Anxiety and panic attacks

Anxiety and panic attacks are presented as forces that can turn ordinary demands into crises, narrowing Gideon’s choices and feeding his fear of social failure. The novel makes that pattern concrete through job interviews, driving lessons, and the effort to form relationships, while also showing that anxiety is not a single, constant state. Therapy, medication, writing, and supportive company offer intervals of relief, but not a simple cure; elsewhere, Ava’s experience of bereavement shows how intense distress can coexist with brief comfort and eventual calm.

How Anxiety Shapes Gideon’s Daily Life

Gideon’s anxiety is closely tied to situations in which he must speak about himself or risk being judged. A job interview at a menswear store becomes overwhelming before it has properly begun. In a bathroom cubicle, he loosens his too-tight tie, tries to steady his breathing, and focuses on an advertisement and the movement of his toes. He repeats an instruction to redirect his attention away from an ominous shadow at the edge of his awareness, then reduces the task to compartmentalising. The small acts of focus are practical attempts to get through the moment, but the scene also shows how much effort an apparently routine appointment demands from him.

The interview episode becomes a portrait of anxiety’s effect on self-image. Gideon describes himself as a nervous seventeen-year-old who can become distressed by situations requiring him to talk about himself. He sees the interview as a test of whether he can perform a confident version of masculinity: composed, physically assured, and comfortable around other people. He cannot identify with that ideal. Anxiety turns this mismatch into another reason to judge himself, rather than simply a temporary difficulty.

The panic also has practical consequences. Gideon worries that he will be late; he recognizes that, when late, he may fail to attend an interview and then tell his parents that it went well. The imagined failure and the concealment that could follow form a cycle: fear makes the task harder, and anticipated embarrassment offers an incentive to avoid it. The bathroom scene does not establish that every feared outcome occurs, but it shows how thoroughly the possibility can occupy him.

His social anxiety extends beyond formal tests. Gideon characterizes himself as afraid of people and prone to anxiety and panic attacks, and says that he takes a long time to feel comfortable enough not to panic. He connects this slow-growing ease with having few friends at school and being especially close to his sister. When he considers the possibility that Issy likes him, the thought is accompanied by physical tension and difficulty breathing. Intimacy is therefore not simply desirable or undesirable: even the prospect of being liked can bring the risk of exposure and alarm.

Panic, Anticipation, and the Five States

A driving lesson provides another clear instance of anxiety escalating from an ordinary challenge. Asked to parallel park on a busy street, Gideon becomes nervous because he considers himself poor at the manoeuvre. A car stops behind him; after he makes two unsuccessful attempts, he becomes preoccupied with inconveniencing the other driver and disappointing the instructor. He abandons the attempt, drives home, and spends hours in his room feeling overwhelmed. The episode reveals that his distress is not confined to fear of making a mistake: it also grows from the conviction that other people’s time and comfort take priority over his own ability to learn.

Robbie, Gideon’s therapist, draws attention to that imbalance. He asks why Gideon is more concerned about the waiting driver than about himself, and points out that a learner driver is expected to take time. The exchange does not make the anxiety disappear, but it places Gideon’s interpretation beside a less catastrophic one. Gideon recognizes that he himself would not be angry at a learner for holding him up briefly. His mind, as he describes it, can nevertheless transform an ordinary inconvenience into a high-stakes event.

Gideon organizes his experience into five recurring states rather than presenting it as one undifferentiated condition. Pre-anxiety involves racing thoughts, mild panic, sweating, and jitteriness; deep breathing and loose mindfulness may sometimes keep it from intensifying. High anxiety brings a sense of impending catastrophe and fears that he and those he cares about will die. In a hyper-aware state, he notices details and conversations but over-processes them, interpreting what he has noticed as evidence that others dislike him or see him as a hindrance. These states show how anxiety can involve both acute alarm and extended social interpretation.

His account also includes a version of normality and a depressed state. At times, he can feel like an awkward but ordinary teenager, with anxiety present but less dominant. He identifies class with Ria, time with Norma and Andy, writing, performing poetry, and being at home as contexts in which this relative ease is possible. Depression, by contrast, feels to him like an energy flatline and an enclosing cocoon that muffles both unpleasant and pleasant experience. He distinguishes it from the heightened fear of panic: one state floods him with catastrophe, while the other leaves him feeling cut off from what might reach him.

Therapy and Ways of Regaining Perspective

Robbie’s role matters partly because Gideon has already seen several therapists. He has been meeting with Robbie since his family moved, and Robbie is the fourth therapist he has tried; the previous three felt old, frustrating, or patronising. Gideon values that Robbie does not make assumptions about him based on what he says, wears, his mothers, or his scars. Robbie also made room for the possibility that Gideon might not like him or return, an approach that gives the relationship a different tone from the judgments Gideon fears elsewhere.

The therapy is not presented as an instant resolution. Gideon reports that, since beginning work with Robbie and taking medication, he has not experienced depression in its full force, while acknowledging that days, moments, or afternoons of it still approach. His comparison is to someone tapping the wrong shoulder and disappearing when he turns around: the feeling can return unexpectedly, even when it is not sustained. The account preserves both change and recurrence, rather than treating improvement as proof that the difficulty has ended.

Attention and writing offer different kinds of support. During the interview panic, Gideon uses his toes and the advertisement as immediate points of focus; in his broader life, writing and poetry are among the settings where he feels more like himself. The novel does not suggest that these practices erase anxiety. Instead, they provide ways to direct attention or participate in activities during intervals when fear is less commanding. The distinction is important: coping makes room for action without guaranteeing control over every episode.

Grief, Temporary Relief, and Continuing Feeling

Ava’s passages place emotional distress in a related but distinct register. Six months after Kelly’s death, Ava feels that time has slowed and fears that her sadness will last for the rest of her life. Her account is about bereavement, not evidence that she shares Gideon’s particular pattern of panic. It nevertheless broadens the novel’s treatment of distress: intense feelings can alter how ordinary time and social expectations are experienced, without being reducible to a single clinical description.

Ava also finds short-lived relief in Lincoln’s company. Flirting and spending time with him can make the school day and her worries about her father matter less for a while; she describes the effect as feeling something other than misery, while recognizing that this would not have happened if Kelly were alive. The relief and the loss remain joined. Later, reflecting on a drunken night with Lincoln, Ava feels both embarrassment and gratitude that she made a choice she considers wiser than having sex in a public place. These moments show distress influencing decisions without making every decision identical or inevitable.

The contrast continues as Ava tries to understand Kelly’s death, repeatedly considering what Kelly may have felt and whether she might have changed her mind too late. By the time Ava describes feeling calm, she does not claim that sadness, anger, hurt, confusion, grief, or love has vanished. The emotions remain present, but are no longer larger than everything else in that moment. Together, Gideon’s changing states and Ava’s movement between bereavement, temporary relief, and calm resist a neat division between being distressed and being well. The novel gives recovery the shape of fluctuating capacity: a person may still carry difficult feelings and, at times, find enough room to act, connect, or breathe more freely.