For reasons personal or professional, about half of my classmates seemed anxious, depressed, or otherwise at wit’s end. I was far from the only troubled grad student. In many respects, overcoming my childhood was my life story I took pride in not being “messed up.” Now it appeared that I was out of control after all. I had, at various times, felt guilty, angry, paralyzed, worthless, incompetent, or ashamed, in ways that I knew made no sense, and over the years I’d figured out how to stop, or at least attenuate, those feelings. Having grown up in a tumultuous family, with a mother beset by alcoholism, I had worked hard to master my feelings through homegrown strategies of self-regulation. But I was also unsettled by what the attack said about my personality. One thing that dismayed me about the panic attack was its accuracy: my life really did need a major course correction, which I had no idea how to effect. It took a few minutes for these sensations to pass eventually, the sound of the chapel bell steadied me, and I sat on a bench, drained and disturbed. What am I going to do? Breathing hard, I paced up and down the path, preparing to throw up. How would we ever build a life together, or start a family? Intellectually, I had known for years that we were approaching our future in an unrealistic way-but now the problem registered as a physical assault, contained in the brightness of the sun and the stirring of the air. There were almost no jobs for new English professors, and the search for work would likely send me and my wife to different parts of the country. Its origin wasn’t at all mysterious: I had no workable plan for my life. I was walking across a sunny quad, wearing an actual tweed jacket, thinking about all the papers that I had to grade, when suddenly a wave of fear washed over me.

It happened in the fall of 2008, during a period when my wife and I were graduate students in English.

Pivot animator aliens figure