I was 11 years old when I had my first panic attack. It was the night before my first day of sixth grade, a hot, balmy August evening in which it felt like there wasn’t enough oxygen in the world to fill my lungs.

I had started thinking about the idea of eternal life, what living “forever” would actually feel like. Forever is forever, and there’s nothing I could ever want to do for that long. That thought terrified me. This notion of being in paradise after you die, something most people use as a catalyst to sharing the Gospel or motivator to living a religiously pious life when contrasting it to hell, honestly seemed horrific to me. Not that hell was an option either, just that the thought of being anywhere forever seemed unfathomable.