“I had a panic attack in the middle of the night, while in a deep sleep,” I tell the therapist, who sits directly across from me in an arm chair, his left leg crossed atop his other, listening intently to my prattling.

“It was terrifying,” I continue. “I tried to scream to my roommate for help, but I couldn’t speak.”

The memory still bothers me — my right leg interminably bouncing with a speed that makes me think it’s trying to run from the rest of my body.

“I could barely breathe. And it felt like forever before I was getting enough air to form words.”

Despite living with chronic anxiety since my adolescent years, this is my first major panic attack. I just turned twenty-one.

My therapist helps me understand why this may have happened, offering a few suggestions and encouraging me to speak with my psychiatrist about a medication that will help with acute, heightened moments of anxiety and panic.

As I walk out of the office, my gratitude for living this alternate, multiverse existence is visceral. This version of myself — sitting with the therapist — is a hypothetical self. My real self does not understand that therapists or medication or panic attacks exist.

My real self became a born-again Christian a few years back, embracing a form of fundamentalist religion. Mental illness is unknown to him. Yet, he (we) labors, daily or hourly — even, now, in his sleep — with a panic and anxiety disorder, major depressive disorder, chronic insomnia, and a plausible bi-polar disorder. But he doesn’t know it. And this ignorance will threaten his life.

Six months after this panic attack, he will consider driving his friend’s car into an electrical pole. He will believe his sadness and constant worry are the consequences of sinfulness and doubting his faith. The only thing he knows is religious dogma and spiritual interpretations of the world. Two forces dictate his life, with a few different names: good and evil; Jesus and Satan; the Holy Spirit and demons.

It’s absurd to my multiverse self that he thinks this nightmarish moment of extreme panic is an attack by the devil.

“A demon flung the bedroom door closed and wrapped its hands around my throat,” he tells his roommate and a Christian mentor.

“It was terrifying. This is probably what I deserve for not spending enough time with God, much less asking some of the questions I’ve asked recently.” He believes this with as much conviction as I do when I call a tree a tree or describe the sky as blue.

Everything inside of multiverse me wants to warn him of what could come if he doesn’t drop this fundamentalist religious belief — this demon and the devil nonsense. With our litany of life-threatening disorders, we risk adding alcohol use disorder or so many other drugs — maybe to self-medicate the insomnia and anxiety, or escape the depression — to the spate of forces that will expedite our journey towards suicide or myriad ways of suffering beyond what we can currently imagine.

These threats don’t just run in our brains and blood, they run through a long lineage of our family. Ignorance is a far shot from bliss for my real self. Knowledge is not just power for us: It’s life or death. I thank some force outside myself — not Jesus or God, but something, probably family and friends — for this multiverse existence. At least there is this one place where I can better manage the shame, and the guilt, and the depression, and the hourly anxiety, and the desire to end my life that piques at least a time or two a year. Maybe this other, ethereal self is that thing my real self eventually taps into — the thing that gives him more control and more peace. The thing that lightens the suffering and keeps him from wrapping his car around electrical poles.

reference: medium.com/@jeremiahblue/demons-and-doors-e9427fdc20eb