It's no secret to anyone that this pandemic has had detrimental effects on people's mental health. Moving during the pandemic as well as graduating to attend a new university has caused me to pick up nervous habits and relapse in terms of emotional wellness. As part of my treatment, I had to learn grounding techniques to help myself out of a panic attack.

One of the techniques I practice is grounding, where I attempt to ground myself back to reality by focusing on my environment.

Here are some of thoughts I've had during an episode. Listen. No I mean really, really listen. Can you hear it? Can you hear? Nothing. Everything. Your own blood pumping through your veins, the stillness of the air. The silence grows heavier. The silence begins to consume you and soon enough dark spots dance across the edge of your vision. You begin to breathe and the dark spots fade, but do not go away. All around you, in the stillness, in the quiet, is darkness. Yet through the darkness that now coats the back of your mind, you can still feel the heavy silence. You can feel it on the tip of your tongue and in the forefront of your brain. It buzzes in your ears, but soon grows louder and louder with each breath you take.

No, don't try to control your breathing. Do not stop breathing. It is imperative to life that you keep breathing, for your own sake.

Except, with every moment you stop breathing, the silence gets louder and louder, pulsing and growing like a tsunami on the horizon. It begins to take over, it begins to cloud all other rational thoughts until the only thing you can think of is the silence itself. You cannot scream or make noise, for the silence owns you now. You cannot remember a time in your life when you did not experience this silence. It seems to grow and grow, crescendoing with no end in sight. It crashes against your ears and thrums inside your skull until it becomes too much and you take a deep breath in because it feels like you are drowning in this silence. And then. And then the silence ebbs away, slowly, as if disentangling itself from your very being, from where it pried open and latched onto your very bones.

You begin breathing normally again, as the silence seems to disappear into nothing, as if it was never there in the first place. Now you can hear the hum of the heater and the rush of cars as they pass beneath your window. This is a different kind of silence. The darkness still lingers, waiting for a moment to strike, but you know darkness is more merciful than silence, so you close your eyes and finally, finally, fall asleep.

Don't forget to wake up.