Days That I Don’t Understand

I had a friend I met online who struggled with social anxiety. He used to tell me how he panicked at the idea of going to the university. I knew he wasn’t lying, but part of me couldn’t truly believe it, that a psychological disorder could control someone that much. I was telling him: you just needed to stop overthinking that people will hurt you, remind yourself there’s no reason to be afraid, and call it a day. Yes, I was ignorant. I tried to convince him to change something he couldn’t change, to “overcome it,” as if these were only voices in his head.

In 2022, I joined the University of Khartoum. I enjoyed the first few weeks before I flew out of the country and returned only for the first semester exam. like any freshman, I spent that first year in exploration, even though I was mostly abroad and only came back for exams and a few short periods.I was just given access to all sorts of materials. I just got good at googling things, MIT lectures, practical sessions, philosophy, logic, debates, activities. I wasn’t extreme/insane compared to people who signed up for every program and consumed whatever their eyes landed on, but I was selectively adding to my curiosity bucket, which happened to be very large. At that time, I was a firm believer in “having the skills” rather than just scanning books, which of course didn’t make me a healthy intellectual out of me, not the kind with good habits and healthy shape. No, it did quite the opposite. It put my health at risk.

I had early signs that something bad was about to happen. I even mentioned this to my friend Kenyata , telling him how much I lack entertainment and simple enjoyment in my life. I was in Morocco at the time, I told him that when I return back to Sudan, I wanted to explore life a bit, pause from the grind, and see what people did outside academics and work. I told him I planned to try different restaurants. And honestly the reason I wanted to have a pause was that, my brother had been asking about my social life. He somehow convinced me it was important for my health to go outside, socialize and meet some friends. I took his advice seriously because he’s an introvert like me, and I hoped that piece of wisdom came from his own experience. But when I came back, I overloaded myself with even more tasks. I consumed even more material, aggressively. The social promise I made to my brother vanished, and I completely forgot the need to entertain myself.

I remember that day clearly, the night before was long I spend the whole night awake and went into the exam without any rest, it was a calculus exam so you can imagine the amount of preparation I needed to put. after the exam, I went to the Computer Science department building at the faculty (the one basically colonized by IT students) for a reason I can’t even remember. I was somewhere in the middle of the first staircase. and without any premises I felt I was dying.

I experienced a tunnel vision , I felt I was isolated from the world, My heart started beating so fast for no reason, it didn’t feel normal at all. I was shocked to the point I could barely breath, I was lucky that the stairs had a handrail I can hold onto, I slowly made my way to the building’s entrance, where some seniors noticed there is something wrong with me, I’ve asked them to bring me water and mango juice (Maza) for some reason, maybe I thought it was a sugar problem. I was carried to what I think was the network admins office or something similar where I rested but my heart couldn’t slow down. Thankfully a girl from my batch called Esraa saw me and stood stayed with me stood by since,

I was taken to the hospital, where they put all those sensors to my chest and ran different scans and tests. After about half an hour of that relentless, heavy heartbeat, my heart finally slowed down. I expected nothing less than a stroke or some kind of heart condition. I even had this dramatic thoughts that I might die from heartbreak for reasons I had woven in my head. I thought, This must be it.

Surprisingly, all the scans were clean. I remember the doctor telling me my heart was “like a horse’s heart,” and that I didn’t have any heart disease. Although I didn’t understand the horse’s heart analogy I couldn’t care less, but It was a relief, although I was too mentally overwhelmed to process anything. I never followed up with the doctors to understand exactly what happened. My family arrived and took me home. My sister Zeinab, who is a doctor, told me it was a panic attack and explained what that meant. I watched some videos about it including this TEDx video I remember clearly, and I immediately related to it. I also joined online support groups and found comfort in hearing other people’s stories.

I was healing from this accident by listening to the stories of people who experienced the same thing. Knowing that others had gone through similar circumstances that I wasn’t alone was reasonable to me to relief. But I never looked into why I was triggered in the first other than knowing “stress can lead you here, and it will reoccur when you trigger it again.”

I eventually noticed a pattern: I felt discomfort whenever I was at the university. I remember this day very distinctly where I wanted any excuse not to go there. And luckily for me, the car I used to drive had almost no gas, and I wasn’t planning to stand in a long fuel queue. For but for some reason, though, I decided to go using public transportation, first a city train, then a bus. While crossing the bridge, Kobry Alhadeed, I started getting anxious. I felt afraid. And the closer I got to the university, the more scared I became. I can’t remember the lectures from that day, but it was the day I confirmed the pattern.

What shocked me was what happened after the lectures. A friend told me he wanted to pick something up from the Computer Science department building and asked me to walk with him before we return back home.I found myself standing in front of the entrance, and my stress levels were extreme. I couldn’t enter the building. That’s when I knew: this was the thing I feared. I was afraid that if I entered that building again, something would happen to me.

As I mentioned earlier, the building is officially the “CS Department,” but it’s mostly used for IT lectures. Since I’m a computer science student, I was never required to be there, I had no courses inside that building. But I used to go there anyway because many of our friends had lectures there and were always hanging out. What I didn’t realize is that I had been avoiding it the entire time without noticing. I didn’t enter that building again until the course finished.

