What Having a Panic Attack in Iceland Taught Me About Death
Or, "Panic on the Streets of Reykjavik"
A shuttle bus in rural Iceland, surrounded by strangers, and thousands of miles away from the nearest friends and family, is a pretty bad place to have a panic attack. It was the summer after my Junior year of college, and I was stopping over in Iceland on my way to Spain for a summer internship. After the red-eye from Boston landed at Keflavik International Airport, I boarded the Flybus that would take me to Reykjavik, where I would hop on another shuttle to my hostel. I’d spent months excitedly counting the days until my trip. But as the bus sped past the barren, moss-covered volcanic rocks of the Icelandic countryside, my heart suddenly started pounding out of my chest.
In retrospect, it made sense that I was freaking out. It was my first time ever traveling alone. I hadn’t been able to sleep at all on the plane. And I was a brown person stepping foot in Europe for the first time. All perfectly valid reasons to be anxious that I’d somehow failed to anticipate. As the bus pulled into Reykjavik, I remembered another one of the reasons I was panicking: in a few hours, I was going to meet up with a couple of total strangers to drive around rural Iceland.
Early Warning Signs
I was a nervous kid growing up. I had a hard time falling asleep the night before soccer tournaments or cello recitals. School dances were my ninth circle of hell. Even as an adult, I get extremely nervous in unfamiliar social situations. It’s something I’ve never been able to shake.
But panic attacks were new for me. I had only had one up to that point, and had chalked it up to a one-off occurrence — an outlier triggered by my first bad breakup. Looking back, Iceland was the first sign that panic attacks were going to be a recurring thing that I’d have to deal with throughout my adult life.
Panic on the Streets of Reykjavik
To calm myself down mid-panic on the bus, I’d told myself that everything would be fine once I got to the hostel and could get some sleep. But when I arrived at the hostel around 8:00 AM, the front desk clerk — a tall viking with a huge red beard — told me I was going to have to wait until the afternoon to check into my room (the fact that I’d even thought that getting into the room that early might be a possibility shows you what an innocent, sweet summer child I was at the time).
That meant I had four hours to kill until I was supposed to meet up with the strangers. So I did what anyone would do in that situation — I locked myself in a bathroom stall and tried to sit quietly for four hours while hyperventilating.
This worked for about half an hour until I started getting paranoid that someone at the hostel was going to notice that I had locked myself in the bathroom. And the only thing worse than having a panic attack is having a panic attack coupled with the embarrassment of someone noticing you’re having a panic attack.
Doing my best to play it cool, I went outside for a walk and wandered up and down the waterfront for about half an hour until I started getting paranoid that someone was going to notice me pacing up and down the same stretch of sidewalk a couple hundred times.
So I went back to the hostel bathroom and locked myself in a stall again. Then went for another walk half an hour later. Rinse and repeat for four hours.
The CouchSurfers
Finally, after what felt like a thousand cycles of walk-hide-walk-hide, it was time to find the strangers I’d met on Couchsurfing. For those who don’t know what CouchSurfing was, it was basically the broke man’s AirBnB. In theory, it was a community where people would offer their couches for travelers to crash on, with the idea that some couchsurfer somewhere down the road would reciprocate the favor. In practice, the site was mostly European men offering up their couches with the hopes of sleeping with American college students. But CouchSurfing also had a travel forum — the broke man’s TripAdvisor — where travelers visiting the same cities at the same time could link up ahead of time to plan activities together and split travel costs. And that part of the website had fewer European sex pests.
That’s how I met Pavel and Anka (not their real names because this was twelve years ago, and I’ve completely forgotten their real names). They were traveling to Iceland from the Czech Republic and were looking to split the cost of a rental car. Given that splitting a rental car was much cheaper than booking a group tour, and given that I was on a limited stipend that needed to last me the entire summer, I was on board. We agreed that we’d meet up outside my hostel at noon, drive around the Golden Circle (Iceland’s most popular tourist route), and then they’d drop me off in a town called Hella where I’d catch the bus back to Reykjavik while they continued eastward.
You know how sometimes you make plans and then, when the day comes, you really don’t feel like leaving the house? This was like that except the reason I didn’t want to follow through with the plans was because a voice in the back of my mind was saying, “This Czech couple is going to lure you into the Icelandic wilderness, stab you, and then dump your body in a geothermal lagoon.”
