I Happen...

Over the years I've had many a panic attack.

It happened in a piano concert once; I was supposed to play "Song of Joy", and I knew it pretty well back to front as I'd been practicing it a lot, so it wasn't that I had just forgotten how to play it. I think that I would have been okay if they hadn't turned all the lights off except for the one that was on me. I know they are all thinking how stupid I look in this itchy brown kilt with it's giant safety pin thing I was made to wear. And who wears long white socks with sandals? I look like a boy dressed up in drag.

I don't even want to play on this white piano; I want to play on the big black one in the corner with the foldy lid that I can see the strings in. Eventually, after what seems like a month, I get up and run off. The stupid audience claps anyway. Like that's going to help. When that didn't improve me I gave up playing. It was easier. I was in a play, another time, when it happened again, but that time wasn't as noticeable apparently. I thought it had been.

Another time, me and some friends got caught by a security guard geting some 'free' photos from those passport booths you find in shopping centres and I totally freaked out. I don't think I had even entertained the idea that we might have actually gotten caught until we did. Someone who was with me that night reminded me about it recently, telling me who had committed what parts of the crime, and I can honestly say I had completley forgotten about it until she told me what had happened.

So, trying to clarify things, I asked someone else who was there, who told me she recalled me sobbing hysterically at the guard, begging him not to call our parents or the police. Apparently, he had already taken down our names and numbers. I can only guess, now, that he must have felt sorry for me in some way, for reacting in the way that I did. I guess he might never have seen anybody totally disintegrate in front of him, like I did, before then.

In the end, after I had convinced him to let us go, that we had learnt our lesson and knew it was bad and wouldn't do it ever again, I laughted and joked to my friend's and said how lucky it was that my acting skills had kicked in at the vital moment. Very lucky indeed. I reckon I'll do alright if I ever have to go to court.

I think at the time I was trying to put a light spin on who and what my friends had just seen me be, but I remember now just feeling really scared of being 'discovered' for being mental and totally beyond my own control. It wasn't the 'getting-in-trouble part' that bothered me, you realise; it was the suddenly been made aware of 'what-kind-of-person I am part' that was scary. I've never fucked up really badly before but I have had a hard time in the past coming to terms with what I do and how I act when I think that no one is watching me, so much so that when I discover I have been seen being who I am, I am horrified.

There are some things that I have done in my life that I will never tell anyone about. I just hope that the people who have seen me when 'I happen' never show up on my doorstep.