My type of panic attack is weird. It only happens when I’m typing, because it only happens when I’m dealing with some issue with someone in WoW. What happens is that the keys of the keyboard suddenly feel like oceans, then like universes, and each movement of my finger is like a needle disappearing into a great vastness of nothing. Then I feel like all the space around me is twisted, and I exist in a vast space of nothing. I feel like I’m going to be swallowed up by all this, that I myself have become thinner than a needle, flatter than a piece of paper, smaller than a dot that shows position but actually has no mass and does not exist. And the sounds, they ring in my ears, they are also so loud, so enormous. They fill my ears and my head and my everything.

I’ve learned this is part and parcel with guild leading. When I am working really hard to convince someone that I am not a bad leader, and I don’t think they believe me, this is almost guaranteed to happen. The first time it happened is clear in my memory. A raider had lost a friend or family member, and they came to me and said no one offered their condolences, and I suddenly felt both me and my guild were terrible people, that this raider may leave us now, and oh my god why am I so awful and why are my people so awful and what will we do when he flakes on us? He did not flake immediately then, but he did multiple times after that, the last time calling me a cunt because I had not responded to him in a long time.

Today, I had two panic attacks in the same conversation. I could feel my existence disappearing, and I had to slow down my typing, because I could not bear the feeling of my needle fingers vanishing into the void, and the noise of my typing ringing and bouncing around in my head. I could perhaps have stopped, and the first time I did, but it did not go away and the person on the other side was waiting for me to write more, waiting to decide how they would judge me and my guild. But, in the end, it’s just a panic attack, I know it will end. I can suffer through it if my words when I type can make things better for the guild.