Throughout the years, I’ve had so many panic attacks, I can’t even count them. But a few stick out in particular.When I was 17, my grandfather lived with us after we learned he was diagnosed with prostate cancer. When my grandfather was going through chemotherapy and living in our house, I felt so anxious and trapped. I avoided him. I avoided my dying grandfather. And when he passed away, after seven months of chemo, I felt a sense of relief. My anxiety had been so consuming at 17 years old that my first reaction was to view his death as a breath of fresh air. I still stay up regretting this. But it was an episode of ongoing anxiety I couldn’t control.And after that, I can’t tell you how many nights I spent in college, wide awake, afraid that I’d fall into a panic attack in the middle of the night, be unable to recover, and be trapped in it for months.My sophomore year of college, my panic attacks heightened, and I missed so many classes that I almost had to re-do my semester. My mom would pick me up from my dorm and take me home, where I’d roll up in a ball and let the fear consume me. I lost my appetite along with my desire to succeed. I slept all day and stayed up all night.I began to wonder if it would be easier on my family, my friends, and everyone around me if I weren’t alive anymore. If they didn’t have this burden. If I didn’t have to call my mother every day, or text my sisters whenever I felt like I was on the brink of an attack.And wouldn’t it be easier on me, too?Why waste this money on my education, when I couldn’t physically go to class? Why waste time and effort on me?That’s when I knew I needed help. When I revealed these thoughts to my boyfriend at the time, he made the appointment for me. I started talking to a therapist at Massachusetts General Hospital, who helped me take baby steps. I felt pathetic. It took a few sessions before I could even get words out instead of spending the entire one-hour session in tears.She recommended medication, a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), and warned me that the side effects were weight gain, low libido, and more rarely, suicidal thoughts. Suicidal thoughts? But that’s exactly what I was trying to get away from.It was a tough decision: There were days I felt like I couldn’t get out of bed, and the idea of taking a pill that might fix this was attractive. And I knew that psychiatric medications can be literally life-saving for some.At the time, though, I wasn’t really equipped to do a lot of research (that just made me more anxious), and I worried about those side effects. But, it turns out the risk of suicidal thoughts related to SSRIs has been way overblown; it is only statistically significant in children and adolescents and even then, the risk appears to be very small, as Refinery29 has reported. Ultimately, I decided that I wanted to continue with talk therapy alone for a bit longer and see where that would take me. This way, maybe I could sidestep the risk of side effects completely and still get better.For me, this approach worked. After a long summer of meeting with my therapist, I felt like I was strong enough to go into the fall semester of my junior year. It was rocky, but manageable. I felt like I had the footing to get myself through. And when it came time for graduation, I felt it was my biggest accomplishment. Only a few months before, I had doubted I could finish even a semester — and here I was, finally receiving my diploma. My next step seemed like the most daunting of all: starting my real life.