Originally published in ELLE

When I was 21 I thought I was fearless. I wasn’t, of course - say the word ‘spider’ to me and I’d run a mile. But, during my teens I’d done slightly odd things  like hitchhiking to Glastonbury Festival, and running away to the USA for a summer. Now I was fresh out of university, flat-sharing with friends, and having the time of my life. Sure, I wasn’t completely confident of what I wanted to do work-wise and my income depended on bar work, but who wouldn’t be happy boasting a guitarist boyfriend, a mane of waist-length, pillarbox-red hair, and their very own not-that-terrible-actually band? Not me. Life was good.

Until, very suddenly and completely without warning, it wasn’t. 

One morning, I was aimlessly browsing in Boots when the ground tilted sharply beneath my feet. My palms flooded with sweat and I was struck by the kind of wooziness you may have felt if, and I don’t mean to be presumptuous here, you’ve ever drunk too much cheap cider and urgently needed to be sick in a hedge.

With my stomach threatening to explosively empty itself, I scanned the shop for the closest exit. But by that point, the world was see-sawing so violently that I crashed headfirst into the mother & baby aisle and blacked out. Other shoppers looked on in horror as, when I came to, I clambered out from under a large pile of breast pumps and legged it.

I’d never experienced anything like it before, so naturally, I assumed I had somehow contracted Ebola, or that the zombie apocalypse had hit. But, after a restorative cup of tea, I felt perfectly normal again. And as I was neither bleeding from my eyeballs nor craving human flesh, I decided it was just one of Those Things.

However, the next day I went funny again in the local newsagent.

My vision blurred and warped, I couldn’t catch my breath, and everyone around me looked as though they were melting. I ran from the shop in tears, afraid I’d faint again.

After that, I felt ill whenever I tried to get on a bus, go into a shop, or enter any other enclosed public space. I tried to get a train to see friends but was flooded with a tremendous wall of nausea that only dissipated when I stumbled out onto a platform, miles from my destination, and walked home. Days later, I was fired from my bar job for spending my shift in the toilet because, suddenly, being behind the bar immobilised me with dread. And it wasn’t even a Wetherspoon.

I didn’t know what was happening, who to tell or what to do with all the voicemails from friends and bandmates wanting to know where the hell I was. In the end, I turned off my phone and stayed in my room for days on end, at which point all said friends and bandmates called my mother. Three weeks after my first ‘episode’, she took me to the doctor, who diagnosed me with panic disorder and agoraphobia.

“Your ‘episodes’ are panic attacks,” he told me. Panic attacks? Not me! Who was this quack? He gently explained that they happen when the body’s fight or flight response is activated with no obvious trigger. That’s when the dizziness and nausea arrive, unbidden. “But I don’t panic,” I rolled my eyes. “I just suddenly feel sick and awful, and then I faint.” I then gave the doctor my most serious look-I’m-a-graduate stare. “I really think you should test for Ebola.” But he was insistent, signing me off work and making me promise to rest.

I agreed because, frankly, after living on the edge of my nerves for the best part of my month, a rest sounded heavenly. While I rested, I reluctantly ploughed through the doctor’s recommended reading list of self-help titles like Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway, and I’m OK, You’re OK. I sighed through the initial readings, rolling my eyes every time I read the words “inner” or “heal”, but then I started to recognise the descriptions of paralysing, almost physical fear, and felt a spark of hope at the prospect of beating it.

I moved back in with my mother and stepfather. I was curiously unemotional about leaving my old life behind - I’d expected to miss hanging out with my friends and playing music, but all I felt was a sort of blankness. My first few days at home were quiet; my mother made me endless cups of coffee but otherwise I was left alone to read, take long baths, and nap. I hadn’t felt this content for months.

Once I was settled, I began aversion therapy - combatting my fears by going to places that triggered panic attacks, and staying there until the panic faded. I started small, with bus stops - then worked my way up on a daily basis. But I was going nowhere fast, quite literally. Travelling three bus stops without going funny took me six weeks. Eventually, I began conquering larger places like railway stations and cinemas. It was a grueling process – I had severe panic attacks every day and often fainted (thank you, blue-rinsed old ladies at the bus stops of Berkshire, for propping me up when I keeled over). It was two years before I was declared fit for work, and in total four whole years went past before I could really claim to live unmolested by panic and anxiety. I emerged from the experience not too changed, but slightly less afraid of the outside world, and slightly more in tune with myself.