Writing this now triggered me a bit. It seems that building really freak me out the most. While I was fighting these internal battles with panic attacks, the symptoms started to manifest as IBS. I thought it was genetic, most of my family has it, but my sister told me mine was caused by stress, and because you were very stressed recently, the IBS decided to accompany you. And she was right, the conversations I had with Kenyata about pausing the grind, was because a very subtle, inner voice was whispering to me, you need to take rest, but because I was exploring and the dopamine was always high, I couldn’t notice that I was under stress, stress that I love doing, stress out of things I loved, I later learned that even the things you love can make you sick, but it was too late. I noticed I only experienced the symptoms when I was stressed, not when I ate garbage food.

During that period, a sudden shift hit my social life, it changed suddenly. I couldn’t hold conversations longer than a minute. I avoided people, especially the ones I knew well. I felt that if I talked too much, I would die. And I mean that literally, that’s how it felt. Talking to people I knew became the scariest thing ever. Almost everyone in my batch noticed. “Ahmed has changed.” Some even sat with me and asked what was going on. I’m not sure what I told them, but I’m sure I said something like, “everything is fine”, because I had no words to describe what I was going through.

And suddenly, I had social anxiety. Me? Ahmed? the guy who initiated our batch group chat, who was nominated to be the batch representative, who used to be public and comfortable speaking. I wasn’t afraid of people. And now I had social anxiety? It was hard to believe. It was a dramatic shift. My online friend the one I used to make fun of when he told me he had social anxiety, I was slowly beginning to understand him, and to understand how ignorant I had been. I never imagined a day would come when my thoughts would no longer control my body.

I was skeptical. I made several assumptions to explain what I was experiencing. The first was returning to the idea that I actually had a heart disease, because all the discomfort was happening in my chest and around my heart. The second was that I might be bewitched or cursed somehow. And the third was that it was a punishment from God, because I had once thought my friend was exaggerating his condition, and making things up. Between those assumptions, I was lost. I genuinely didn’t know what was happening to me.

A new fear was unlocked during that time. where I went to picnic and I met some friends some of them for the first time, it is common in Sudan, we greeted each other with hugs, before handshakes. I remember seeing the first group of friends, and before we even hugged, my body was signaling that I should run, that I shouldn’t let anyone touch me. I’m someone who doesn’t like physical interactions, but not to the point of being terrified of it. I didn’t want this. I forced myself to hug them “normally”, and of course I didn’t die, but my stress levels was even higher than when I stood in front of the CS department building. At that moment, I believed for sure that I was bewitched. There was no way, that someone can get stressed and feel like they might die from hugging a friend, someone I should have been happy to see.

After about two hours, another group of friends arrived, and when it came time for the hugging thing again, I partially fainted and fell to the ground. My friend Mustafa sensed my heartbeat; it was beating to the max. I don’t remember the exact dialogue, but they gave me something to drink and eat. And then I was fine again. They were confused because my explanations weren’t clear; it wasn’t clear to me either.

I don’t remember a lot from that period because too many things were happening at once. But I do remember that after that picnic, I stopped meeting people entirely. I skipped university for several days. And it wasn’t long after that when the war started. To this day, I still can’t fully understand why all of this happened. But at least I evaluated my assumptions: I have came to the realization I wasn’t bewitched. After about eight months, I went back to working out and running, and being able to do those things easily, without any heart issues, boosted my confidence that I didn’t have a heart disease.

I was gradually disappearing from people’s life, I had no motivation to talk to people, I have more things that are telling me not to connect with people, I mean if just hugs are doing this to do. lol, Looking back, I see many people who have no explanation for why I disappeared from their lives, why my behavior changed so drastically. Things weren’t good even before the war they were getting worse, but at least they eventually led me to understand that stress was the cause, even when I couldn’t feel the stress itself. One of the strange, almost funny stories from that time: several weeks after the incident, the right side of my face became completely paralyzed. I couldn’t move it at all. I went to the hospital, they diagnosed me with Bell’s palsy , a condition where the facial nerve on one side of the face suddenly stops working. And of course I was bewitched, of all the diseases that I know, I was given a weird paralysis in the face, someone must have wanted to torture me. After reading more about it, I learned that stress can also cause it. I rested my heart by saying, Stress is the cause.

I remember I landed an internship but only went onsite for a total of three days. I remember barely speaking to my best friends during that entire period. I don’t remember much about how things were at home either, but I’m sure I kept myself constantly busy. Those days affected almost every part of my life. I tend to have a weaker memory for the bad times, but what I’ve written here are the extremes, the moments I simply couldn’t forget. The belief that I always had control over my mind and my body, that I can act as a commander was a heaven that I only realized when I lost control, when my mind and body turned against me. I was afraid that people would see me as vulnerable, I was afraid that with all this stress adding more and more complexity to my life, that I would be dependent on someone, I didn’t want to be burden. I didn’t want anyone to know that I wasn’t ok.