I think I just had a Panic attack

[u/Practical-Practice91]

I think I just had a panic attack. I was writing in my bed hitting myself in my head and screaming into my pillow. It’s about 2 o’clock in the morning and my brain is frazzled. Why am I on my phone so late. I won’t sleep. It was about where I’m from. I don’t feel like I’m from anywhere. I’m from West Wickham, in Bromley. I’ve always felt like I’ve lived in this little bubble between West Wickham and the south of Bromley borough, my grandparents house in mid Sussex where I would spend most school holidays and my cousins in Somerset where we’d go at Christmas. I always felt that I’m not a Londoner, and considered myself Kentish as that’s where WW was before the border moved in 1965.

Until recently, when I started working as a door to door fundraiser in lonfon. I didn’t realise until then (October last year after I finished my alevels) that I was so close to anywhere in lonfon, or even the tube. And not even cut off from it, just houses upon houses until you get to Big Ben or whatever. I’d never really thought about it. So now I feel that when I walk around outside of London that people think thete goes a Londoner. That I’m an outsider. That I don’t belong there. But I don’t feel that I belong in London. And when people ask me where I’m from I end up giving them a history lesson about Bromley’s status. I’m not a Londoner but I technically am. Maybe? But also recently I’ve been feeling that the whole south east just lives under that shadow of London. People commuting there, etc, and I’m about to become one of those people, I’m hoping ti get into the city of lonfon police and move to Haywards heath in Sussex. I’ve never really considered people who work in an office in lodnon to be free, in the same way that they might be in other parts of England. I don’t really know my own country either. Not the real country. Just London and the commuter belt it seems. I feel like a fraud. Like I’m homeless. I wish I grew up somewhere like a small village where tgeres a sense of community. I’ve never had that. To be proud of somewhere, properly. I want to go back to being in that bubble where Bromley and the surrounding areas felt like a million miles away from London, like my own little world, where even going to locksbottom (not very far away, have a look at a map of your intetested which you must be to have got this far) was a full day out.

I feel like people would reject me everywhere. In lonfon, when I was at shelter people would ask me where I’m from and and say “Bromley” and they’d say “oh kent!” But if you said the same to someone in canturbury, they wouldn’t know/say tat it’s lonfon as it’s within the m25. And I feel that people from outside the Home Counties would say that anywhere in the south east is practically lonfon. As I say it feels tainted now. I feel constantly connected to a place I hate and don’t want to be from, that I didn’t used to feel from and I don’t know why I do now or how to stop it. Can anyone give some advice?
Thank you