It has been three months now since a new type of hell started in my life.
I always believed that I was resilient. There were so many times that I felt hopeless, many bad periods of time that I thought would never end. But they did, and I was ok, and most of the times that something went wrong, I would remind myself that I've been through worse, and that this will pass too. It's a healthy approach in my opinion. You can either see your life as a string of negative situations with intermissions of positive ones, or the other way around. It's a matter of conscious choice.
However, sometimes, the mind takes control in an unexpected way, as I have come to know... When you don't know what is happening, what you are experiencing, it is hard to keep it control.
For the last three months I've struggled with panic attacks, with an almost permanent state of anxiety, with the fear of the next panic attack and how I might handle it. I has been hell and, although I've been working on retaking control, I still feel somewhat hopeless when it happens.
Now, I have days in which I feel completely fine and I try not to think about the possibility of the symptoms returning. But they do, from time to time, and I try to keep them to a low intensity. It doesn't always work, but accepting the fact that I cannot just stop them once and know that they will never return has helped a lot.
Once you realize that something is not entirely in your hands, once you let go and accept that the only solution is to stop worrying and just learn to cope with the situation when it happens, you have the power to heal. Well, you have the power, but you still have to work for it :)
I do hope nobody has to go through this. But if you do and are reading this, I hope that knowing that others are going through it and knowing ways to manage it will help you through your healing process. And if a close one is having these problems, please be there for them, even if it is hard to understand their situation.
Until next time, have a peaceful day :)
Many thanks to a wonderful person that provided the image I use for this section: ElisaRiva