The Cutprice Guignol

Just a quick trigger warning here for mentions of OCD, medical stuff, and health anxiety, should that be something you’d care to avoid.

This time five years ago, I forgot how to breathe.

It was right around the time that I purchased my first home, and I was deep in the throes of painting and building furniture (or something that resembled it) and finding space for every book that I’ve accumulated over the years; I can remember standing on the tiny, wobbly stepladder I purchased for the job at hand, badly painting the corner of my soon-to-be-bedroom purple, and realising that I couldn’t draw in a full breath.

This was back in 2020, at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, so at first, I assumed that I’d managed to contract it – I took a test, it came back negative. Still, I couldn’t breathe. Two weeks, three weeks, four weeks later, I found myself sitting on the floor, hands on my belly, trying to focus on heaving in a breath that didn’t feel shallow and gasping. At night, I would lie awake for hours, slowly breathing in and out, terrified that if I let myself fall asleep I would stop breathing entirely since I could not consciously pay attention to it.

I went to the doctor to get my lungs looked at, and he pressed a stethoscope to my back while I hyperventilated into a mask (the only one I had at the time happened to be printed with an “insert beer here!” motif, which, looking back, is actually quite funny) and waited to hear the worst. He told me, kindly, that there appeared to be nothing wrong with my lungs; follow-up appointments confirmed that there was no physical obstruction causing my sudden weird inability to breathe, and yet, I still couldn’t.

Of course, I knew on some literal level that I must be able to breathe – I would be dead if I truly wasn’t able to, after all – but there was this impossible, all-consuming feeling that I somehow just couldn’t do it right any longer. No matter what I did, every breath I took felt like something I had to meter and measure and micromanage just to keep from keeling over entirely. This thing, this thing that had underscored the very fact of me being alive for twenty-five years, was suddenly foreign to me, and I didn’t know why. My doctor gently reminded me of the diagnosis of health anxiety on my medical history, but this couldn’t be that, could it? Anxiety could do a lot of things, but it couldn’t take away my built-in knowledge of how to fucking breathe, could it?

Anxiety, I’ve come to find, is not unlike living your life with your foot in a bear trap. The bear trap is ready to go off at any instant, at the barest hint of some trigger, and send your day, week, month, year, spinning into a pit of all-consuming terror. And health anxiety, to me, has been the sensation of having my foot nailed between the jaws of that bear trap whether I like it or fucking not.

Health anxiety has been the primary way that my OCD manifests itself (eg, the bane of my fucking existence) for about the last decade or so – my foot has been firmly planted right there in the trap for most of my adult life, and, while I have absolutely found ways of mitigating the harm it does to my life at large, sometimes, it tears a great big hole in my peace of mind and leaves me trying to bring the tattered edges together as best I can.

I think what makes health anxiety so difficult, at least for me, is the way it invades every aspect of your life. The big red button that kicks off a period of health anxiety is, in short, pretty much anything happening in or to your system that you might be able to vaguely connect to a serious disease or illness. There’s no way to take a step away from the things that trigger you when those things are day-to-day bodily sensations or functions. I’m in my body all the time; there is nowhere I can go or be nor anything I can do where I don’t bring my body and everything that comes with it along for the ride.

And it’s exhausting, in ways I think are hard to explain if you haven’t dealt with it yourself. You spend your life aware of the trap that you happen to be standing in, with the distinct certainty that it’s going to go off at any moment and that it will take your health and your life and your future with it. Running in the background of every single moment of every single day is a constant surveyance of your body, a search for anything that might be wrong, anything that might spring the trap – and, if you do, prying it out of your mind feels virtually impossible.

Kind reassurance, whether from the people around you or medical professionals, becomes a kind of addiction in its own right, the only kind of relief you can find, even if it never lasts. Conversations turn into a million ways to plead with people: tell me I’m okay. Tell me I’m alright. Tell me I’m going to survive. Life becomes limited as the certainty of your own fate starts to supersede everything else – what point is there making plans, doing things, forming relationships, if it’s all just waiting to be torn from you? What kind of person would you be for bringing that great, clanging trap into other people’s lives, when you know on some impossibly irrational but completely sensible level that it’s going to go off?

It’s maddening in the most literal sense of the word, and I don’t think I ever felt madder with it than during the weeks that I forgot how to breathe. It truly did not matter what reassurance I got from the people who could actually tell me what my body was doing – my brain had so utterly convinced itself that breathing was just no longer something I could do that I had no choice but to believe it. To have your mind rebel against you so squarely as to ruin your ability to even breathe without anxiety felt like it should have been impossible, and, in that impossibility, I could only come to the conclusion that there really was something wrong with me. And so, the cycle would continue.

It took about two months for me to get a handle on the whole, you know, not being able to breathe properly thing. And I wish I could tell you that it was therapy or self-care or medication or something positive that got me there, but it wasn’t – it was, predictably, the obsession of my health anxiety moving on to another perceived physical ailment, as another lure entirely set the trap off after all that time. I found another symptom that terrified me, and the matter of my breathing became irrelevant to this, the real issue, the one that would really harm me. Which, of course, it did not, and nor did the one that followed, or the one after that, or any of them since, but that hasn’t stopped any of them feeling as world-ending as the one that came before.

And that’s the glorious (read: grotesque) circle of health anxiety. It’s a circle that I’ve often found myself caught in, and one that feels virtually impossible to squirm your way out of when you’re in the midst of it. When you struggle to breathe, to so much as be in your body without something sending you down that spiral of panic, the thought of pulling your leg out of the trap seems improbable if not outright impossible.

To be very clear, due to the excellent support I was able to get from the people around me and the healthcare professionals I’m lucky enough to have access to, I have been able to find breaks between those cycles of panic, something that, before treatment, was virtually unthinkable. If you’re living with health anxiety – if any of what I’ve described here sounds grimly familiar – then please know that this doesn’t have to be it for you and the rest of your life, and that help and relief is available. I’ve listed a few resources that I found useful below, and I encourage you to drop any that you have in the comments.

Health Anxiety Forum

Free Health Anxiety Workbook

Intro to CBT and Health Anxiety

If you would like to read more about my experiences with OCD, you can check out my OCDiaries series here; if you’d like to support my blog, please consider supporting me on Patreon or dropping me a tip via my Support page.