Allow me to introduce myself… 

I’m bat shit crazy… in the medical profession, they have an unofficial code for that: “BSC”.

I’m dating a latex freak. I enjoy being alone, know what it’s like to be homeless, and spent over three years and thousands of dollars to discover that years of abuse have caused me to have crippling panic attacks.

For all of the incredible medical specialists in this world, I only learned what was happening to my body by accident… As I sat in the waiting room to pay the bill for more tests that revealed I was perfectly healthy, my wonderful young doctor saw me sitting there and realized what was going on. 

The problem was not with my body, but with my mind. 

She pulled me into a small room, and finally gave me a name for the excruciating pain that I had been suffering from for years… Panic Attacks. That young woman altered the course of my life and I will be forever grateful for the compassion and insight that she gave me that day. I finally had a name for what was happening, and the credibility of a doctor’s diagnosis to take back to my psychiatrist to finally get taken seriously and receive treatment.

In the three years that I had been seeing my post-college psychiatrist, he had never paid heed to what I had been telling him. As with most people my age, I had scoured Google for answers… for a name… for anything. I had asked him nearly a year prior if it was possible that I was having panic attacks, and he scoffed at me from behind his desk, ran a hand over his white beard, and informed me that if I had been having panic attacks I would know.

How?

Because I would have been to the Emergency Room.

I’d still like to punch him square in the face for making me suffer needlessly because of his own inability to listen and trust me after three years of monthly visits that lined his pockets with insurance money for simply writing me the same script I had already been taking without problems for the past six years, while he talked about his dogs for 15 minutes before ushering me out the door.

I left with a benzodiazepine script that day, and for the first time in years, I got a reprieve from the pain.

Benzos don't solve the problem, but they definitely make it more manageable. I can walk, talk, function and breathe now. I still have to work at it, and some days are still really bad; but even moderate relief is better than unending suffering.

From the age of 24 to 27, I worked through the pain and tried to find answers, as the symptoms grew progressively worse. The pain brought me to my knees… but I never gave up because even though I sometimes wished for a quick death to escape the pain, I wasn’t ready to die yet. I had clawed my way through life, put myself through college, attained a respectable job within my field during the height of the Great Recession… 

I refused to let what I had worked so hard for slip through my fingers.

Fast forward about 4 or 5 years, and I’m writing this post from the cab of an old Chevy truck… 18 hours away from where I grew up, on a computer that my former therapist/current boyfriend bought for me. There’s a twitchy border collie in the driver’s seat, basking in the sun, and I’m trying to ignore the incoming text messages from my boyfriend as he drives 4 hours back from dropping off his kids with their witch of a mother.

I don’t know who’s the most crazy in this situation… me for ending therapy to date my therapist, my boyfriend’s illiterate ex–wife, who has done everything within her power to sabotage any chance of bonding with the children, or my boyfriend for how much he has changed since the kids first came to visit our shared home for the summer… or maybe the boyfriend’s family that is not only aware of their extreme dysfunctionality, but proud of it to the point that I want to crawl out of my own skin when I’m around them.

I’ve been around and seen enough to know that this shit ain't right… and I’m obsessed with figuring out the truth.

I’ve been alone most of my life and I’m pretty comfortable with that. I’m not afraid of traveling into the wilderness alone. People always try to discourage females from venturing, camping and traveling alone. They worry about bears and strangers… but I’m not scared of backcountry wildlife or coming across people I don’t know while traveling alone. I’m scared of the people that I do know.

It’s the people and places that you do know, that hurt you the worst.