My Brain Broke...

Eight weeks ago, in September of 2023, I suffered a complete mental shutdown after I had the mother of all panic attacks. The kind of panic attack that sent me into the deepest and darkest depression of my forty something years on this planet. It was the kind of depression they warn you about and I never saw it coming.

My memory of the week that followed the panic attack is spotty at best. I have glimpses of what occurred, but have had to be filled in by family and friends. Renamed my "mental minute", the shut down was officially diagnosed as "dissociation disorder"; I was unaware of my presence, time, and space around me.

During the week of my "mental minute", my independence vanished. My hyper-focus went blurry and I was not able to process more than the basics. I could not feel physical pain, temperature changes, hunger or thirst. While my memory of the week is intermittent, I can recall feeling the heaviest weight of my life sitting on top of my chest. I did not have the mental capacity to crave death, however, I no longer had the mental capacity to fight it. The candle that I burned from both ends, the flame I worked so hard to keep lit, was extinguised.

I have always recognized that becoming "burnt out" was a consequence of not establishing a balance between responsibility and desire. Until it happened to me, I did not know that your brain could actually shut down to force you into preservation mode. I did not know how I would survive. All I knew was that I was not strong enough to survive like this.

It has become incredibly important to me to share my story, not because of the recognition or the validation, but rather because I know that my experience will help someone. In a world where millions of people collaborate and share their unique experiences on the internet, I could not find one person that had shared an experience similar to mine. I would like to imagine my writing as the light at the end of the tunnel, for me and perhaps for someone else.

For my entire adult life, I have been an extreme people pleaser. I have juggled the expectations, perceptions, feelings, and happiness of everyone around me and prioritized every person over myself. I have always taken great pride in the amount of work I could accomplish; reduced to a heap of exhaustion day after day. In September, everything changed. All of my deeply burried trauma and history came crashing to the surface, drowning me in the process. This is my story.