by Julie Buxbaum
When I was in elementary school, everyone I knew was afraid of something. (Actually, come to think of it, that’s still true. Shh, don’t tell, because adults definitely don’t want kids to know this, but grown-ups are afraid of lots of things.) My friends’ fears, unlike mine, though, all seemed pretty “normal.” My best friend hated lightning. On stormy nights, she’d be wide-eyed and terrified, and in the middle of the night, would crawl into her parents’ bed. (I’ve always loved lightning and its ominous crackle. It’s always felt like the opening of the best kind of story.) Another friend hated bugs and spiders, while I’ve never met a daddy longlegs I didn’t like. (I once had an encounter with a black widow, and I didn’t even break a sweat.) My brother hated small, tight spaces. (I’m not a fan, either, to tell you the truth.)
All of these phobias have names: astraphobia, arachnophobia/entomophobia, claustrophobia.
As a kid, though, what I was most afraid of in the world did not have a name, at least not one I’d ever heard. Even worse, what scared me the most seemed to be what everyone else most loved. When I was twelve years old, the two things that filled me with an almost unbearable dread were slumber parties and going to the movies. Often, life would serve me the double whammy of both at once.
“Oh my god, for my birthday party we are all going to see Weekend at Bernie’s, and then my mom said we can sleep in the basement!” my best friend, Halee (still my best friend now, actually, thirty-one years later), reported gleefully over our peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches in the cafeteria at lunchtime.
“Great!” I said, while my stomach pretzeled into knots. I put my sandwich down, no longer hungry.
“Maybe we can play a trick on the first person to fall asleep? Like put their hand in water to see if they pee their pants?” another friend asked, laughing. I nodded, forcing my face to smile. No way would I be the first one to fall asleep, so worrying about wetting my sleeping bag was the least of my problems. I already knew I’d be awake all night.
A slumber party. And a movie.
Kill. Me. Now.
“I’ll just have to make sure I can come. I need to ask my mom,” I said, trying to find a way out of the situation. Maybe miraculously we’d already have plans to visit my grandparents. Maybe the earth would open up and swallow me whole. That seemed preferable to a movie and slumber party.
“It’s my birthday! You’re my best friend. Of course you have to come!” Halee said. She was right. I considered myself a good best friend—we even had matching half-heart BEST FRIENDS FOREVER necklaces slung around our necks to prove it—and good best friends don’t miss their best friend’s birthday because they have completely irrational and secret fears. They just get over themselves. Right?
I don’t remember the first time I found myself panicking during a movie. I suspect it was during The NeverEnding Story, because I remember that film as, well, never ending. Instead, most of the movie experiences of my childhood blur together. Like slumber parties, they were treated with the expectation that I would be excited, that they were a big treat. And I understood why. Tickets weren’t cheap. I loved the buckets of buttery popcorn. I could even see the appeal of the dimming lights and the booming intro music.
But what I hated more than anything was what happened to me after. Because invariably, about thirty minutes into the film, my mind would begin to wander. My thoughts would stray from the story playing out on-screen to some other story playing out in my own mind. At the time, I didn’t understand that this would one day turn into a sort of gift—my imagination’s ability to run wild and out of control would be the foundation of my later life as a novelist.
But at the age of twelve, that distraction soon turned terrifying. It felt like the opposite of a gift. It felt like a sucker punch. Or falling down an endless hole of spiraling thoughts.
I was stuck in my seat in the theater. With at least an hour to go before the lights came up again. There was no escape from my own brain. Nothing could be scarier to me.
Here’s how it would go down. On-screen, Johnny would be yelling, “Nobody puts Baby in a corner!” (If you don’t get the reference, ask a parent. It’s an iconic line from Dirty Dancing, a classic I’ve come to appreciate in more recent years.) In my head, a totally different scene would be playing out. I’d be overcome with dread and fear, a feeling so overwhelming I worried I might pass out.
I’d sit in my seat, hands grabbing the armrests. I’d curl my toes in my shoes to keep myself steady. I’d begin to sweat. My chest would hurt, like someone was hollowing out a space in the center of my lungs. My breaths would come quickly, and I’d try to steady the shaking. The feeling had happened enough times that I came to understand that I wasn’t sick. It wasn’t that I had eaten too much popcorn, or had skipped lunch, or was about to get the flu. The feeling was pure fear, similar to the feeling I’d get when jumping off a high diving board, but 1,000 percent worse, because there was no thrill attached—and worse yet, no bragging rights.
Everyone else had no problem watching Honey, I Shrunk the Kids or, most embarrassing of all, The Little Mermaid. I never told my parents. Or Halee. Never once said, “Hey, let’s not go to the movies.” Never once let them know about the way my stomach would fall, my brain would whirr, how sometimes I thought I might die if the movie didn’t end soon.
