I'm on the Verge of a Breakdown...

I will never forget the first anxiety attack I ever had.

Everything seemed, well, fine! I escaped the wintry gloom of New York City after what seemed like an endless stretch of bad weeks. Fights with friends, bullsh*t tickets from the NYPD, a bad internship, and an even worse living situation. I was broke, tired, and ready to get out.

I was with my fellow band member (and now fiancé) Wesley visiting his family in Louisville, Kentucky. The Ohio River had just flooded over 30 feet... but the sun was shining, warming up the breeze as it blew through the poplar trees. It was the first signs of spring, and there was a buzz in the air louder than the galloping of racehorses training at Churchill Downs.

The attack happened while we were on line at the DMV. Sure, the line had wrapped around itself enough times to make a snake jealous, but I was with the love of my life, so nothing could stress me. But I was blindsided.

At some point between a blink and the inhale of air into my lungs, my soul escaped out of my ears and eyes, bringing any sense of familiarity with it. In that moment, the world I knew suddenly seemed vague and paper thin, like at any moment things would shatter around me into a pile of shards on the ground. All the colors in the room went grey, and all that was left was just dissonance. Up until that very second I had been blissfully ignorant that such depths of my brain could be reached. I felt weighed down by everything... and nothing at all. In milliseconds, my eyes peered around the room for something to calm me. Anything familiar to bring me back. It was then that I found the pupils of my fiancé’s eyes. I stared deep into them and to my horror, all I saw was darkness. Endless and endless and endless lonely darkness.

I felt flushed. I felt lost. I was overwhelmed. I excused myself to the bathroom with a smile on my face. I couldn’t let people know. I couldn’t show people how I had lost my hope and how my faith was gone, because I wasn’t sure if I could articulate what was going on behind my blanketed eyes. After hearing the bathroom door close behind me, my smile quickly turned to a face of pure, raw terror. I felt every bone, muscle, cartilage, and vein grow cold. The blood in my legs wanted to escape my body, rushing toward my skin, giving me pins and needles. My knees were weak, so I leaned on the sink, gazing into the mirror at the reflection of a person I couldn’t recognize.

The only sounds to pierce the screaming in my head were the pulsing of my heartbeat around my temples. My hollow breath was staggering midair, like smoke rising out of the funnel on a sinking Titanic. It would take 10 harrowing minutes to relinquish a semblance of control—but these minutes would feel like hours.

The following years toward learning acceptance would be excruciating. I would become a time traveler for a better part of my 20s. One second I’d be living in the present—laughing, socializing, working... and in an instant I would be back in that DMV the second before I would have that first anxiety attack. Back and forth, I’d go between past and the uncertainty of the future while actively losing the ground beneath my feet to an endlessness of uncertainty. I would be lost in translation until the years of coping mechanisms I learned would come to the forefront again and bind me back to reality.

It wouldn’t be until I moved away from my family and childhood home, again, that I would be forced to find a home inside myself, and in my fiancé. It was then that I learned to fill the voids in my life with music. We learned to speak the language of our deepest insecurities and channel them into sounds. This is how our band, Looseleaf was born. This is when my true recovery began.

“Breakdown” is off our sophomore album, Paper Cuts. It explores the challenges we still face as gay men living with anxiety. However you got here, to this text, to these songs, we hope you find peace in knowing you’re not alone in whatever you may or not may not be struggling with. Life can feel deeply sad, but how else would you know how happy you could be if you couldn’t recognize the darker moments?

This is “Breakdown.”

"Breakdown" and Paper Cuts are available for streaming on Apple Music, Spotify, and every major platform. Show your support by purchasing the album on iTunes!