My relationship with mental illness started before puberty.
It was a feeling I had in my gut. A rolling that swelled up to my chest and squeezed. I knew something bad was going to happen, but I didn't know what. It happened when my father was out late. I was worried that he would wreck. It was always when he was gone that the rolls happened, at first. Then it came on more frequently. I thought I had a sixth sense, even though nothing bad ever truly happened, I was convinced that that squeeze was a premonition. The house was going to burn down, someone was going to die, something terrible was going to happen. I had a checklist for my sister and me, who shared a room. Every night I would make sure that she didn't have any gum (she fell asleep with it once), and that she didn't have a necklace on, in case the gum choked her and the necklace twisted to asphyxiate her in her sleep. I made sure she had no earrings, no rings, for the same reason. What if the ring fell off and made its way to her windpipe? What if an earring fell out and stabbed her in the eye?
I remember it happened every night before going to bed. Always at night, only at night. After the Cosby show ended, and the credits rolled, my stomach would clench. There were weeks I slept on the couch just because I couldn't handle the finality of shutting the door to my room to go to bed. This happened every single night. Day in and day out I had that to look forward to at night. Sometimes I cried, sometimes I didn't. It made me tired, it made me angry.
When I was thirteen I was spending the night at my grandmother's. I told her I was worried. I didn't know it was called panic, I didn't know it was a mental problem, I just knew I worried. She was used to this. She had her tactics to calm me and lull me to sleep. We would sit at the coffee table and talk until I was calm and ready to go to bed on my own. She'd warm milk up for me and turn the tv on low. I couldn't sleep in silence; I would start to see things crawling along the walls.
That night she was on the phone with my mother. I told her I was going to be sick. She tried to reach for me but I was already running down the hallway to the bathroom. I didn't make it. I threw up on the carpet halfway there, and my grandfather pulled me up and helped me the rest of the way to the bathroom. When I was empty, I crawled into my grandmother's bed, shaking like a leaf. I couldn't stop crying. I told my grandma to call my mom. Mom was out, away, and didn't seem to think it was serious. I called her myself, and did my best not to let my voice shake when I said, "I know you know where to get Xanax. Get me one. Now."
She didn't come by for another hour, or maybe it was only fifteen minutes, but time was dragging so slowly I thought I would lay in that bed for the rest of my existence. She came in, broke a pill in half, and handed it to me. I don't know if it was a Xanax, it very well could have been an aspirin, but my body was convinced and I slept for fourteen hours.
When I woke up I was different. I was groggy from sleep and walked to the kitchen to get a drink. Grandma was sitting at the table, and asked me how I felt. For a split second I thought I was fine, but everything I said came out shaky and I cried all over again.
I didn't understand. I felt betrayed by my body. The sun was a safe space, and now that space had been violated in the worst way. I was devastated. I spent the next three days out of school in crying fits. My parents didn't know how to help me. I couldn't hardly eat but my father did his best to feed me grilled cheese and milk shakes during that time.
On the way to the doctor I had a small glimpse of hope. My doctor could fix me, I was sure of it. The idea of being able to function again caused me to cry even more. In the waiting room I felt like a raw nerve, sitting in silence and trying not to sniffle too loudly so as not to disturb the elderly couple on the other side of the room. I was so hyper aware of everything around me, like the air was laced with electricity, but the anxiety made my body heavy like I was wading through water.
My doctor diagnosed me with anxiety and depression. The anxiety didn't truly surprise me, and neither did the depression, but somehow I had never thought I was depressed. I wasn't suicidal, I didn't want to die. At that age that was what I thought depression was. He asked me if I ate, and I recall rarely doing so. It wasn't that I was starving myself, I just wasn't hungry. I never had a bad relationship with food, luckily. I told him how I felt uncomfortable a lot, and I always looked down at the floor when I walked. I didn't care about the depression, or I didn't then, because the anxiety felt so much more pressing. I wouldn't find out until later that the two were grotesquely intertwined.
I was prescribed a very subtle downer of some kind. Just something to help me sleep. My doctor called it "breaking the cycle." If I could just feel normal for a few nights, my body might flip into doing that instead, because it hadn't known anything else for so long.
I took one that night and was able to return to school a day later. I took them three nights in a row. I had to ask my mother for them. On the fourth night I told my mother I needed my medicine, I was getting anxious again, and she became exasperated. "You can't need these every night", she said. I argued with her that night and of course she relented. I was so confused by her that night. I was so shocked that she couldn't see what was happening to me. I was convinced she didn't care about me at all.
Being older now, I understand her reaction. She was sad and scared for me. The family has a long line of anxiety and depression issues. I think she was crushed that it had come on so quickly for me. She didn't want to admit that to me, and I think a part of her felt guilty for it. I can't imagine watching my child struggle through it, crying all the time for no reason at all because it's all inside their head. I never considered how it must have been for her and dad.
For a while the anxiety got better and worse. It was years of somersaults trying to figure my body out. So much of it now is a blur, blending into my memories like normal. I spent a lot of time by myself then. I was later diagnosed with social anxiety, which came as no shock to me, but was enlightening at the same time. For some people I think naming their mental issues becomes a crutch or a disabling thing, but for me it was a very freeing experience to be able to put my feelings in a box, to see it for what it was, and be able to fix it from there.
