More by: Karen

Any person who has ever had a panic attack knows the feeling. The sudden horrific excitment being sent to the brain. That feeling is a concentration of searching for somewhere you can be by yourself in order to calm down. When I had my first panic attack, my mom told me to “think of happy things and it’ll help you to calm down.”

In Johnny Cash’s biography, he talks about this pain that he gets in his body. The book was written  five years before he died so of course he‘s gonna have pain in his body. He was an old man. But what he does when he gets this pain is this: he lays down in an empty part of his house, or tour bus, and lets his mind take him away to a spot in Alaska he once visited where two rivers meet. To him, this is his calm place.

I have a calm place. I have several, actually. I’m always trying to collect them. One of the places is in Shereen and Shahla Taheri’s grandma and grandpa’s backyard in Hastings, by the river. I was there a couple of years ago for one of their cousin’s graduation party. It was just so peaceful and relaxing and as I layed in the grass, I felt like nothing was wrong in the world.

Another place of mine is a made up place–I pretend i’m in a field. Sometimes it’s just acres and acres of grass, sometimes its wheat. It’s always a little breezy, but warm. I’m always laying on my back, with my arms behind my head. Its totally quiet and nothing is bothering me.

When I get panic attacks, I try to think of these places. It helps to imagine myself there so that my brain gets sidetracked and forgets that i’m having a panic attack.

My best moment was when I was in rochester, NY for a punk fest. My friend John drove all the way up from Florida in order to hang out with me that weekend. Of course he tried to brush it off at the time, saying that he was already planning on visiting his family in Yonkers, NY and that he “might as well stop in rochester along the way and visit.”

John and I had admitted that we had crushes on each other not too long before that, so we were super excited about seeing each other.

The night we met up, we slept in the basement of this big punk house . We were freezing to death on the hard cement floor with a thin blanket for both of us, which wasn’t the ideal romantic setting.

There was this little weird half-room off to the side that some dude was sleeping in that night. We found out when we woke up that it had a mattress in it! So we immediately starting planning out how we were going to snatch this “room” away for the next night before anyone else could.

So the fest played on all day, and after it was done, all the punks piled into their vehicles and made their way to the house. John and I raced over there and snatched that room up quick before anyone else could. This was going to be great. More blankets had made themselves known, including a heater lap blanket that we made up on the mattress.

This was the “calm place” of all other calm places I have stored away in my head. I’m laying on this bed, with the heater blanket keeping me cozy. No one else is in this room* except for John, who is peaking out the door for other room-predators. The mattress was actually really comfortable. I was really happy to be there with John too. And I said “I’m very comfortable right now” outloud, but I wished there was a bigger word for it because it was the moment of all moments and it just didn‘t come close enough to how i felt. It could possibly be the happiest moment of my life. It’s up there, definitely.

To you, it may not seem like that important of a moment. Of course I could never show you or  help you feel everything I was feeling at that moment, but just be assured that it could definitely compare with your happiest moment. It had the strength to combat any panic attack or sleepless night or bad day I could have.

I called up John last night after I read that part in Johnny Cash’s biograph about his calming place.  I told him about that moment, to which he said he liked that it meant a lot to me because he was in it, and then he told me one of his happiest moments. It’s something in the way you know these little things about a person that really makes you appreciate them.

*Actually, one of the dudes from The Ergs!  tried really hard to sleep in the little room with us, but we wanted to makeout and stuff later, so no amount of love for his band was going to persuade us enough to let him sleep in there with us.