Years later you will read that a panic attack is a scrambling of the same flight instinct that tells the human being to run from a bear. But you’ll never find that description to be accurate. The panic you experience for the first time on stage in Little Rock is not like the panic you’d feel if you were being chased by a bear. No, it is, instead, like the panic you’d feel once the bear has already caught you and has begun to eat you, the panic of someone with no chance of survival, in the last moments of consciousness, when neither fight nor flight will help.
