin to question the decency of all the people who don't say anything. But that doesn't last long, you know it's not their fault. They're the normal ones, you're the one walking around the city at night, crying, with no purpose.
Left with very few options, I settled that fine night for a while on a bench. Panic attacks in public are all about strategy. You can't let other people see you because you know, and remind yourself constantly, that everything your next 30 minutes or so will consist of is just plain embarrassing. You time when you’ll take your biggest breaths so that no one is passing by when you do. You bend over to tie your shoe when the tears start to come harder. Repeat cycle a handful of times and you’ve probably exhausted yourself to the point where you can finally crawl into bed and go to sleep.
Even long after it's over, the embarrassment persists. You now have to deal with everyone you reached out to in the midst of your attack, hoping they'd be able to help in some way, and apologize for bothering them, regardless of whether or not you were actually bothering them.
Waking up the morning after my city walk felt like a bad hangover. I had known full-well what had happened and I wasn't proud in the slightest, but it happened. I got dressed and went on my way that day, knowing that I was probably safe from being alone, considering I was spending the day with friends. And since every story has a moral and some of you may be unsure what mine was, it is with much condolence that I inform you the only thing I learned that night is that the city at nighttime is a very lonely place and potentially conducive to panic attacks. That is all.
