I've Never Been (Un) Happier by Shaheen Bhatt

Author:Shaheen Bhatt
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9789353057206
Publisher: Penguin Random House India Private Limited
Published: 2019-12-02T16:00:00+00:00

Crawling

I had my first panic attack when I was eighteen years old, post TylenolGate, while getting a hair cut.

In general I’ve always found salons to be unnecessarily stressful and anxiety-provoking places. Every person who works at a salon is effortlessly outgoing, dresses like they’ve jumped right off the page of some cool, hipster fashion magazine, and has the sort of flawless hairstyle that only Greek gods could pull off. Maybe years of salon-xiety (a genuine and should-seriously-be-recognized condition caused by feeling dangerously uncool whenever you are at or in the vicinity of a salon) finally took its toll on me, and I snapped. Maybe the overwhelming smell of hydrogen peroxide sent my central nervous system into a tizzy. Maybe having to sit still in one place for so long while someone tutted at my lack of hair care ritual awoke my claustrophobia. Honestly, I don’t know what made it happen or why, all I know is that I was suddenly sure I was going to die. As I looked in the mirror (already an unpleasant enough experience when your hair is wet, clipped above your head in five different places and poking out at weird angles causing your face to look like a giant squishy bao bun [every girl on earth knows what I’m talking about]) I experienced several wildly uncomfortable sensations, all at the same time.

First, my heart felt like it had suddenly and suicidally nosedived directly into my stomach while pumping at a ridiculous 600 beats per minute.

Second, every inch of my body instantly went cold and numb, as if its blood supply was cut off and its every nerve ending had malfunctioned and died.

Third, I developed a terrible case of tunnel vision and was disoriented by how everything was simultaneously in front of me but not at all in front of me.

Fourth, my entire experience of reality changed. In a moment I felt completely removed from my own body. I felt as though the invisible connection between mind and body had been completely severed and I was hovering somewhere outside of myself, a disembodied tangle of thoughts with the fast fading memory of the word ‘I’ trying to hold it all together.

Fifth, my brain started screaming at me ‘Oh my God, you’re going crazy. Oh my God, you’re dying! You’re having a heart attack! Human hearts are not built to beat this fast! You can’t breathe! Your throat is closing! You’re having an allergic reaction to this haircut! Of course you can have an allergic reaction to a haircut, you’re just the first person to ever have one!’

My body tensed up and froze as all these alarming new physical sensations rose, and crashed and cascaded over me.

By now the chic, muscular, pierced and tattooed man cutting my hair had noticed something was going on with me because I was rather conspicuously staring at my own reflection in the mirror with my eyes widened in horror and my mouth hanging open in a sort of silent scream.

‘All good?’ he cautiously ventured.

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