Hi! Welcome to my first ever blog –
No, not really. I’ve blogged before. I even have a whole other website. But I am calling this my first because it’s the first time I’m blogging as myself – as Vicki Glass. I have an author persona; I write Urban Fantasy under a pen name. I took a break from that, I gave myself permission to take a break. And then I found a new purpose to my life, I’m being called to share how I made it to the other side of severe anxiety and depression. I saved myself when I ‘found’ myself – hidden beneath a façade that I thought I needed to adopt to live a fulfilled life. Little did I know that façade was what was destroying me.
This is part one of My Story. 
Truth is, I’ve always struggled with mild anxiety and a general, intense fear of social situations – As a child I was called shy, as an adult, introverted. But that is not the story I want to share. This one began after I had my daughter, this one threatened to take everything away from me.
The summer after my daughter was born, my husband and I left our newish baby with my parents so we could have some adult time at a Renaissance Faire. We go every year, it’s fun, we’re geeks. This was also the first time we were going somewhere without her. It was a short trip, roughly half an hour away and I was driving. It was almost all highway.
We weren’t more than fifteen minutes away from the venue, I had just pulled over into the left lane to pass a car when it happened. It was my very first panic attack.
Fun stuff.
It didn’t take me too long to figure out what was happening, maybe a few seconds, only those few second felt more like many long minutes. I knew it from descriptions I’d heard from other people. It was completely unreal and irrational. My heart was pounding, I was barely breathing, my ears were ringing, and I couldn’t move. Gripped by a wild and unrelenting sense of impending death. The sun was unusually bright, the colors too vivid around me. I began to slow the car down and by that, I mean, I basically just relaxed my foot off the pedal, I couldn’t turn my head. I felt as though I couldn’t see in front of me. I was seeing, but my brain wasn’t registering anything that was in front of my face. You know that scene in the Wizard of Oz where Dorothy asks the Scarecrow for directions to the Emerald City and at one point, he points in two different directions? THAT was what it felt like my eyes were doing.
To make matters worse, I thought my husband was yelling at me, it felt like he was yelling at me, I swear I could feel the car behind me yelling at me. It felt as though everything was angry with me. My husband seemed to recognize right away what was happening and he was trying to tell me to move back over to the right lane and then pull over. I did, eventually manage to turn my flashers on and guide the car back into the right lane and then pulled over to the shoulder safely. Short of breath as I was.
This was the moment I began to retreat from the world.