All the while, as I was grappling with my own issues, anxiety was quietly becoming the most common mental disorder in Britain. Between 2007 and 2011, NHS hospital appointments for panic and anxiety quadrupled, and a 2012 report found that anxiety affects one in three female graduates in their twenties. Symptoms range from nightmares and loss of appetite to being too crippled by fear to commute to work. Some experts blame the recession. I suspect that landing with a bump in a dwindling job market and immediately being forced to conjure up a life plan involving having a baby before you’ve even met a partner, and a mortgage before you’ve paid off half your student loan - all while battling extreme Instagram-inspired FOMO - can’t help much.

I put a cursory call out on Twitter and it prompted an overwhelming response from a sliding scale of female anxiety sufferers. Feeling overwhelmed triggers Siobhan’s panic: “The dog falling ill on top of family and financial problems set off a major attack.” Amy was overcome with anxiety when she first moved to London: “At my worst, I couldn’t even get in the shower. I was so scared of anything that wasn’t exactly what I was doing at that moment.”

Exams were also a common cause - I heard from a student called Jessica who becomes extremely anxious before every single one and Andie, who goes into panic mode whenever she thinks she’s running out of time. Personally, I think this is a fairly rational response. Possibly less rational is Grania’s trigger, driving on the motorway, or that of Abbi, a novelist, who becomes anxious when she’s travelling but not in control. “I’m a decent driver but a terrible passenger,” she told me. “My heart races, I get short of breath and strange sinking feelings in my gut.”

When I was ill and in recovery, I was reluctant to talk about my experiences for fear of people judging me. I didn’t want to be a weird-haired singer with a theatre degree who faints in Sainsbury’s. In stark contrast, these anxiety sufferers were completely open about their issues - sharing anecdotes and trading coping strategies which varied from podcasts to Pilates to repeatedly counting your own fingers.

Practically everyone recommends cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) to reroute the subconscious thought processes that perpetuate panic – something I wish I’d had when I first fell ill. Before I was diagnosed, and for a long time during recovery, I wasn’t even aware I was anxious. I was so used to subconsciously pushing worries - and even my own ambitions - to the back of my mind, that when they seeped deep into my psyche and started causing panic, I had no idea what was happening.

In the four years following my diagnosis, my life changed dramatically. I scraped by on incapacity benefit and lost two stone thanks to the constant ball of anxiety in the pit of my gut. I quit my band, my fairweather friendships fell away, and my guitarist boyfriend swapped me for someone as outgoing as I used to be (although, I was pleased to note, with less amazing hair).

But I also gained a lot. I started writing, got a rescue dog, and took up running through the local forest every morning (being outside I liked - it was enclosed spaces that triggered attacks). My favourite new hobby was learning complicated piano pieces. Other anxiety sufferers I know swore by mindfulness or meditation to calm and retrain the mind but I’m not terribly good with ‘sitting and being’ - I can’t help but start making lottery-win wishlists or wondering what that weird smell might be. Instead, I found losing myself in the intricacies of a piece of music incredibly soothing.

Through psychotherapy, I realised that, before the panic attacks hit, I’d been suppressing upset over my uncertain future by focusing on an unfulfilling relationship, shallow friendships and a social life that distracted, rather than nourished, me. Lying to myself was the root of my panic and, at least in my case, this unaddressed anxiety went into room-spinning, palm-sweating overdrive.

Now, several years have passed since my recovery. I’m a fully integrated, Oyster card-wielding, latte-swilling Londoner. I still have an oversensitive stress trigger - if I argue with my boyfriend, or there’s tension at work, I’m always tempted to clamber into my onesie and lose myself in Netflix forever. But I’m functional - I hop on and off the Tube on a daily basis, chair meetings, and even occasionally speak in public. I surround myself with good people and interesting things. I regularly do something that takes me out of my comfort zone - like flail around in a dance class, or make everyone else panic with my pronounced dyspraxia in an archery lesson. Somehow this works, and I haven’t had a serious panic attack in at least five years.

I still experience anxiety, and probably always will. The difference is, these days when it happens I see it as a signal for change, rather than something to fear.