Crying Alone On A Street In Soho

Trigger warning: This post contains sensitive topics such as mental illness.

It was a scene many of us have been in: I’m on a quiet stretch of Bleecker in Soho. It’s November, and it’s starting to get cold, and I’m shivering from the cold and shaking from sobs. My mascara is running and the gorgeous fashionable woman walking past offers me the courtesy of not looking at me because I’m a humiliated wreck.

This was the beginning of the breakdown that drove me from New York and back into the foggy, filthy arms of San Francisco.

2014 was basically the year from hell. I went into PR — what the fuck was I thinking? — which was a disaster. I had no idea what I wanted, so I hopped from job to job only to hyperventilate my way out of them. When I finally realized I belonged in a newsroom despite the fear-mongering about its apparent demise, I applied for an internship, and two weeks later I was in New York — that gorgeous, heavy, overwhelming city.

Except, as soon as I got there, I got bedbugs. I was away from my boyfriend, who had helped me maintain my sanity and anxiety for four years and from whom I’d never been apart for longer than a few weeks. I knew almost no one, I was making $8 an hour at my internship and barely more than that at a coffee job I hated. And although I wasn’t unhappy, per se — I love that city — I was a wreck.

I could barely breathe.

What a lot of people don’t understand is that the anxiety that accompanies a diagnosed panic disorder is completely debilitating. For most people, anxiety is the sweaty palms they get when they have to speak in public, or the nerve-racking pressure of an impending deadline. Those things, of course, plague people with diagnosed anxiety, too.

For me?

Anxiety is having my whole body heaving with sobs, gasping for breath, as I say to myself — out loud, often:

I can’t do this. I can’t do this. I can’t do this. I can’t do this. I can’t do this. I can’t do this. I can’t do this. I can’t I can’t I can’t I can’t can’t can’t. I want to die.

It always comes to that. When I’m in a bad place, it always comes to that. When the thought at the end of a daily panic attack is I want to die, I know that something needs to change — fast. Because when something doesn’t change, I end up in the bathroom staring into the medicine cabinet, daring myself.

So. New York.

I ended up sobbing on Bleecker Street after my editor, over coffee, had gently criticized something I’d written. I felt very alone and unsupported in that internship, and although my editor had always been kind, my self-esteem after a year of relentless rejection was frail and ill-equipped for criticism, even if it was well-meant and constructive.

I don’t even remember what the critique was; I just know my face must’ve suddenly flushed before I gasped, tears streaming down my cheeks. I stared into my iced latte, took a sip, took a breath.

“Do you need a minute?” he asked. I nodded, and after he left, I walked over to Bleecker, forcing myself to stop hyperventilating and failing. I leaned against the wall, pulled out my phone and called my boyfriend.

It was so, so embarrassing.

The worst part was? That wasn’t the only time that happened, even at that internship. I’d feel my chest’s telltale spasm and silently excuse myself — from my internship, from my coffee job, from coffee with a friend. So when my editor informed me there were only a few weeks of my internship left, I knew I had to go home. That night, I booked a flight a few days out, wrote an apologetic email to my boss at the coffee shop and finally took a breath.

I’m returning to New York at the end of summer, a year after I first arrived in 2014, and I couldn’t be more excited. New York, like a tempestuous lover, requires inner fortitude and the right circumstance for those of us who are a bit more emotionally fragile. But I think I’m growing stronger; I’m loving and respecting myself a little bit more each day. I’m almost ready.