Hey there. Welcome to the Anxious Truth. Something a little bit different today.

I'm actually on the North Shore of Long Island on a beach with nobody on it.

And I promised that I would do a series of podcasts where I went to places

that I used to be terrified to go to and I would record those podcasts. This is

number three in that series. So I just want to talk to you for a few minutes

today about what it was like to be in a place like this when I was at my worst.

I would have never come to this beach, especially this time of year where it's

preseason. It's a little bit of a colder days. You can see it's really windy.

I hope you can hear me and there's nobody here on this beach.

I mean, there's a few scattered people around, but, but I could count them all on

one hand. And they're all really far away. They're really quite far down that

way and really far behind me. So I walked away that into the sand to get to

where I am now. And I would have never come to a place like this because I am too

far from help. Air quotes help.

At the time when I struggled the most with panic disorder and agoraphobia, I was

constantly really concerned that I might need medical attention. And so driving

here to this beach through an area where my cell phone doesn't really get

service where there's nobody and where I'm far from a hospital or ambulance or

EMT doctors medical attention, just any other human beings that could so

call rescue me would have been out of a question I would have never done it.

Yet here I am now. So this is what would have been a very difficult place to

come to or really an impossible place to come to. And I would struggle to come

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