Where Does Rage Go?: Panic Disorder In All Its Glory

On a summer night in 2023, I was sitting around a fire, having dinner with my friends. We were laughing, acting up, enjoying the usual chaos, when suddenly the strangest sensation flooded over me. I felt extremely lightheaded. I announced that something felt wrong and tried to lay down—but standing up sent me tumbling to the ground in the yard, just sitting and staring. My vision blurred, I was disoriented, and I couldn't walk. I managed to scare my friends, though I barely noticed them. Somehow, I made it inside and collapsed onto the sofa, still struggling to understand what had just happened.

Months passed. I told myself it was a fluke. I'd had small moments of lightheadedness before, but never like this. I forgot about it until one night in Manhattan, standing at a bar, when the feeling hit again. Soon, I was outside, on a curb, head resting against a street letter box, being handed water.

Weeks later, on Halloween night, it happened again. I felt the panic rising and forced myself to stay present, talking myself through it. Somehow, I made it through.

The following months became a blur of tests—diabetes, POTS, anemia—anything that could explain why my body betrayed me like this. Everything came back normal.

Then, another trip to New York. An episode struck me in a vintage store. Luckily, I was spending my weekend with a nurse, and after describing what had happened, she suggested it sounded like panic disorder.

It was a revelation. When I mentioned it to my doctor, she agreed—we needed to figure this out immediately. I had never seen panic attacks like these. My speech remained clear. My breathing never changed. Yet my eyes sometimes lost focus, my hearing distorted, I became severely lightheaded, and I felt as if my body were literally shutting down. It wasn't that I felt I was panicking—it felt as if I were dying.

Friends began to pick up on slight indications that an episode was beginning. At a movie theater, the lights came on, and I tried to stand. The person I was with just looked at me and asked, "Are you going to fall???" before catching me and practically carrying me to the car.

I've had to shock myself out of episodes in the most inconvenient places: a cave tour this summer, locking myself in a restroom and drenching my face and chest in cold water, desperate to reset my nervous system so I wouldn't fall into an open trench once the tour began.

And yet, through all of this, a silent question kept rising: why? Why was my body reacting this way?

I kept running into Bessel van der Kolk's The Body Keeps the Score—recommendations and videos popping up everywhere. I haven't read it yet, but I already sense the truth it offers: trauma doesn't always have to shout, it doesn't have to be loud at all. Sometimes it hums quietly under the surface and in the background—waiting for a crack to slip through. My mind had moved on from so much pain, but my body never got the memo.

Maybe this is what happens when we survive things by minimizing them—your body keeps the story for us until we are ready to listen.

And then there's the rage. Because panic isn't just this fear. It's a surge of energy, a buildup of tension that wants release. It's the body screaming true frustration at a system that's been forced to suppress pain for far too long. I've learned that panic carried a shadow of anger for myself personally—towards the situations I've survived, the injustices endured, the parts of myself I've denied. Rage stored int eh body can feel like dizziness, disorientation, even the sensation of being shut down entirely. It's all the unspent fire that refuses to be ignored.

I have lived so long in this mindset of simply pushing through the bad, rationalizing, and staying functional. I'm beginning to realize that maybe a true sense of strength is sitting down with the body that's been trying to tell you the truth all along. Listening, feeling, accepting.

And now I'm left with this lingering question: when we say we've "healed," do we really mean we, or just the parts we think are healed?