It’s easy to be unaware of the depth of terror when you are not faced with the thing you fear. It’s hard to articulate when your heart is pounding. Hard to write when your hands shake. Writing about this is hard. Four sentences in, I’m not sure it’s something I can do.

Over the summer, I saw no one. There was nothing to stop me from leaving the house only to work or to take walks alone. Nothing to stop me from retreating from my family—a thing I wasn’t even aware of doing until a friend who lives miles away and saw my summer only through my writing pointed it out. There were a few exceptions. Meetings, interactions I consented to out of guilt or obligation. Both, really. The extreme, irrational reluctance with which I faced those should have told me. It didn’t.

I don’t know why this has happened. What I know is that I barely made it through the first day of classes yesterday. That acting normal in the face of an overwhelming urge to bolt from a room that contains more than one or two people is a supreme act of will. Speaking above half-volume is not to be mentioned. Speaking at all is not to be mentioned. The cafeteria is torture. I left a meeting room full of interesting, lively, creative people last night, went back to my dorm, and dropped the class because an hour of fighting back tears was enough to let me know working on the lit magazine staff is no longer something I can do. What I know is that just writing down the facts like this has me on the verge of a fucking panic attack. And that I will have to do it again tomorrow. All of it.

I don’t know how.

I cannot understand, cannot come to terms with the fact that going to class is apparently too much for me, that I fear people but I cannot be left alone. I have always lived with fear like this, but I haven’t been so helpless in the face of it for years.

I have to do it again tomorrow. I have to do my fucking homework. I can’t speak, I can’t answer emails, I can’t I can’t I can’t.

What I will do, I don’t know, but this can’t continue. I cannot afford for it to continue. Explaining it like this is a victory, I guess, but it doesn’t feel like one and I don’t know how I can even say I want to speak when everything I have is conspiring to keep me silent.