SameTide
I Feel So Alone With Panic Disorder
I never expected to feel so alone with panic disorder, because I braced myself for the fear, or at least I thought I had, but I didn't brace for being surrounded by people who cared about me and still feeling like the worst part of it was happening somewhere none of them could actually reach. For a long time I wondered what was wrong with me for feeling that way, since the panic itself was loud and impossible to ignore while the loneliness was much quieter, and in a strange way that made it even harder to talk about.
If you might be in danger or you're thinking about harming yourself, this page isn't crisis support. In the US, call or text 988. Anywhere else, you can find a local line at findahelpline.com.
The part no one else can see
My panic attacks felt enormous to me and yet most of the people around me never really seemed to notice much, because I probably just looked quiet or tired, or like someone who wanted to leave early, when inside my body it felt like a full emergency and from the outside it apparently looked almost boring. That mismatch did something to me over time, because I could be sitting in the same room as people I loved and still feel completely cut off from them, since they were only ever reacting to what they could see while I was quietly dealing with the worst of it alone.
Cleared by every test, and still scared
I've been checked over by doctors more than once and told, kindly, that nothing was physically wrong, and I believed them every time and was still just as scared afterward, which is a genuinely lonely place to be, because now there was nothing obvious I could even point to and say look, this is why I'm acting like this. When my fear had no visible cause I felt harder for anyone to understand, and I started to half wonder the same thing about myself, even while my body still felt completely alarmed. I'm careful with this part because I'm only ever talking about my own past here, about my body and my tests and my own fear, and I'm not saying anything about what anyone else's symptoms might mean.
So I got good at hiding it
After enough blank looks I just started hiding it, so I'd leave before it peaked, or cancel plans and give some boring excuse, and I got weirdly good at having an attack quietly somewhere and then walking back out like nothing had happened at all. Hiding it saved me from a lot of awkward conversations, but it also made the loneliness worse, because every attack that nobody saw became one more thing that nobody actually knew about me.
I felt like the only one
The thing that eventually stayed with me was hearing another person describe the exact same private fear, because I'd heard people talk about anxiety in general before but this felt different, since they knew the strange, specific part where the fear is enormous and almost impossible to show anyone. When I was in the middle of panicking it always felt like I was the only person alive going through it, and it wasn't until later, hearing someone else put words to something close to it, that I finally felt a little less strange, and for me the loneliest part had always been just how much of it happened somewhere nobody could see.
The conversation I remember
For me it was really one conversation that changed how I thought about the isolation, because at some point I heard from someone who had been through something similar and they didn't need me to explain why something completely invisible had been the most frightening part of my life. That did far more for me than any reassurance I got from people who loved me but hadn't felt it themselves, and it wasn't that the other person had better words, it was just that they didn't need me to make the story neat before they could understand it.
What SameTide is trying
SameTide is only testing one small thing right now, which is that it asks you a few private questions at your own pace, with no name or account needed to start, and turns your answers into a first-person story of what your anxiety actually feels like. The peer-reading part is planned but it isn't live today, so someone actually recognizing your story is the direction it's going rather than a promise for right now, which means for the moment it's just the writing part, the part where I finally didn't have to keep re-explaining the whole invisible thing from scratch. When I felt most alone with panic disorder late at night, what I really wanted was one place to write the whole thing down without having to say it out loud to anyone first, and that is the part SameTide actually starts with.
This is a private writing tool, not live support, crisis care, or a chat with another person. If you need someone right now, please use the crisis lines below.
A few honest answers
Why did I feel so alone with panic disorder even when I had supportive people around me?
In my experience the people around me missed most of what was happening simply because they couldn't see it, so I could be genuinely well loved and still feel completely unseen in the exact moments that scared me the most.
Why did I feel more alone after being told nothing was physically wrong?
I can't really speak for anyone else on this, but in my own experience being cleared was a huge relief and also weirdly isolating, because the fear no longer had any obvious thing left for me to point to.
Did talking to someone who has panic attacks change the loneliness for me?
For me, one conversation with someone who had actually felt panic made the loneliness a lot easier to name, and they didn't fix anything at all, they just recognized the experience without ever making me justify it first.
If you need help right now: If you're thinking about harming yourself, or you're in immediate danger, please reach out to a crisis line. This article isn't a substitute for that. In the US, you can call or text 988 (Suicide & Crisis Lifeline). Outside the US, you can find a local line at findahelpline.com.
Written anonymously by someone who lives with panic disorder.