On the fifth morning of the government-mandated fourteen-day quarantine, sitting alone in my room at a city hotel in Singapore, I had a panic attack. The first I had ever had. Yet, I had no difficulty in diagnosing it for what it was. I had all the classic symptoms – heart racing painfully, sweat pouring from me like rain, a sense of severe tightness, of something dark and airless gathering around me relentlessly, its dense, suffocating fibres choking my airway.
A nameless fear overpowered me; my head throbbed, I couldn’t move my body, couldn’t throw off the ensnaring bedclothes, couldn’t run out of the room in Singapore that I was forbidden from leaving. Submerged in the tide, flailing and drowning, a thought remained sealed in a corner of my head – this fear was irrational and I must pull through.
I pressed a finger on the wildly beating pulse on my wrist and focused on my breathing, trying to slow it down. I forced open my eyes and looked at the puddle of…