The only time I've had a panic attack... I guess you could say it was artificially induced.


The only reason I'm writing about this is because two days ago I woke up frightened and it took me a minute to realize why. And I can't talk about it with the people involved because they don't want to think about it, I guess.

Over winter break, my mom gave me a corner of a pot brownie made by her brother in Oregon. It was about the size of a nickel.

If anyone's reading this, your first reaction will probably be like "wow, your mom is awesome!" My mom is great, and I thought the same thing at first. The only rule was that I wasn't going to tell my dad, and I agreed. I ate it and went downstairs to play Katamari Damacy to see if it would increase my scores.

The first thing I noticed was the taste. I've had edibles before and it's always obvious what the "secret" ingredient is... but this tasted like ash and felt as dry as paper. I soon got bored of the game and went upstairs.

What happened over the next few hours didn't make sense to me. Because I've had experience with this kind of thing before, and if anything you get a little silly then pass out pretty quickly. It's a depressive drug, that's what it's supposed to do. But what happened to me felt more like a strong stimulant.

I called my boyfriend, and I couldn't breathe, I was scared because it was like I couldn't control what my own mind was doing. Thoughts and memories kept coming up out of nowhere, and it was overwhelming. I was terrified that i would go crazy, before I finished school, before I went back out to Los Angeles to have a career, that I would lose everything I'd worked so hard to get. I could barely hear him trying to help me breathe, I just kept seeing myself taken out of school.

One of the other terrifying things about the experience was that I kept noticing patterns in my own frame of thought, and I felt like I was falling asleep and immediately waking up over and over. I would think I was getting a handle on things, I would use a happy thought to ground myself, and then I would realize that I'd done this before, over and over again.

After that, everything seemed hyper-real, like seeing a movie in 48 frames per second. Everything was ugly and in high definition. I thought that if I gave myself a good of enough scare, that maybe I would snap out of it. It was my last hope. So I went down stairs to my father and told him everything. I thought that the terror of revealing what I had done would work. It didn't. All it did was make him go upstairs and get my mom to come down and sit with me as I shook and cried on the chair. I couldn't stop shaking, my entire body wouldn't sit still.

It was two days before Christmas, and I spent that night staring out of the window until about six in the morning when I finally could go to sleep.

The next day everything was no longer in 48 frames per second, which was nice. My mouth was dry, but that's normal and I probably ended up drinking my weight in water.

My parents never spoke of it. Never asked if I was okay, never told me never to do it again. Dad never said "I told you so," which, if you've had a father or are one, will know it's something that satisfies them. I never got that. They never talked about it.

That night I went to the annual Christmas Eve family reunion at my Uncle Doug's house. I was fine on the way down, listening to music, and I was even fine getting out of the car and carrying in the soup and presents. But once I stepped inside, I started to shake again. I had to put everything down quickly, and I knew that if people saw me shaking for more than two minutes I wouldn't able to blame it on the cold.

So I did my basic math. If, somehow, what I had was an extreme stimulant, I needed to find a depressive drug I could count on.

I filled a typical college red cup about a third of the way with vodka before cutting it with Sprite.

I don't usually drink so heavily so fast, but it did exactly what I hoped it would do. I stopped shaking, everything dimmed down a little, and I was able to be charming and not panic again.

What I woke up to a few days ago was a piece of the panic I'd only ever gotten after eating a small piece of that brownie. I don't know if it was just a fluke reaction, maybe I was too freaked out about my dad not finding out. Maybe it was laced with something else without my mom's knowledge.

I'll never know. I can only say that every once and a while a minuscule amount of that panic will come back. Never in full force, I hope it never comes back in it's entirety.

I guess I just wrote this here to get it off of my chest because it happened even if my parents will never talk about it.