A Panic Attack on the Way to the Eiffel Tower

Just when I thought my meds were foolproof.

January 2005

My first trip to Europe. So exciting. All the feels. And pre-iPhone feels. My first “real job with benefits” allowed me a 3 week vacation and I decided to tag along with a friend to Europe. We went to a travel agency and though she had recently graduated college, she finagled student-priced tickets for us with her student ID.

It’s on this trip where I learn my medication won’t shield me from the most massive panic attack ever.

Having already been on anti-anxiety meds for 4 years, I didn’t emote a lot back then. Which was probably why I was on medication, to tamp down on all that emoting going on. Which also meant I couldn’t cry. Seriously no matter how much I tried working up a tear…nothing. A year later I saw Brokeback Mountain and cried for 3 days, nonstop. I couldn’t put a cork in it and it frightened me. To this day I still don’t know why that movie unleashed so much emotion. It took about 4 more years to make the decision that maybe I was ok enough to welcome crying, laughing and emoting back into my life.

Paris has always represented some weird feeling of freedom for me. It represents the beginning stage after I’ve managed to tear myself away from whatever hell I was living in and shake my life up. The energy of the city itself is overwhelming, intimidating and intoxicating on its own, and on that trip, was strong enough to poke through my cozy cocoon of “this is fine, everything is fine”.

We landed, got our jet lagged selves to the hostel, which was an old building with dormitory-style bunkbeds, dingy bathrooms and showers, a courtyard, and a bar with a coin-operated computer terminal to check emails (remember, pre-iPhone). To this day, I still troll google maps street view, trying to locate that hostel. I can’t remember the arrondissement, but I swear we stayed in the left bank, next to a small church. Which narrows it down to…the entire left bank.

Downstairs served breakfast the next morning, which consisted of a fresh, crusty baguette laid out on the bar, accompanied with jam preserves and butter. Just tear off a chunk of baguette as you please and schmear away. The coffee was milky, bitter and unremarkable. Everyone was sitting at the bar and surrounding tables, deeply engaged in conversation, seeming jovial, normal, like the most well-adjusted people on the face of the earth. The opposite of how I felt, which was OH MY GOD I DON’T KNOW WHAT TO DO.

Welcome to me traveling. I’ve improved quite a bit, but this was my entry point.

My friend had chatted up some other folks and it was decided the activity of the morning was making our way to the Eiffel Tower. And this is when I started to slowly shut down and realized oh shit, I’m going to fall into a dark abyss and I can’t stop it and no one can help me, not even medication. It was after we all piled onto the Metro that would whisk us to zee Eiffel Tower when I started to get nauseous. Which is how my panic attacks manifest. It’s a super fun and sexy combination of dry heaving, coughing, sweating and heavy breathing.

We get there, and I literally have to sit on a bench to collect myself. My friend, being firmly ensconced in the the normal and well-adjusted category and blissfully unaware of my impending abyss, didn’t understand what was going on with me, and wanted to know “what to tell” the other people we came with. As they were essentially strangers to me, I barked to her that I couldn’t give a crap.

The next day my friend decided to go to Sacre Coeur with some newly made friends, and I hung back at the hostel, taking it easy. It’s funny, once I was by myself, I was a lot better. Sure Sacre Coeur with new friends sounded more ideal, I guess. But according to who?

As I was that American who only spoke English, I found a French phrase book in the hostel and quickly committed a few sentences to memory. I’m also a very insecure foreign language learner, as in, my insecurity as an only-English speaking American is a huge motivator. But also, I love languages. I'll watch Wikitongues FOR FUN, geeking out over languages.

Away from jovial and well-adjusted normal people, what sounded doable was simply walking down the street. That way I could absorb Paris and all the newness on my own terms. I bundled up, walked out of the hostel and hung right. I took deep breathes and felt my pores and cells open up. I walked into a boulangerie, buying a baguette and madeleines in terrible French, but it was still French. I walked a bit more, popping into a Tabac shop, picking up a few postcards and a magazine. I listened to the shopkeeper chat with another customer and found myself picking up a few words here and there.

If I could unpack my inner world in Paris 17 years ago, and that panic attack, the emotions felt like combination of feeling out of control, tasting pure freedom for the first time in my life, and glimpsing and saying hello to my future self. All things I could not handle back then. I haven’t written about this experience before, not even in my journal, and yet I find it amazing the underlying theme of my life and traveling (overwhelm, crash and burn, pick myself back up, do it on my own terms) was present even back then.

And now I’m craving a croissant.