Reading with Anxiety; Recognizing panic/anxiety attacks in novels?
Heya!
After quite the few «Blogging with Anxiety» posts that i’ve made this far, I’ve also gotten the lightning bolt while reading that hey, it does impact my reading aswell. Mostly with recognizing and feeling what our characters are going through.
Sometimes, you’d be consuming a kind of media (in this case a novel, though it might be a movie or etc.) and although it hasn’t been said yet that the character in question is suffering from anxiety, or any other related kind of mental illness, something just clicks.
The way the character behaves after a certain circumstance: the way it’s described how they feels, the environment, the whole “surrounding” of whatever is happening within the novel at this precice instant makes me recognize right away that it’s a panic attack. The confirmation usually comes later on the reading that it was indeed what it was.
This had happened to me at multiple times. I recognized the signs within tv shows or movies i’d be watching with my parents, and while reading aswell (this post was inspired by the one in “Emergency Contact”).
Not only do I find it quite nice that the creators has pin-pointed the feeling to where an individual that has been through that recognize what’s happening, but it’s also slapping me in the face of how recovered I really am.. I can’t tell 100% if what my physician told me is true, but it already needs so much to realize that you yourself are going through something and identify what’s going on; it’s another thing completely to acknowledge it happening within someone else, without saying that everyone might have different symptoms and etcetera.
Have you ever paid attention to that ?
Is there something else that you can mostly always “identify” before the plot leads you to the answer of what happened?