Megan’s panic attacks and insomnia

Megan’s panic attacks and insomnia are presented not as isolated symptoms but as states that disturb her sense of safety, unsettle her marriage, and make escape feel both necessary and dangerous. In entries from September and October 2012, Megan describes nights without sleep, a mind that will not quiet, physical agitation, and a sudden panic attack on her way home. The railway tracks recur in these accounts: they are a landscape she watches and a place she goes when ordinary surroundings become unbearable.

Sleeplessness and Restlessness

On 20 September 2012, Megan records that she has been awake for hours and has not slept in days. She describes the mind’s repetitive activity as an incessant ticking, alongside an itching sensation and an urge to shave her head. The details give insomnia a bodily as well as mental presence: rest is not simply delayed, but replaced by an agitation she cannot readily settle. Outside, the gardens beside the railway are cold and waiting for sunlight, a quiet scene that contrasts with her inability to sleep.

That wakefulness opens into fantasies of movement. Megan wants to run, drive to any coast with the convertible top down, and walk on a beach. She recalls road-trip plans made with her older brother, Ben Mills, whose imagined journeys ranged from Paris to the Côte d’Azur to the Pacific coast of the United States. Those plans never happened: Ben died in a motorcycle accident on the A10 before reaching Cambridge. Megan connects his absence to a larger uncertainty about her life, without deciding whether her distress is about his death or everything that followed. The desire to leave therefore carries both a concrete form—travel toward a coast—and an unresolved longing for a life she and Ben expected to share.

Panic and Its Immediate Course

On 2 October, Megan describes a panic attack that began on the walk home. Several ordinary but intrusive sights and sounds accumulated: a repeatedly revving motorbike, a red car moving slowly past, and two women with buggies blocking the pavement. When Megan stepped into the street to get around them, an oncoming car nearly struck her. Its horn and the driver’s shout preceded a rush of physical alarm: she could not catch her breath, her heart raced, and her stomach lurched with a mixture of fear and adrenaline.

Megan ran through the house and down to the tracks, then sat waiting for a train, hoping its passage would drown out the other noises. The tracks offer no simple comfort: their trains have elsewhere been associated with the possibility of going away, but in this moment Megan seeks their sound as relief from the sounds that have overwhelmed her. She also expects Scott Hipwell to come and calm her, but he is not home. Trying to climb over the fence to reach the other side, where no one else goes, she cuts her hand. When Scott returns and asks what happened, she says she dropped a glass while washing up. He does not believe her and becomes upset. The episode thus ends not in an explanation shared with her husband, but in concealment and an unresolved reaction between them.

Seeking Help and Reaching Out

Megan’s decision to see a therapist is tied explicitly to her insomnia and to pressure from Scott, who has urged her to go. She is nervous about the prospect and doubts that speaking to a stranger means she can say anything without reserve. Although she has trouble discussing these matters even with people she knows, she views therapy as at least an action she can take. Her comparison with confession conveys a wish to unburden herself and be forgiven, while her recognition that therapy is not the same thing marks the limits of that hope.

The night after the panic attack, Megan leaves Scott asleep, goes down to the terrace, and calls the therapist. She listens as the voice on the other end shifts from sleepy to wary, worried, and exasperated, then hangs up to see whether he will call back. When he does not, she calls repeatedly, eventually reaching a businesslike voicemail promising a return call. She considers trying to bring forward her next appointment but concludes that the practice’s automated system may not work in the middle of the night. She goes back to bed without sleeping. The sequence shows her reaching for contact while also retreating from a direct conversation; the repeated calls do not resolve the night’s distress.

Marriage, Therapy, and the Need for Purpose

Megan’s account of Scott combines affection with strain. She believes he loves her deeply and wonders how he can endure the parts of her that she thinks would drive her mad. His encouragement to seek therapy is an attempt to help, but the episode on the tracks also shows how little he knows about what happened: Megan hides her injury’s cause rather than telling him. Her distress therefore exists inside a marriage in which care is present but does not automatically produce disclosure.

By the later account, Megan says she has been talking with Dr Kamal Abdic about Scott, her perceived failures as a wife, and the need to find happiness without continually searching for it elsewhere. She accepts the force of that advice while describing how, in the moment, she acts against what she knows. The entry places therapy alongside her efforts to understand her relationship, not as an instant cure for sleeplessness or panic. Megan also rejects the idea that she should simply rest: photography courses and cookery classes seem to her like playing at real life, and being a wife alone feels insufficient. Her wish for something she must do links her search for purpose to the earlier desire to run away, while leaving the underlying agitation unresolved.

Narrative Significance

The dated entries make Megan’s distress legible through repetition and contrast rather than through a diagnosis. Insomnia is described across nights; panic takes a more concentrated form in the disrupted walk home; afterward, the calls and missed sleep extend its effects into the night. The accounts preserve concrete circumstances—the almost-collision, the cut hand, the concealed explanation, and the unanswered calls—so the distress is shown as a lived interruption of movement, communication, and routine.

The railway setting gathers these tensions without resolving them. Megan imagines trains as a means of leaving, yet sits beside the tracks to use their noise as shelter from other sounds. Likewise, she longs to speak and seeks a therapist, but repeatedly hesitates or conceals what has happened. Her accounts establish neither a simple escape from her life nor a completed recovery. Instead, they show her trying to act—by seeking therapy, calling for help, and imagining work—while insomnia, panic, grief for Ben Mills, and dissatisfaction with domestic life continue to shape what action can mean.