'How my crippling anxiety was brought on by a disaster movie.'

Family friends had taken my sister and me to see Earthquake at the cinema.

Earthquake was a disaster movie, which did not scrimp on the disaster. As I watched cars fall through cracks in the freeways and buildings collapse, I felt engulfed, as though the room around me was shaking too. It was.

Earthquake offered a brand new cinema experience: Sensurround. The audience didn’t just hear the carnage; they felt it pulse through their bodies. I was scared out of my mind. Literally.

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I was so scared that I wasn’t consciously thinking that I was scared. Instead, I felt sick and dizzy, like I wanted to throw up and pass out at the same time.

My sister took me to the bathroom, after which I assured her I was fine, but I would wait in the foyer by myself until the movie was finished because my tummy still felt funny.

Some time later, I found myself in another cinema with friends watching The Towering Inferno. (1975 was a bumper year for the disaster genre.)

As fireballs exploded, I felt a familiar, sweaty nausea rising. I suddenly remembered what had happened to me during Earthquake and my little brain very quickly realised what my body was doing was somehow related to what I was watching.

I was determined not to spend the entire movie out in the foyer, queasy and pale. I had to find a way to focus so I could stay in the cinema.

I started counting the seats. Front row. Beginning from the left. For every seat, I had to click my teeth together - once on the left hand side, once on the right hand side - then I could move on. I counted every seat in the cinema. Then I started again. And again. Until the movie finished.

And that’s how I watched movies at the cinema for the next few years. Yep, all movies, even those well outside of the disaster genre. Every time the theatre went dark, my sick and dizzy self took over. And so I stopped it by counting the seats with my teeth.

It would have made sense to tell someone about this but are you freaking serious?

Say it out loud?

“Hey Mandy, which is your favourite member of Sherbet and also do you click your teeth to stop yourself from fainting?”

My “episodes” were insidious, inky clouds I did not understand and did not have a name for, so how could I begin to explain them to someone else? I didn’t even know how to tell my mother.

Left untreated, of course, they burrowed their way into my life in other ways. Visiting someone in hospital, on a date that went badly, travelling on a theatre tour. There was no pattern to clue me into their violent arrival. It seems unthinkable now but I didn’t know what was happening to me, which explains how more than once I landed in the emergency department with suspected appendicitis.

Finally, when I was in my early 20s, The Sydney Morning Herald ran a front-page story about women’s anxiety being linked to nausea.

My whole life rushed at me like a truck. Everything made sense.

I suffered from anxiety.

Okay, this may all sound very late-bloomery now, but let’s remember, this is 25 years ago. This was a time before chia or selfies or mental health were things we shared. Anxiety was not discussed.

And I certainly didn’t discuss it freely straight away either. While at last I knew why whenever I felt worry or fear, my body shut down, I still felt like a freak. My panic attacks kept coming, but my anxiety now presented itself in other ways too. My hair falling out and leaving me with bald patches was a highlight.

Meeting my husband, Wayne, was when everything began to change. Firstly, he was very helpful in getting me to see a great therapist. Secondly, he loved me, and all my bald, panicky bits.

My therapist helped me learn to manage my anxiety as well as get to the bottom of a few things about the root of it.

I know I am someone who feels things deeply. I cry easily, I laugh easily. I think we have established that I am terrified easily. I sense emotion porously which makes me a very good writer and actor but, at times, has made me a barely functioning human being.

I can accept now the part of me that is prone to anxiety is also the part of me that is highly creative and, oddly, very productive. I’m not afraid of it any more. I have embraced who I am and have been liberated because of it.

If I feel anxious, I express it, and the anxiety bubble pops. I really wish I’d known that sooner.

Still, better late than never. I haven’t had a panic attack for a long time.

And now I’ve even made my own movie that I can watch in the dark cinema, without counting the seats with my teeth.

Robyn Butler is the writer and star of Now Add Honey, not a disaster movie, which will be released in cinemas on November 5.

This piece was first published at RendezView and was republished here with full permission.

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