My Safe Place
I told him so before, but Rudy is my safe place.
A few days ago I had a panic attack which involved me saying ridiculous, incoherent things and after a 17-minute phone call (I had to look it up; it felt more like 30 seconds) Rudy had me all like “What just happened?”
In a good way.
Last I left off I thought he was mad at me. (If you don’t remember that story you can find it here.)
I was already in a state and entered panic mode shortly thereafter. There were some missing puzzle pieces for Rudy, as I had been wondering when I should discuss them or if they needed to be mentioned at all.
What he managed to do for me in light of that missing information is nothing short of a miracle in my book.
Here’s what I told him helped me after doing my standard panic attack postmortem:
1. You stayed calm when I called, even though I was a panicky mess.
2. You told me you weren’t Dan and repeated that you weren’t mad at me, bringing me back to the present
3. You didn’t go out for a smoke, metaphorically.
By the end of the call he was laughing a little bit. I don’t remember why. At the time I remember feeling like it wasn’t good, but his laughter is my favorite sound in the world anyway. I just shut up and my mind just shut off. With nothing for my panic to feed on, the episode abruptly stopped.
I still had to deal with the aftermath, but the point is the aftermath started right away.
I’m days past the event and still can’t stop thinking how monumental it was for me.
What if everyone (and by everyone I mean Dan) treated me compassionately? What if everyone had this power over my panic attacks? What if I had this power?
I think I could be a better person with that kind of support, and I want to be better more than I want Oreos.
When I told Mom that Rudy was mad at me, her advice was, “Emily, don’t you dare take care of somebody else before you.”
“I won’t. I promise,” I told her.
Who knew that promise would be so easy to keep?