Even now, I am not sure why I suffered in silence. Maybe because it was just too weird. Just too embarrassing. Just too . . . irrational.
I was afraid of what, exactly? Of movies? No, that wasn’t it. I was afraid of getting distracted from the movie, and the torture my brain would offer when that happened—my own spinning out while everyone else sat engrossed and happy. How do you explain such complicated feelings when you haven’t yet developed the vocabulary? No one had given twelve-year-old me the words.
I have the words now. Two of them, actually. And it wasn’t until adulthood that I was able to identify what used to happen to me in the darkness of those theaters. I would have what a psychologist would call a “panic attack.”
If you haven’t had a panic attack, the Mayo Clinic’s website describes it as a sudden bout of intense fear that can trigger a response in your body. Twelve-year-old me would describe it as an unexplainable downward spiral of dread and loneliness that would leave me drenched in sweat and panting. It came on without warning and without a real reason. Like a monster waiting for the end of act one on-screen to pounce on me in my seat.
Of course, the same thing would happen to me at slumber parties. At Halee’s birthday party, slowly, one by one, the girls around me would slip into sleep, and Halee’s basement would turn into a chorus of snoring. I’d lie awake, looking around in wonder at everyone else. It felt like their ability to fall asleep somewhere new was a superpower I didn’t possess.
Instead, I was like the princess in “The Princess and the Pea.” The floor was hard. The sleeping bag did not smell like my comforter at home, did not drape across my shoulder with the same amount of weight. The house was too hot or too cold and definitely too loud. Clearly some of these girls should possibly see a doctor about their sinus problems. That amount of snoring couldn’t be healthy.
I’d try to remain brave. So what that I couldn’t sleep? There were worse things than sitting up through the night. It’s not like there were actual monsters here. And it’s not like anything bad would happen if I watched my friends snore. Tomorrow I’d be tired and probably a little cranky. Sleep wasn’t important, I told myself, though of course, I knew that sleep was important. My parents had drilled into me how necessary it was that I get a good night’s rest, that my brain development depended on it.
While I lay there in the dark, I thought about how I was damaging my already clearly damaged brain. I felt the now familiar tornado of panic rear up. What was wrong with me?
Again, I didn’t have the words.
I don’t know what would have happened had someone explained to twelve-year-old me that I was suffering from “panic attacks.” That my frequent bouts of nervousness, not just during movies and sleepovers but also at the lunch table with friends, even at night in the comfort of my own perfect, pea-free bed, also had a name: anxiety. That what I was feeling was not something embarrassing or weird or any different from anyone else’s fears—though mine, of course, were turned up a notch.
I don’t think knowing what they were would have solved my problem entirely, but it definitely would have made the experience a whole lot less lonely. Tons of people have panic attacks. Tons of people have anxiety. Tons of people are scared of all sorts of random things.
Did you know there is something called phobophobia? It’s a fear of having a phobia! There’s also hexakosioihexekontahexaphobia, which is the fear of the number 666. I don’t have either of those, but sometimes I wonder if I have nomophobia, the fear of not being able to use a mobile phone.
It’s funny how naming something can take away much of its power. I don’t have panic attacks anymore. I do still have anxiety. (I was about to write “suffer from anxiety” but then realized that’s not quite true. I don’t “suffer” so much from it anymore, mostly because I’ve asked for help and have found the tools to manage it.) I now love going to the movies, though I’m still not a huge fan of sleepovers. (The floor is still too hard. Halee’s basement is still too noisy.)
I can name my fears. I can even write them down right here for you to read without shame or embarrassment. Twelve-year-old me didn’t have a damaged brain, only an overly imaginative and sensitive one. So if I could go back in time, these are the words I’d hand myself, when I was gripping on to the movie seat armrests for dear life, another kind of gift: panic attack, anxiety, and most important, hope. I watched The Little Mermaid not too long ago with my own children. When I got bored thirty minutes in, I let my mind wander and relished the time to explore my own imagination. It wasn’t scary there at all.
JULIE BUXBAUM is a New York Times bestselling author of novels for kids, teens, and adults. She’s the author of The Area 51 Files, her debut novel for middle grade readers; five young adult novels (Tell Me Three Things, What to Say Next, Hope and Other Punch Lines, Admission, and Year on Fire); and two novels for adults (The Opposite of Love and After You). She is a former lawyer and graduate of Harvard Law School and lives in Los Angeles with her husband, two children, and more books than is reasonable. Visit Julie online at JulieBuxbaum.com and follow her @JulieBuxbaum on Instagram.