Panic Beneath the Skyscrapers
The myth of making it alone in the big city
This Weekly Edition of Inkwell features Audrey Elledge
“The skyline was intricate and voluptuous and enchanted and absurd.
It looked like a Sunday school picture of Heaven . . .”
—Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five
I’M TRAPPED. In a church on the east side of Manhattan, the word clanks inside me like a struck bell: trapped, trapped, trapped.
This morning, I am in the middle of my favorite row, flanked on either side by hushed congregants cradling Styrofoam cups. I scratch my pen in a notebook, inking words floating down from the pulpit. It’s a Sunday like any other, except this time, I have arrived with the concussion I got a few days prior.
Without warning, something thick like a blanket drapes across me. Like an X-ray vest spread leaden on my skull. At first, I assume it’s another symptom from bonking my head, as the neurologist warned I could experience some funny business. But she never said anything about this sticky heat on my body, this dizziness and gasping for air. A door inside my mind opens, and I fall to the bottom. Trapped.
Thoughts with no beginning or end spiral down to my chest, organs, toes, leaking past my body’s border. I want to crawl out of the pew, over people’s legs and outside, but I don’t get up until it’s time to receive communion at the altar, where I reach out a shaking hand and spill wine on the floor. Jesus’s blood all over my hem.
I MOVED TO THE CITY craving metal. Demanding spectacle. Having tasted nothing but Texan meadows and sleepy Tennessee moonshine, it was time to cut my teeth on subway grates, on gridlock and steel and concrete corners, on glass where I had only known green.
That first year in New York, I wandered up and down numbered streets with no agenda, pulling myself over and across and through the island like a thread and needle. Weaving myself into the bright electric air. Sirens and taxi horns became my soundtrack, replacing the trilling cicadas back home, back where everyone I loved still lived. I carried the clichéd wonder of it all in my chest until it outgrew my body and spread like an ache—like a homesickness for the place where I already was. If only they could see me now, I thought, examining my reflection on the buildings I passed, imagining everyone I’d ever wanted to impress, everyone I’d left behind, eyes wide and in awe of the brave little girl in the big city.
I liked my own company. Alone, I was better able to imagine what my life looked like to others, without interference. I viewed my solitude not as an affliction, but as a courageous, romantic choice. I was the main character in the trench coat wandering the miles-long park, all eyes on her, not pitying but envying her lonesomeness.
I collected new places to explore, pocketing them like treasures I would later write terrible villanelles about: a bookstore in Brooklyn, Riverside Park, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, that Greek restaurant near the pier, the school where my church met. I thought I had everything, until one night in the rain, I passed a candlelit restaurant in the West Village. Through the window, I watched a clot of young women inside, breathless and tucked in a corner, leaning over menus and on each other the way only intimate friends can. Something lumpy and blue like a bruise caught my throat, pushing me away from their warmth and back into the cold storm.
I KNEW I WANTED friendships in the city, but it wasn’t until that first panic attack in church that I realized I needed them. John Milton’s old words rang in my head, something about loneliness being the first thing God named not good. As my panic attacks came more and more frequently—a result of my concussion triggering a chemical imbalance and overactive nervous system—everything I loved about New York shrunk in size, including me. Every place that once felt expansive became suffocating: grocery stores, the office, the streets, my own body. I became unmoored in crowded subway cars, my mind rattling and spilling like marbles all over the Q train floor. I stayed home every night. When the walls closed in, all I wanted was a hand to squeeze, a friend to lean against and tell me I would live.
Late in J.D. Salinger’s classic novel The Catcher in the Rye, the main character Holden finds himself alone in New York City, walking up and down Fifth Avenue. Sweating and distressed, Holden fears he will disappear each time he crosses the street, and he pleads to the heavens just to make it to the curb on the other side. I thought this was strange when I first read the book in high school, and found Holden to be a real whiner. But when I re-read the story as an adult freshly diagnosed with panic disorder, I had never related to a character more.
I, too, began to worry I would disappear, that I would float down, down, through a pothole to the underground, without anyone there to hoist me back out. I started repeating to God a question from the poet Jane Kenyon: “Oh, when am I going to own my mind again?” Most nights though, my brain was too fried to form prayers, so I would lie in bed with my Bible opened flat on the pillow beside me. When the dark pressed too close, I flung my hand over, letting it rest on whatever page until I could sleep again. It was all I could do.
One night, my fingers landed on Psalm 18:19, where David exults: He brought me out into a spacious place; he rescued me because he delighted in me. I didn’t realize what verse I had been touching until hours later, when I awoke with my hand still clutching the words.
All day I begged God for that same sort of rescue. I thought of David, confined amongst rocks and caverns, covered in shadows, then saved from the coiled cords of the grave and pulled out into a spacious place—ample and generous. Oh Jesus, please, I cried on the subway. Just bring me out.
