Panic attack
Posted to LinkedIn on 2025-11-20. The text below is the post as published.
I had a full-fledged panic attack at CDC in January 2017. I’m interrupting my series on data-related resources for learners to share a little about myself.
That 2017 panic attack struck during an in-person meeting of senior staff. We were planning how to use $17 million of seed money to boost CDC’s ability to do good things with surveillance data. In that moment, I thought that I was going to die: I was the same age that my father was when he died, and I was sure that the elevated heart rate, chest pain, and shortness of breath were signs that his fate was about to become my fate. One blessed advantage of working with physicians: I was able to talk with a colleague and calm down enough to see that this was, in fact, a panic attack. I didn’t die that day.
I did, however, seek talk therapy. I was diagnosed with anxiety disorder and saw that I identified so closely with my work that I had little psychic room to maneuver and repair my injured coping mechanisms. Once I regained confidence in my coping, I graduated myself from talk therapy and continued on my merry way, still overidentifying with work (but masking it to myself beautifully).
I thought that retirement would free me of all that, since I could no longer tie my sense of self to my work-a-day. To the contrary, my anxiety progressively intensified, but I didn’t even see it. When a window of self-efficacy recently opened, I sought care. A month or so later, I’m told that I chatter more and laugh more. Heck, I’ve even experienced hope.
I don’t think that I was in willful denial – just honest ignorance. Now I see that I’ve had at least a half dozen panic attacks since grad school, tied up with work-life and personal grief. I’m sharing this story here because it both helps me to reframe my place in the workforce and to promote empathy, sympathy, and compassion for work colleagues who have gone through it and who go through it. I lift them up.