3:37 AM

I awoke with a jolt, like my nervous system got hit with an electric shock.

It was early in the morning. I didn’t need to be awake yet, still too early for that.

Something seemed off. It was subtle, but I could tell something wasn’t right. Like completing a puzzle with only a handful of pieces left and you get that first inclination that there is one piece missing.

Then I felt the wave building in the back of my head. I was lying on a beach at night, but the moon was bright enough that I could see. I was lying there in the sand, parallel to the water, just at the spot where the tide reaches its peak and recedes back, waiting for the next wave to inch further forward.

There was a pull to my right, as if the tide was rushing out. I couldn’t see it at first, but I could feel the wave building. It was massive, unlike anything I had ever seen before. It kept building and building until its shadow blocked out what little light there was on the beach.

The wave started to crest and curl over top of me and I knew I had only seconds before it crashed and pummeled me with its force. How long would I be under water? How would I be able to see which way to go to reach the surface?

And then I realized I couldn’t move.

I was completely paralyzed, lying flat on my back with my arms at my side. It was like Snidely Whiplash tied me up and left me to die.

The fear was rising, my heart was pounding in my throat, I couldn’t breathe, and I was sweating profusely.

This wasn’t the first panic attack I had, but it was by far the worst.

I felt helpless. There was nothing I could do to intervene and gain control of the situation. My ears started to ring and I started to see stars from the lack of oxygen getting to my brain.

Then I realized I wasn’t alone. I wasn’t on the beach at all, I was in my bed, and my wife was lying there, asleep, next to me.

It took all of my strength to extend my left leg, just a few inches was all I needed to touch my wife’s leg.

That was the constant I needed. The anchor back to reality. She would prove to be this many times over during this period.

Reality crept back in and I recognized that I was lying in bed. The beach and the wave had disappeared. I reminded myself that I was having a panic attack and what I needed to do right then was to outlast it. From my previous experience, I knew that it wouldn’t last more than a few minutes. I knew that panic would extend it, and the path to the end was through calmness and relaxation.

I just needed to be patient.

I layed there for what felt like minutes but was probably only seconds. My breathing and heart rate slowly returned to more normal rhythms.

Soon, it was over. I lay there a few minutes longer to allow my strength to come back to me. I got up, slowly, and made my way to the bathroom. That episode had the same toll on my body as a full HIIT workout.

I turned on the light in the bathroom, sat on the edge of the tub, and tried to understand why that just happened.

I started to cry.

After a few minutes, I gently stood up and slowly made my way back to bed. My shirt was soaked with sweat and needed to be changed.

I looked at the clock on my cellphone: 3:37 am.

Less than an hour before I had to be up for work.

I couldn’t sleep. Should I just get up and start working? It felt like there was always something that needed to be done. Between coaching, program administration, the lawsuit, my wife’s illness, and our children, it felt like my plate was always overflowing, and something was always getting left behind. Might as well use these extra hours if I can’t get back to sleep.

But I just stayed in bed. I didn’t sleep at all, just lay there looking up at the ceiling. Despite everything I seemingly needed to get done, I didn’t want to be anywhere other than in bed beside my wife.

I don’t know the exact date the above story took place, just that it occurred at some point during the winter of 2018. My business had been teetering on the brink of collapse for over a year at that point, and would remain in that constant state of suspense for quite a while longer.

Compounding the almost dire situation my business was in was the fact that my wife was incredibly sick during this period. Lyme disease had gone undetected, and was still not diagnosed at this point. The disease was causing her adrenal system to fail. She was constantly exhausted and experiencing constant bouts of brain fog.

Word finding was becoming especially challenging for her. There were times when she knew what she wanted to say, but couldn’t get the words to come out of her mouth. She would have to use other words to describe a single word she was looking for:

“Do you want to take the kids to the…the place with the swings and seesaw…”

“The park?”

“Ugh, yes.”

My wife and I were the parents of two young children, ages seven and four at the time.

I had the right mindset, in many ways, to get through this period. I didn’t give up and hide. In fact, the business kept running in such a way that no one really knew anything was wrong at all, let alone how bad things really were.

That was my goal: for everything to appear normal…

…to my customers.

…to my friends.

…to my family.

This relentless mindset kept me going, and also kept me trapped.

I didn’t ask for help because this was my problem. I was going to fight my way out of it without burdening anyone else. I didn’t let anyone outside of my immediate family in to see what was really going on because I believed that vulnerability would undermine the confidence people had in me.

I kept going because I believed that if I stopped, even for a moment, everything would collapse. I had become a master plate spinner.

The reality was that I was slowly collapsing on the inside. The panic attacks were my body’s way of telling me that things were not in a good place; this wasn’t a sustainable, long-term plan of attack.

We were still at least a year away from a resolution to the issue that was hanging over the business, and a great portion of that was completely out of my control.

I realized that I needed to loosen my grip on everything. I was holding on to every detail of the business so tight that I was actually choking it. So I slowly off-loaded enough tasks to make things more manageable.

The business survived, although it took years after that to become stable. I’m happy to say that my wife’s recovery to full health was much faster.

I look back at that period with a smile and a shake of my head, like Neal Page reliving the past three days of his life on the “L” at the end of Planes, Trains, and Automobiles. Tragedy was ultimately averted, the lawsuit was settled, and I was eventually able to move on.

The head shake is for the mistakes that I made during that period. The smile is for the lessons I gained from those mistakes.