SameTide
I Want to Talk to Someone Who Has Panic Attacks Too
After my first bad panic attack, the thing I wanted most genuinely surprised me, because I kept catching myself thinking I want to talk to someone who has panic attacks too, and I didn't mean someone guessing at it from the outside, I meant one single person who wouldn't need the long version of why my body had felt like it was dying even after I'd been told my tests were fine. The people around me cared, and honestly that almost made it harder to say out loud, because I could see them trying and I could still feel the distance the whole time.
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.
People can love me and still not know it
The people close to me really did try, and they said kind things and sat with me through bad nights, but I could always tell they were guessing, because panic sounds like a completely different thing when it's being described by someone who has never felt their own heart suddenly turn into the whole room. The calm-down advice made perfect sense to them and I understand that now, but in the moment it just made me feel stupid and alone, like I'd somehow failed at doing the one obvious thing everyone else could do. So I slowly stopped bringing it up, not because they'd done anything wrong, but because explaining it one more time to someone who hadn't felt it started to cost me more than it ever gave back.
The conversation I was missing
What I actually wanted was something much smaller than a big serious talk, just one regular person who had woken up terrified at some awful hour, survived it, and could look at me and say yeah, I know that one. It sounded simple until I actually needed it, because the people I loved could listen but I still had to build the entire scene for them first, whereas with someone who'd had panic attacks themselves I imagined being able to skip all the setup and say one messy sentence and just have it land. I wanted one person in the room who understood why it had scared me so badly without immediately turning it into a project to fix.
The one conversation I remember
I found it completely by accident, when at some point I heard from someone who had been through something similar, and we talked for a while without either of us trying to fix the other or trade techniques, just saying plainly how bad it actually gets. That conversation stuck with me because I didn't need to give the backstory at all, since they already had their own version of it, and when I said I knew I probably wasn't dying and I was still terrified anyway, they didn't make me explain the contradiction. It was completely ordinary, which is honestly part of why I still remember it, because there was no big breakthrough, just a few minutes where I wasn't translating every single sentence before I said it.
Why it is hard to find on purpose
The frustrating part is that the person I wanted was almost impossible to find on purpose, because I might run into them in a comment thread, or after posting something a little too honest, or not at all, and mostly I just waited and hoped some stranger would happen to say the one sentence I'd been trying to say myself. There was never a plain, obvious place to go and say I want to talk to someone who has panic attacks too, I just want one person here who knows what I mean without turning it into a rescue mission, and that's still the part that bothers me, because the need itself is so simple and yet finding the person is almost entirely random.
What SameTide is trying
That gap is really the reason SameTide exists, even though right now it only does one thing, 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 part where someone who's had something close to it reads that story and recognizes it isn't built yet, and that's the direction it's heading rather than a promise for today, so for now it's really just a way to write the whole thing down once in your own words, instead of rebuilding it from scratch every time somebody asks. If what you were hoping for was to talk to someone who understands anxiety, SameTide isn't that conversation today, but it does start with the story that could make a future one a lot less exhausting.
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
How do I find someone who understands panic attacks?
I found someone who understood panic attacks completely by chance, through a stranger who reached out after something I'd written, and that's honestly part of why it felt so out of reach for so long, because I never really knew how to look for it on purpose.
Why did I want to talk to someone who understands anxiety instead of explaining it to family?
For me it came down to the fact that family could love me and still be guessing the whole time, whereas someone who'd had panic attacks wasn't starting from zero, so I could skip the exhausting part where I tried to prove the fear was even real.
Why did I want to talk to a stranger about my panic instead of the people close to me?
Because for me it felt lower stakes than explaining it all over again to people who worried about me, since a stranger with their own panic story didn't need me to soften how bad mine actually sounded.
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.