I had my first panic attack outside the Luas stop at St Stephen’s Green, though at the time I was certain it was a heart attack, a stroke, or some private punishment arriving in public. It was a wet Thursday in November, the kind of Dublin rain that doesn’t fall so much as settle on you. I had just left a job interview near Merrion Square, one I had spent weeks pretending not to care about. I remember the shine of the tracks, the green light of the tram coming in, and then the sudden awful certainty that I could not get on it, could not stand, could not breathe.
People moved around me in that careful city way, giving space without staring too hard. I sank down onto the low wall near the stop and tried to make myself small. My hands had curled into claws. My tongue felt too large for my mouth. I was twenty-nine and I had always thought of myself as capable, the sort of person who carried plasters, phone chargers, spare change. That afternoon I could not manage the simple act of inhaling.
A woman stopped beside me and asked if I was alright. I said yes, because panic makes liars of us. She didn’t believe me, but she didn’t fuss either. She was maybe in her early forties, wearing a navy raincoat and carrying a paper bag from a bookshop. She asked if she could sit near me. Not touch me, not call anyone yet, just sit. I nodded because speaking felt dangerous.
Her name was Maeve. She told me mine only after I managed to tell her. She spoke softly, as if we were in a library rather than beside traffic and trams and people rushing towards Grafton Street. She asked me to name five things I could see. I could only find three at first: a red umbrella, a cyclist’s silver helmet, a coffee cup rolling in the gutter. “Three is plenty,” she said. “We’ll do three.”
I kept apologising. I apologised for crying, for shaking, for taking up the wall, for making her late to wherever she was meant to be. She said she had been on her way to meet a friend in Bewley’s but had already texted to say she would be delayed. There was no drama in it. No performance of kindness. She said it the way someone might say they had missed one bus and would catch another.
After twenty minutes, I was still trembling. After forty, I was embarrassed enough to try standing, but my knees buckled and I sat back down again, ashamed in a way that felt almost worse than the panic. Maeve opened her paper bag and took out a bottle of water and a packet of mints. She placed them beside me, not in my hand. “You don’t have to be ready just because you wish you were,” she said.
That sentence undid me. I had been ready for years, or trying to be. Ready after my father died. Ready when my mother leaned on me too heavily. Ready at work, ready with friends, ready in every room where I was frightened someone might discover I was held together with string. Sitting there, under the wet trees, I realised my body had staged a rebellion because I had ignored every quieter request.
Maeve stayed for three hours. Not three symbolic minutes that later became three hours in memory, but three actual hours. The light changed. Office workers thickened on the pavements. The rush-hour Luas came and went. Once, a man asked if we needed help and Maeve thanked him and said we had it. Another time, she called my sister from my phone because I couldn’t unlock it without shaking. She put it on speaker and helped me say, “I’m safe, but I need you.” I had never said that sentence so plainly in my life.
My sister arrived from Phibsborough in a taxi, frantic and furious with love. By then I was exhausted, emptied out, as if the panic had burned through me and left only ash. Maeve stood up slowly, brushing rain from
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