Breathlessness

Breathlessness is the second track off the EP Of Course It's Personal. It is written in the key of Abm, in 4/4 time, at 128 BPM.

Background

As long as I can remember, I've been emetophobic. Even as young as five years old, I remember having panic attacks at the smallest stomach discomfort. At that age, I had a four-day hospital stay because I swore there was "something wrong" with my stomach. The doctors, of course, found nothing, because it was a panic attack.

The panic attacks continued for my entire childhood and adolescence. At the first sign of indigestion, cramps, or even mild discomfort, I would launch into a full-blown panic attack. These would sometimes last hours, long into the night. Sometimes the entire night.

Around the time I entered high school I noticed that loss of appetite was present in essentially any stomach illness, as far as I knew. If you have the stomach flu, you aren't hungry. I also realized the opposite was true: if you are hungry, you aren't sick.

Armed with this information, I began a dangerous and disordered pattern of eating: eat as lightly and infrequently as possible to maximize how often I was hungry. If I was hungry, I could know with 100% certainty I was not sick, and whatever panic attack I was having would go away.

This pattern of food avoidance and disordered eating continued for several years, until I was thin enough that others started to notice. I eventually got therapy and medication, and was able to grow past the disordered eating, and today I'm back at a healthy weight and am able to eat normally.