I’m so scared. I’m so fucking scared. I’m afraid this is never going to go away. This feeling is never going to go away. I know it. It’s never going to go away.

Because it isn’t. I know it isn’t. They can lie to me all they want, the doctors and the therapists. They bullshit me with stories about breathing through it and visualizing my way through this. There is no breathing that can stop this from killing me. There is no visual I can conjure, I can imagine, that will make this feeling okay. This is hell, and they think I’m just being dramatic.

The drama queen. That’s what my sister’s always called me. Fuck her. Fuck her for making me feel like this is something I do. The last time I cried in front of her, she told me flatly to cut it out. She intimated I was acting.

My friends used to say the same thing. “You just want attention.” Did they ever consider that I was socially awkward? That I didn’t understand their culture or their minds? I don’t watch MTV. I don’t listen to music—like you do. I read. I read books. I like being in my head, just like you do, but my thing is different: it’s words. Is that so bad? I feel okay when I’m surrounded by them. I’m in control.

It’s the only time I feel in control.

Can you see by how much I write how out of control I feel? How many words must be on this site? How many more are there on my shelves and in my journals? Out of the corner of my eyes, everywhere, always, there’s books. I’m an editorial assistant at a textbook publishing company, for christ’s sake. I help make books. That’s my life. Do you see how stringless I feel? I’m a puppet, slumped on the floor. Everyone else seems to be dancing, safe on their strings. They dance along with the rest of the world. In turn, they all dance around me. They ask me, “why don’t you dance?” I tell them, “I have no strings to hold me up.” They tell me I’m lying. They have disdain for me because I’m not dancing. They tell me, in no uncertain terms, it’s my fault. But I want to dance. I would love to dance. I like music. I like moving. I just can’t. I’m watching the whole world move. I manage a few steps. But it’s still not good enough. “You’re so slow, Lucy.” “You’re todo alrebe.” My mother, telling me every day I’m “all backwards.” Abnormal. And not to trust men. My mother taught me to fear men. I wonder sometimes, what happened to her, that she had such a fear. She would tell my sisters and me, “Don’t let your father kiss you on the lips. It’s wrong. A father shouldn’t kiss his girls that way.” A common Hispanic custom, but my mother made it sound so dirty. I wondered for years if that was ever his intention. Now, I’m starting to think on the man I feared and the woman I adored and pitied. I fell deep into my mother’s manipulations even as I thought I was fighting against them. I survived my mother before I ever survived rape.

This is never going to go away. I know it because I’ve done all the right things. I’ve committed myself to healing. Even as I rage against it, I’m committed to get better, to improving through self-awareness and, thereby, self-respect and self-love. But this madness will always take me places in my head I don’t want to go. In my darkest moments, the entire human race, including myself, is disgusting vermin, locusts on the world and ourselves. Do you know what the acceptance of that idea, of the realization of my own worthlessness in light of the knowledge that the mind is designed to justify its own actions at all costs to protect itself, what that does to you? Every reason I think of to argue against my own worthlessness is just my mind trying to justify its sick ineptitude.

That can go on for hours, days, weeks. It once went on for about a year. I held myself together by sheer willpower. And I had no one to talk to. I had no one to depend on. My family? They only make me sicker, with their judgments and their third world mentality. They could drive a person to kill themselves. In fact, they almost have—on several occasions. And no, not me. People talk to me. Family members talk to me, always in secret, always in private, even as they disrespect me. But no one will admit it to themselves or the other. No. It’s all just normal. It’s all just Mom being nuts, and me being—what did my sister call me? Reina. On her wedding day, after she had hurt someone’s feelings, everyone knew it, and I spoke up about it to her. She called me a queen. The implications were that I was self-righteous and demanding. I laughed. What was I supposed to do?

I’m always speaking up to them. God. I don’t know why. It never helps. They never listen. I’m “banal,” Leo once wrote about me. I was cleaning our bedroom in the Garfield house, and I found a piece of paper. That was on the first line. I was young, so I had to look it up.

No, I was alone, but I held it together. I can at least say that for myself.

It doesn’t help. I’m alone, and I just want someone to lean on, to help.

But instead, nothing to be gotten from them. No help. They’re all sick. We’re all sick, but no one will admit it.

But me, among the six of us.

My entire life, I’ve felt so fucking alone. I know it’s not uncommon. I know everyone feels that way. There’s pop songs about it. But this is different. This isn’t a pop song. This is nothing anyone would put a voice to, except to scream. God, do I want to scream. I could cry, it’s so deep inside me.

And nothing, nothing will ever get this out.

I’m not strong enough. I’m not. I’m just a little girl. Don’t you see? I’m just pretending. I don’t want attention. I just want help. I just want someone to give me a hand, to tell me it’s going to be okay. Don’t you see? Don’t you see me? I know I’m small, but try. Try.

I do.

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2. Freewriting Panic Attack: Tell Me
3. Freewriting Panic Attack: Holding Myself Up Normal
4. Freewriting Panic Attack: There’s Never Enough to Cry About
5. Freewriting Panic Attack: A Masturbatory Act, A Big Step