Shortly before Christmas I was approached by Ryan, asking if I’d like to host a guest post by him, about panic attacks and anxiety issues. Then of course Christmas happened and it got shelved for a while. Anyway, over to Ryan and his story:
I Loved Her, Now She’s Gone, And That’s Okay
I pushed her away.
I don’t know if it’s fair to say I pushed her away. But yes, I pushed her away. We were in college, and she was the first woman I had ever truly loved. This was real love too. This wasn’t the love that someone experiences when someone experiences love for the first time. That’s infatuation love. That’s fleeting love. The math geek in me wants to call it comparative love – “I like you more than I’ve liked anyone else, so it must be love.” That’s not love.
This was real love. This was “we” love, where I no longer spoke about myself in the first person, because I wasn’t only one person anymore.
But still I pushed her away. We were both young, and with her (and because of her) I experienced changes.
- I became confident.
- I became motivated.
- I became sexy.
I was a different person thanks to her, but as a different person, it felt like my life had restarted. The previous 20 some odd years were long since forgotten, so much of a distant memory that they may have been a dream. She became all I ever knew, and for a 20 some odd years person, that idea was terrifying.
I felt like there might be something else out there. There might even be someone else out there. The world is full of experiences, people, activities and beauty, and I felt like I needed to see it. I didn’t know anyone or anything else other than being with her, and the thought that there might be another life out there that I hadn’t lived was, as a 20 some odd years person, an idea that continued to eat at me despite the intensity of my feelings.
So I pushed her away. She had the opportunity to attend graduate school in cities all around the country, including only a few miles away, and I pushed her into choosing the one that was on the exact opposite coast, over 3,000 miles away. I called it a “better school” and discussed its “qualifications” but really I saw this as an opportunity to live what I thought would be my “new life” as the newly confident, motivated, sexy person that I was.
And after a lot of crying, she left.
It took 4 hours. Not four months. Not four weeks. Not even four days. It took 4 hours after she got on a plane before my heart beat sped up to daily fast food levels, my brain felt cloudy and my legs became so weak I thought I was dying. It took four hours for her absence to cause my first ever panic attack – a panic attack that left me temporarily stranded on a bathroom floor in an office building shared with industry leading software developers, and a guy that smelled like old soup.
I knew what a panic attack was. I studied it in college, I lived with someone that suffered from them regularly, and I had my own anxiety issues growing up that prepared me for the idea that I may someday experience a panic attack. But in the moment – just four hours after she left – I thought I was going to die.
I wish I could say that I learned something valuable from the experience. I wish I had some sort of knowledge or moral that I could pass on that would provide insight for those that have suffered or will suffer from the same problem. But the only thing I learned is that bad decisions can still lead to regret.
Still, if I had to impart any thought it would be this:
I made a mistake pushing her away. I made a mistake thinking that life could somehow be more exciting without her. And I made a mistake thinking that one person cannot provide a fairly endless supply of happiness, give or take a few toilet seat position arguments.
Yet despite these mistakes, I’ve never lost sight about how important seeking out happiness is. I suffered from anxiety. I suffered from panic attacks. I lost the person that meant the most to me, and I lost her because of my own foolish behaviors.
But even with all of that I know that 20 some odd years me was right about one thing: The world has an abundant supply of experiences waiting to be uncovered. There is always – always – so much to live for and look forward to, because life itself is its own unparalleled experience.
I don’t know what I would be like if we had stayed together. Probably less anxious. Maybe a little bit fatter. But what I do know is that despite everything I’ve been through and everything I’ve put myself through, I still like myself, I still seek and find happiness every day, and that is something I will never regret.
About the Author: Ryan Rivera suffered from panic attacks, anxiety and stress, and other mental health issues. He’s provides information for others suffering from similar issues at www.calmclinic.com.
I think you probably did her the biggest favour of her life.
Ooh, that sounded a bit, cruel, Remittance Girl: People make mistakes. This fella is here and he is saying that. All these years and he has not forgotten what he did, and what it caused in more ways than one. I applaud him his honesty, his candidness. Judging others from a distance is so easy. Empathy allows us to imagine standing in their shoes – not to behave differently from them, but to try and imagine all the myriad emotions and reasons that would have gone through their minds. That is true empathy: it does not judge or condone or praise, it allows the other party to be human, and for us to say to them; it’s okay, no one can change their past, but we can all help shape our own futures. I think he sounds like he is doing that… and more, because he is putting himself ‘out there’ helping others. Good on you Ryan. Good on you.
Thanks for this. My 20 something son has had his first panic attack and there was ‘no reason’… at least that immediately sprung to (his)mind. However, taking a step back it became obvious that actually he had a great many things weighing him down; and then I became ill, throwing his stable homelife off-kilter. On a night out with a good friend his normal defences were down and he suffered his attack. Paramedics were ‘awesome’ (his word!), took him seriously and stabilised him. However, and this I think is why we need posts like this, he doesn’t feel it necessary to talk about it – and I feel that to ignore it is to the detriment of our own mental and physical health, because the mind and the body are so intricately linked. It’s not something you can just ‘snap out’ of, or ‘pull yourself together’ from.
I found this sooooo scary. It made me realise just how dangerous some of our (fairly lightly taken) decisions can be. Perhaps we all need to be more careful out there.
What a fearlessly honest post. Thank you, Ryan and Viv.
Very honest. It’s difficult being truthful for others, darn near impossible to be truthful to yourself under these circumstances.
Hello Andrew,
Hmm, I didn’t mean it to be cruel at all. But there are two people in this story. The one with the voice who has spoken and told us his story, and the one who is spoken for: the girlfriend who is manipulated into leaving the narrator free to enjoy his newly found confidence and sexiness.
I guess I do this often – read something and then identify the characters in the narrative who are used as expositionary devices – and I wonder what their story was. It’s a bit like the mad wife in Jane Eyre. I always wondered about her.
I guess, being female, I wondered what happened to the girlfriend who seemed dispensable until she was gone and then was missed. Because her journey far away must have changed her life significantly – and perhaps, I hoped optimistically, for the better.
My comment wasn’t at all meant to be cruel.
A big thank you to everyone who commented and to Ryan whose article this is.
I found it very freeing to read; having been at the receiving end of being pushed away it was good for me to see that it was nothing I had done, or not done that had triggered it. It was just something someone else chose(perhaps/probably mistakenly) to do, and it gives me some peace to realise I had not myself failed, but that they in essence had.
The pain of unresolved endings is quite corrosive, so I do hope that Ryan’s ex maybe now understands what happened and that she did go onto things that made her happy.