Yet, when it came time to meet up with them, it never actually occurred to me to just not show up. Somehow, in the moment, driving off with two complete strangers felt like a relief compared to having to wander the streets / sit in a bathroom for another three hours until my room was ready. Sure, they might try to murder me, but at least trying to not get murdered would give me something to occupy my mind, you know?
Actual Danger
Within a half hour of driving with Pavel and Anka, my panic attack receded. I spent the rest of the day enjoying the sites along the Golden Circle — the geyser, the waterfall, the rift valley between the North American and Eurasian tectonic plates where every tourist takes a picture captioned “Just walked over to Europe, lol!” Once I had cheesy Instagram photo ops to distract me, my mind quieted down.
The drive took longer than expected, and by the time we left the last stop, we had to rush to get to Hella before the last bus left at 6:30 PM. By this point, it had started raining hard, and we could barely see the road ahead as Pavel raced to get us to the bus depot in time.
That last hour, Pavel was driving at least 20 km/hr over the speed limit on windy, Icelandic roads he’d never driven on before, in pouring rain, and piss-poor visibility. It was the first time that day that I was in real, objective danger. Had we skidded off the road, we would’ve been hours away from medical assistance, assuming anyone found us at all. So you can imagine I was crawling out of my skin with terror, especially having had the four-hour panic attack just hours before.
Only, instead of going into all-out panic mode, I could barely keep my eyes open. I drifted in and out of sleep, exhausted from the red-eye and a long, stressful day.
That’s the cruel irony of anxiety. The things that trigger fear and panic — the things we spend so much mental energy on — are very rarely the things that actually put us in real danger. And we can become so worn out from dealing with the irrational fears that we fail to see the actual dangers ahead of us.
I’ve Died a Million Times
Panic attacks are something I continue to struggle with. Thankfully, with therapy, I’ve gotten better at recognizing my triggers, and learned breathing exercises to calm myself down before things get too out of hand. But when a bad panic attack comes along, my heart beats so hard and so fast that I become convinced I’m having a heart attack (of course, it’s when your heart isn’t beating that you really need to worry, but try telling that to my panic-addled brain).
My panic attacks might be one of the reasons why, as I’ve gotten older, I’ve become increasingly obsessed with death. When I get into “catastrophizing mode,” I start to envision every possible scenario that could result in death, from mundane activities like getting in the car to go grocery shopping, to broader fears like the climate and the political situation in the U.S.
There’s an old saying that if you fear death, you die a thousand times. If that’s the case, I’ve easily died a million deaths — and pictured them all in stunning, 4K clarity. This obsessive thinking has only gotten worse in recent months as I get ready to become a parent — thus becoming responsible for another life whose death I already fear more than my own.
But when it comes to death, there is something that gives me a bit of comfort. It’s a hope that stems from that panic attack I had in Iceland twelve years ago. That when death does come for me, and I have a sneaking suspicion it eventually will, I hope that it feels a little bit like being in the back seat of that car speeding through rural Iceland in the rain — that at the moment when I should be the most terrified and the road ahead feels the least certain — all I want to do is lean my head back, close my eyes, and rest.
Panic on the Streets of Reykjavik: Director’s Cut
There’s more to this story than I was able to include here. Because, as it turns out, the plan to catch a bus in Hella back to Reykjavik was not nearly as straightforward as Pavel and Anka had made it out to be. Long story short, I ended up taking a bus to the middle of nowhere late at night with no idea how to get back to my hostel. If you want to read that story, I’ll be sharing it with paid subscribers in my monthly roundup of extra comedy tidbits, La Ñapa. You can upgrade at any of the following levels:
Very authentic and enjoyable read. I too suffered through panic attacks for about a decade in my youth. But when you read about them or remember them they seem comical as they are so irrational. Like the old silent comedy movies
Well this is timely. I just had my second panic attack yesterday, having wrongfully assumed that my first, years ago, was an anomaly. Thanks for sharing! We need more stories like this to give each other language for what feels like certain death. At the very least, it can save us Americans from unnecessary medical bills. Because the only thing worse than feeling like you're dying is anticipating the bill that comes from making it out alive!