ALONG WITH Catcher and Psalm 18, my literary diet during my panic-strewn year included, for some reason, Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five. In this novel, the protagonist, Billy Pilgrim, is a prisoner of war in Dresden during World War II. He survives the firebombing of the city, but returns to the experience again and again for the rest of his life. He returns to Dresden via time travel, which most English majors will say is Billy’s way of dealing with the trauma of enduring a gruesome war. I just believe we sometimes return to places when we need to redeem them.
I tried to do the same. I needed an excuse to show up to the building I dreaded most, to take a baby step toward redeeming the place where my mind first lurched into panic and never stopped. And, more importantly, I genuinely needed a friend. So I started by asking someone I met at church months prior if they wanted to grab lunch after a service. Then, knowing I couldn’t survive another year alone in my tiny apartment, I moved in with Elizabeth, a girl I barely knew but trusted would be a better roommate than my fragmented mind. I stopped eating lunch alone at my desk and joined coworkers out in midtown Manhattan, even at the Cuban restaurant where I once had a panic attack so severe I stole away to the bathroom and cried.
Perhaps New York would break me. Or perhaps, with Christ’s help, I could try to crack it myself and find that spaciousness David waxed so eloquently about. By shuffling my living arrangements, by putting myself—panic disorder and all—in front of people I wanted to know better, by praying the Psalms back to God, I was tapping the city’s surface, shattering my own self-sufficiency, trying to find what would seep through. And what bubbled up, slowly but surely, was friendship.
NEW YORK CITY has so many people. In my worst moments of panic, it feels like there’s nowhere to hide. No refuge, no sign of the Lord’s wings to run to and curl under. So many strangers and eyes that could watch me break.
But in my best moments—when New York feels like a foretaste of the heavenly city to come—I am so grateful for all the people. For this “density of the Imago Dei”: every street corner and restaurant and bus and taxi and jammed subway burning bright with splendorous facets of our shared Creator.
I was once most proud of my independence, of my ability to move to and live in a city where I didn’t know a soul. But now, I’m most proud of my friends. Proud of who they are as actual people—as intricate and enchanted and absurd as any skyline. Proud of how they’ve turned this sharp city, somehow, soft. I know God delights in me not just because he rescued me, but because he brought me out into this spacious place—friendship. Friendship in a city that will tear your own self apart.
OF ALL THE PLACES redeemed from panic, somehow the subway remains my final frontier. Alone, I still can’t stomach snaking through the cramped city underbelly, stuck in a steel trap. I still can’t always convince my body it’s safe and that the sun will find me again when I come up for air.
I always appreciate when I’m in a car decorated with a poem. Poetry in Motion, a public arts program, places poetry in the transit systems of bustling cities. So when my mind pitches headlong, wanting to rest between my legs and squeeze out the harsh fluorescent lights, I search frantically for one of their poems. I usually find it at the end of the car, where it waits for the right passenger to notice.
On a recent ride home from dinner, I flick my eyes to the framed poem by Danez Smith, called “little prayer.” The second stanza says: “let him find honey / where there was once a slaughter.” It reads like a psalm and sits sweet on my tongue. I look to my right, to the friend leaning on my shoulder, dozing after our big meal. I look to my left to see my other friend gazing out the window, surely crafting her own poem or song.
There is certainly honey after a slaughter. Spaciousness after such constriction. Peace, thank God, after panic. As Charles Spurgeon says, “large indeed is the possession and place of the believer in Jesus, there need be no limit to his peace.”
Large indeed. This dear possession—friendship—doesn’t discount the darkness, but just helps me to distrust it. To point me to the light that always, always awaits outside the subway car. After the better part of a decade in this fizzing, preposterous city, I know I could find myself back in isolation again, trapped in my mind and closed off in a pit. And then, just as easily, I now know I could find myself pulled out.
Audrey Elledge
Writer & Editor
Audrey is the co-author of two books, Liturgies for Hope and Liturgies for Wholeness (Waterbrook). She is also an editor at SparkNotes. You can read more of her work at the Substack she co-writes with Elizabeth Moore (Our Usual Spot).
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"But in my best moments—when New York feels like a foretaste of the heavenly city to come—I am so grateful for all the people. For this “density of the Imago Dei”: every street corner and restaurant and bus and taxi and jammed subway burning bright with splendorous facets of our shared Creator."
Love this part especially! This was what I was trying to get at in my poem 'urban revival project' for Ekstasis a little while back: https://www.ekstasismagazine.com/poetry/2025/urban-revival-project
Glad to see works talking to each other in this way.
This was a beautiful essay. I lived through a decade of panic disorder in Los Angeles during my twenties (I'm now almost 74). I found then, and still today, how soothing others can be. There's a story in the Bible that really helped me when I felt guilt about what I thought was not trusting. God enough. When Gideon was afraid to trust what God was directly telling him to do, God told him that if he is afraid to do it, take along his servant. Wow. God didn't chastise him for his fear. That really opened me up.