Panic
Here’s what it feels like:
I’m in my first-ever improv show, on a team I joined to help me be more okay with saying “yes” to things instead of always being afraid and saying “no.” I started learning improv almost a year ago, and was supposed to have a show in March, but then the pandemic hit and the show was canceled.
Thanks to a strange series of events, several friends and I tried out for a team and I ended up making it, not knowing any of the people I’d practiced with before.
I’ve never been good at new things. I’m comfortable with doing the same thing over and over until I’m confident I’ll do it right, until it feels so rote that there’s almost no chance of it going wrong. But with improv, everything is constantly changing, so I thought it would be a good way to practice a controlled measure of chaos.
On the day of my first show, I was confident when I saw my friends writing in the chat that they were looking forward to seeing me, but I was also nervous that I was going to mess up in front of people I knew. I comforted myself by reminding myself that I knew exactly what I was going to do - I knew what games I was playing and who I was playing them with, and I did well in practice with those exact games and people.
As the time approached, I felt more nervous and excited. My emotions were ramped up and by the time I turned on my screen to participate, I knew it was game time and I needed to be ready no matter what I was feeling. It’s a sentiment that I feel when I go into major tests, job interviews, and other things that I’m nervous for ahead of time but can muster a good response in the moment no matter what my head and heart are doing.
I was going to be fine. But then, the person tasked with introducing the game changed how it worked. The entire premise changed, and all my plans went out the window. I was on camera already, so there was no chance of calming down. The smile froze on my face as the announcer left the screen and it was just me and my scene partner expected to do something I felt completely unprepared for in front of way too many people who I suddenly felt were judging me behind their computer screens.
It didn’t matter that the suggestion from the audience related to technology and computers, two topics I’m well-versed with. It didn’t matter that the people who came to watch me were my friends and family who had nothing but my best interests in mind. It didn’t matter that my scene partner was not going to let me fall because she wouldn’t want to fall either.
All I knew was that I was screwed, lost and gaping like a dead fish in front of a crowd of 40 friends and family members who were expecting the best.
My Fitbit recorded a heart rate of 156 beats per minute for just that one minute, the one where I had to wipe my brain of everything I had rehearsed and come up with something off the top of my head. My scene partner started speaking as I could feel my heart pounding, blood rushing, palms sweating.
My friends couldn’t see that I was panicking, because I did what I always do when I’m nervous: I started talking. Every time I go to the doctor for a blood draw, try to navigate through a tough point in a friendship or romantic relationship, or basically anytime I’m very nervous and don’t know what to do, I fill the silence in my brain by filling the silence in the room. I never know if what I say is going to make sense or if I sound like a rambling mess afterwards. I just know that it’s something I’ve always done, and even if it seems to be a little too close to a regression to when I was a child and couldn’t stop myself from doing this, it carries me through situations like this when panic takes over.
In improv, thankfully, it works better than in many other situations like chattering away at a nurse trying to take a vial of blood. I barely remember the suggestions I made or the things I did during the game, but apparently, I didn’t look nervous. I looked like I was playing a chatty character, which was the best possible outcome for that situation.
I was leading the next game, and since I had written everything down for that, I didn’t have to be particularly creative. It still felt strange, though, with anxiety peeking in at the strangest moments. Even as I called on people to perform their puns, I kept overthinking things - less and less as time went on, but definitely following a downward path ever since the one big spike when I didn’t know if I was going to crash and burn.
My chatterbox self took over in that moment because it’s who I used to be. As a child, I had to learn - over and over and over again - to let other people talk, to occasionally come up for air, to stop taking up so much space in conversations and classrooms and more. I trained myself well, and only in situations where the panic takes over do I revert to the endless motormouth pattern I displayed throughout my childhood.
It comes out at times of pure, raw panic when my executive function shuts down. Panic, for me, is not something I remember afterwards. It’s not something I can try to try to mitigate in the moment, in the middle of a scenario where I’m terrified and feel like the only option is fight or flight. My body shakes, sometimes, when I’m in the grip of it, as if it can’t decide whether to hide or flee. My eyes tend to go wide. My mouth falls open. I never, ever know what to do.
Luckily, panic moments for me are few and far between, but it wasn’t always like that. I had my first panic attack during my junior year of college and thanks to my OCD, I was unable to calm down at all. Whereas most panic attacks last for a few minutes at best or a few hours at worst, mine went on for days. I couldn’t sleep or eat. I started losing touch with everything I was as the days blended together.
These moments of panic remind me what it felt like then, when everything was so far out of my control and nothing anyone said or did could bring me back. These moments make me want to hide under the table, wait for my heart to stop beating so fast, and then take an evening of self-care as I feel thrown for a while afterwards.
Strangely enough, no one noticed that I felt like this at the show. Apparently, my talking looked confident, and when I was reading off my script, I looked like I knew exactly what I was doing. No one realized I forgot to take off my sunglasses at a crucial moment and no one realized I was twirling them around in my left hand instead of putting them back on. No one knew this time, but in past times, I’ve lost friends and alienated myself inadvertently when I lost control and people did notice.
These moments are strange because they’re so different from my typical experience with OCD. Usually, when I’m afraid of something, so many thoughts cloud my head that it’s difficult to isolate a single thought or think clearly. But when I panic like this, it’s the complete opposite experience. My mind is completely blank, and that almost never happens in daily life so it’s even more alarming. The mere fact that there is nothing in my head makes me think “Do something!” over and over and over, but forcing myself out of the rut almost never works.
Even considering this reaction to my first show, I am glad I signed up for an improv team. Giving myself more opportunities to not know everything that’s going to happen and try new things can hopefully help mitigate these moments in the future, as trying something new won’t be quite so scary if I can desensitize myself to the experience of saying “yes.”
Ellie, a writer new to the Chicago area, was diagnosed with OCD at age 3. She hopes to educate others about her condition and end the stigma against mental illness.