Anxiety walls and golf balls

A couple of weeks ago, professional golfer Charlie Beljan suffered a severe panic attack during the second round of the Walt Disney Classic in Lake Buena Vista, Fla. He literally was followed around by paramedics as he tried to get through the round thinking that he was having a heart attack. He didn’t quit because he needed to finish to try and regain his tour card. He actually came back after being checked into the hospital for the third round and amazingly won the tournament the following day.  You can read about it here.

I’ve suffered through a couple of panic attacks in my life. One, in Ottawa, where I too, checked myself into a hospital fearing I was having a heart attack. It was awful. Truly horrible. I felt I was going crazy but I did not know what that meant. What was at the end of this crazy? What would happen to my body. I was dizzy, I could not breathe, my heart felt like it was crawling up my body and into my throat.  Of course, when the nurse returned with my EKG and my blood test results, saying nothing was “wrong” with me, I was tragically embarrassed.

Generally my anxiety is under control. I say generally because I still go through mini-panic attacks during the day. I have been on pills before but felt it placed me too close to monotone, not able to enjoy the peaks and valleys of an emotional life. You see I find the anxiety feeling is close to a mania that I very much thrive on. The energy bounces from fear to verve without me even knowing and I change from metaphorically chewing my fingers bloody in the corner to literally facilitating a 15 person blue sky meeting to emphatic rounds of applause.

Would I trade that feeling of dread for that feeling of elation? Likely not, because that rambunctiousness has become part of my personality. There is an expectation of my highly functional hyper goofballery that others, including my friends, my family, my wife, my sons all feed on and into.

I guess this what you would call an imbalance. And I agree it is a dangerous tightrope to tread. Sometimes I dull it with alcohol, which perpetuates itself because the anxiety is  heightened the day after my overindulgence. I quickly recognize this and scale the cocktails back, but I occasionally let loose and suffer, bug eyed, craving but not finding sleep and ruining myself for a few days.

Why am I telling you all this?  Because the golfer story got major press. The following articles about this type of affliction being common, the how to recognize, the what to do whens, the don’t feel so bads offered me some solace.  You see I don’t talk about this much. Steph obviously knows about it, as does my mother and sister, but I still am a bit ashamed about it.  It feels feckless to me, something I should be able to overcome by myself, another reason why I never lasted too long on the dope that evened me out.

Only a few friends of mine know about it. The thoroughbreds that I hang around with seem to all have their mental shit together, so it doesn’t come up over beers and wings after ball.  Trying to explain it to someone who has never felt it is difficult, so it gets pushed back down, beneath the talk of jump shots, funny things kids say and boobs. So the chatter once the golfer story broke, etched away a bit at the shameful sting of panic attacks and anxiety in general.

I am not willing to be an advocate, ironically the anxiety would prevent it (other than here of course, but this is just my personal blog right?), but any random story that forces it a bit into the mainstream makes it easier to discuss, which makes it that much easier to suffer from.