The night Yahya truly cracked, the outside world was indifferent. The stars blinked, unaware of the internal catastrophe unfolding below. He sat curled on his bed, breath shallow and fast. His palms were slick with fear, and his eyes darted nervously between the ceiling and the ticking clock. Each heartbeat felt like a hammer striking from within, a frantic warning, a countdown, a silent, invisible alarm bell that wouldn’t shut off.
It felt exactly like dying.
Again…
But this time, something inside him snapped. It wasn’t the intensity of the fear that broke him; it was the sheer, bone-deep exhaustion. He was tired of just surviving the attacks; he wanted to stop them. He was tired of whispering prayers, of hoping some tied thread would make the difference.
His trembling fingers reached for his phone. He bypassed the usual news apps, opting instead to ignore social media. He typed, raw and honest, into the search bar, giving voice to the desperate fear he couldn’t share with anyone in his house:
“Heart races for no reason, feel like I’m dying but I’m not.”
The first result glowed back at him, clinical, sterile, and utterly profound:
You might be experiencing a PANIC ATTACK.
He blinked. The word struck like lightning, a flash of white-hot clarity slicing through months of thick, humid confusion. Panic attack.
He scrolled down, his breath momentarily held captive. The text explained everything.
“Panic attacks can cause sudden feelings of terror, a tight chest, a racing heart, dizziness, and fear of dying. They are real. They are psychological. And they are manageable.”
Yahya’s eyes burned, but not from the usual hot flush of panic. It was from something gentler, sharper: recognition. It had a name. It wasn’t an unseen curse. It wasn’t drama. It was not a weakness. It was a condition.
He read for hours, his symptoms finally aligning like pieces of a terrifying puzzle. He checked them off silently: the feeling of shortness of breath? Check. The chest tightness? Check. The acute fear of losing control? Check. The certainty that something terrible was about to happen? A profound, undeniable check.
He scrolled through forums filled with strangers’ confessions. One message stopped him cold.
“I thought I was dying. Turned out, it was a panic attack. Therapy helped me more than any medicine.”
For the first time in months, a tiny, fragile spark of hope stirred beneath the fear. He wasn’t broken—he was human, and his internal wiring was crossed. And now, the monster had a name.
The Wall of Shame
When dawn finally broke, Yahya woke with something new inside him. It was not perfectly calm, but a fragile, bright clarity. He knew what he had to do next.
While the house buzzed with clattering plates and the warm scent of fried parathas, Yahya sat silently with his phone. His thumb hovered over a new, hopeful search.
“Therapist near me for panic attacks.”
Results flooded in: Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. Exposure Therapy. Talk Therapy. These were words he didn’t fully understand, but they looked like hope spelled in unfamiliar letters.
He rehearsed sentences under his breath, lines from a secret script he knew he would need to perform.
“I want to talk to someone.” “It’s called a panic disorder.” “It’s a real condition—a health condition.”
Later that morning, he gathered his courage and approached his father, the man who stood as the authority in his life.
“Baba,” he began, steadying his voice to hide the tremor in his hands.
“I think I need to see a therapist.”
His father’s brows rose sharply, the familiar expression of judgment tightening his face.
“A therapist? For what? You’re not crazy.”
Yahya pressed on, softer but firm, armed with his new knowledge. “It’s panic attacks, Baba. I read about it. It matches everything I feel. Therapy can help manage the symptoms.”
His father scoffed, dismissing the science with a wave of his hand. “So now Google gives fatwas too? What will people think if they hear you’re seeing a mental doctor? You should be praying more, not paying a stranger to tell you you’re fine.”
The words hit him like cold metal. The air grew thick, suddenly devoid of oxygen. A wall went up between them—made not of bricks, but of shame and fear of judgment. Yahya wanted to scream, to break something, to smash the phone that had delivered the truth only for it to be instantly invalidated.
But he didn’t. He just nodded, burying the truth once more.
“Okay. Never mind.”
The Quiet Rebellion
That night, long after the house had fallen silent and everyone slept, Yahya sat again under the faint, familiar glow of his phone screen. The same search page stared back at him. The list of therapists and treatment methods was waiting.
He didn’t close it this time.
Something fundamental had shifted. He was done waiting for permission to heal. If they wouldn’t believe in his pain—if they saw his need for help as a shameful failing—then he would believe in himself. If they wouldn’t guide him, he would learn to guide himself.
The fight ahead was his alone, a private war against both the monster and the shame of his community. But for the first time, Yahya wasn’t afraid of the word alone; he was armed with the monster’s name, and that was all he needed to start.