My first panic attack happened when I was 7 years old. I saw Stephen King’s “The Langoliers” escorting 10 passengers on a red-eyed flight who woke up to see their plane missing and they were completely alone in an empty airport. . Somehow, watching this film, I made a narrative about death that I am fully convinced to be true: I have decided that when you die, your body leaves, but your soul lives. It’s as if your soul is stuck alone, in an empty airport, forever and ever.

I ran into the hall, fell on a ball and rubbed my thighs until blood came out. I combed my hair from the root until my hand came out of my hair with my fist. Brother Dave held my hands so he wouldn’t squeeze and pull me. My parents kissed me, took a hot bath and did everything to calm me down. They told me that the story I was convinced was true … no. I just watched a movie and I had an idea.

These types of panic attacks have been going on for over ten years. But everyone in my family and I believe that with the help of therapists these fears will disappear over time. These are “children’s gear”. And we weren’t the only ones who thought – I remember 10 years with a psychotherapist. He looked at me during the third session and said, “When you are 17, those thoughts will go away. So don’t think about that first ”. I have no idea what or why this age is called, but I’ve been waiting a few years. I thought I would wake up on the morning of my seventeenth year and the fears would be gone.

He was wrong. In fact, not long after we turned 17, we started an astronomy department with a science class. I was expelled from school for the duration of the department because disbursements were frequent. (On the scale of the world, the thought of loneliness as a floating soul has become more violent to them.) University years in New York. But the panic attacks that gave way to obsessive-compulsive disorder and depression were so exacerbated that I was forced to skip medical leave.

It was then that I increased my medications and began seeing a cognitive behavioral therapist. To express my fear of death, the therapist asked me to read essays about death – many Essays on death. I even wrote a song about it – I was instructed to write a song and play it while brushing every night.

During that time, I started to come up with an idea for a movie script called “Death, Ghosts and Other Things”. No wonder the script is about my teenage self trying to accept the death of a friend. The idea for the script was mine, but it was approved by my CBT therapist – after all, it’s another form of exposure therapy. And if I can go through the whole death scenario, I can overcome my fear. Is that right?

Over time, I continued to visit different doctors – my regular CBT therapist, EMDR specialists, psychiatrists – and eventually started to get better. The exposure exercises, combined with the three different medications I was taking, worked. I continued working on my script and I even took a virtual course at UCLA to finish it. I graduated from another college in Washington and am enjoying life instead of being afraid to finish it.

But like all good things, it didn’t last long.

Three months ago my brother Dave was diagnosed with an aggressive form of arachnoid lymphoma called Burkitt’s Lymphoma. And for the first time I was compelled to reconcile the calm I thought I had found in death with the thought that the nearest person might die.

Burkitt’s lymphoma is rare in Western countries and makes up only 1% of adult lymphomas. Leukemia Foundation. Burkitt’s is considered “highly aggressive” non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma because it spreads rapidly, usually to bone marrow, blood, and the central nervous system.

To some extent, Dave, who has been diagnosed with this type of cancer, is a full-fledged exposure therapist, as if my multi-year treatment were cutting off his middle finger and saying: What now, bitch ?!

The day I found out Dave was sick, I had my first panic attack in years. It was an intuitive response to these stories and I felt like I went through years of therapy through a window. My claustrophobia associated with sitting on an airplane reappeared. I went back to a drug I hadn’t taken in almost five years. My OCD was destructive and I started to have weird nervous tics in my legs. I called doctors I hadn’t seen in almost a decade because I felt I needed to reconnect with people who knew me when I was in the heart of fighting to the death. I also had to run away with my script. Not only did I encounter writer’s block, but I also had the same questions from my trusted readers: “What is medicine? What is a bow? What did your hero learn? ”I have not yet answered these questions.

Then, in the second round of Dave Chemiotherapy, something interesting happened: we started talking about death. Dave and I went straight where he was going. Ignorance. No exaggeration. There are no euphemisms.

In one of the conversations, Dave told me, “I learned to run.” He reminded me that he has no control over what happens, so what’s the point of pointing? At first it bothered my stomach. How did he become “fluid” about it? And if it “goes down”, I have a right to do so No. Let that be? As we continue to talk about it – death, faced with its possibility, and while maintaining a relatively normal life – has become less of a “case”. When you talk about death and talk to Dave specifically about it, death loses power. He has lost power over me.

Until last week, Dave underwent half of his chemotherapy. I am cautious in saying all the tumors were gone except for the patch on the left thigh. Doctors hope that the last three rounds of chemotherapy will eliminate the “little joke” we call and, if that doesn’t happen, they will use radiotherapy.

Despite my initial response to the news of Dave’s illness, my brother may have experienced what I feared for so many years, which eventually allowed me to express seeming anxiety with relative dizziness. It doesn’t mean “I’m just okay”. It doesn’t mean I walk with a smile on my face. This means that I update the news as it arrives and do not rush to make conclusions about what the outcome of events will be. In a way, it all seems like a cosmic disposition: for years I have been trying to overcome this fear as my brother recognized it. So maybe everything is weird and twisted and dark. Or maybe I’m a fool for saying this.

Last week, with the help of my brother, I wrote the new ending of my script. It features a character named Charlie and it’s about not recognizing or befriending a stranger. It is to understand that tomorrow is not safe, and even less after that. If I had caught up with my 29 years of life, these were the last sentences I used like “death, ghosts and other things”:

Charlie

“Such is death – I don’t know. Faced with uncertainty and unknown. ‘Maybe’ and ‘I don’t know’. And sometimes, it can be ‘yes’ or even two. Before I could think of all the answers needed: “In life. But now I find peace in not knowing. And maybe you did too. “

Shannon Wall is a writer, actor and director based in Los Angeles, California. When not in traffic with her dog Finn, Shannon is busy developing her first feature film, “Death, Ghosts, and Other Things,” which was named semifinalist in this year’s draft, the script competition. Big Apple Film Festival. And the Atlanta Film Festival 2022 Screenplay Competition.

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