I learned what hurt me. I learned when and what to eat, what to avoid, and how important sleep was to me. Lack of sleep has always been the hardest for me. It caused me so many problems in high school, and even in college. Facing a sea of faces when my heart was trembling was the greatest nightmare I've had to live through. It sounds crazy to say now, because I can speak in front of hundreds of people, and I can go for days where I might get three hours of sleep a night, but back then it was a debilitating process to work through.
My biggest relief was writing. It's always been something that I've never been able to stop doing. I would sit awake until 3 a.m. some nights, writing away on our family computer. The stories never meant much; when I ran out of stories I'd edit my work and move forward. I had twenty pieces going at once, always changing, always being redone as I grew better at it or my style changed.
My best stories were ones that never got done. Not even stories really, just clips or glimpses into an imaginary life. To cope with my anxiety, I had personified it. I made her into a person to battle with my characters, a looming presence that tore everything apart: their families, their relationships, their friendships. I let her strip everything from them. It was soothing to let her control someone else's life and not mine.
By giving her a personality I built a better understanding of my anxiety and what it was doing to me. It allowed me to talk back to it, to find the weaknesses. I can't say that this point in time was a giant milestone, but distancing the way I looked at my anxiety, and separating myself did lead me to better ways to treat my anxiety.
I stopped taking medication when I was sixteen. I had gotten a part-time job at Walmart, and I found myself really struggling to keep up with work and school. I dreaded waking up to go to school, and I dreaded getting out of school to go to work. Eventually I had another meltdown and went back to the doctor. He prescribed me Paxil, and it worked like a charm. I remember walking into work and realizing that regular people must feel this way about work. There was no sense of dread, no impending doom, just going through my day without agonizing over everything. I'd never felt that way before. I was still prone to panic attacks, but they were less frequent with the medication. I went off of Paxil after a few months. My body had, for the most part, adjusted to feeling normal, and I did well without the medication until college.
College was a barrage of problems. I had trouble acclimating to it. Not that the experience has been terrible, I've enjoyed a lot of it, but for some time I had a hard time figuring out what to do with myself. It seemed like everyone else got it, and somehow I didn't. I still felt like I was on the outside. My second year the depression came back. I'd had it before, on and off in high school, but I didn't have too big of an issue with it. In college, when it came back, it hit full force.
I've been lucky, I've had depression but I've never been suicidal. I've never really wanted to die, but in those days I remember thinking that that is what it must feel like to want to die. I could understand why people would think about it. I just wanted some peace and quiet. I tried explaining this to my older sister, who immediately freaked out. She thought I was a danger to myself, but I wasn't really. I was toeing the line, but I never got to the point of being true danger to myself. No harmful habits or destructive behaviors. I was just miserable.
I called my grandma, the same one that used to sit with me and talk me down at the kitchen table. Medication wasn't an option for me, I had gone through a slew of them just a year prior. Maybe we eventually would have found one, but I was too tired to think of going back through the process. My grandmother told me to go back to the way I used to do things, focus on what I eat and when I sleep. Spend time in the sunlight, ask for extensions on homework, and so on. That's what I did. I'm not going to tell you that I was suddenly cured by eating better and spending time outside, but it helped a lot more than I thought it would. It allowed me to crawl out of that hole of a mentality and move forward.
Another thing started to happen that second year, my anxiety changed. I would still get panic attacks if I didn't sleep well, but I was becoming angrier. It was to the point that I was blowing up every day, yelling about one thing or another. The slightest inconvenience sent me spinning. I was irrational, my head was so sick. It was worse than the depression and anxiety combined because it was the most negative of the forces. Everyone around me was targeted. To this day I don't know why anybody put up with it. I thought I was crazy. We thought maybe I was bipolar, but I refused the thought, even though I feared it myself. It's in the family, and I didn't want to bear the same issue they have because of how much they've struggled with it. I didn't want to live that way.
It took me a year to think that maybe it was my birth control. I went to my doctor and swapped medications twice before finding the right one. There are studies out now that are showing more and more how terrible birth control pills are for the psyche, and how it boosts anxiety and depression symptoms. Nobody really thought anything of it then, at least not in my experience. Even my doctor was hesitant to take me off of the medication because she thought I may be using it as a scapegoat, but she changed it and it worked. I was calmer. I was more at peace with myself and the people around me. I didn't feel like I was at war in my head.
The biggest and best thing that happened to me to get me away from my anxiety attacks was work. I began working full time in 2013. I became a person that was depended on by others, and after that promotion, all anxiety attacks ceased to occur at work. I could go in on three hours of sleep and function perfectly all day. My body will still try to go through the motions, heart pounding, chest tightening, but my mind stays clear and free of fear. This job has pushed me in directions I never thought possible. My social anxiety doesn't exist here. I can stand in front of classes and speak without fear, I can handle confrontation in a better manner. It's been the most amazing experience to realize that I've become a mostly functioning adult. Like I've somehow made it through a maze.
My anxiety isn't gone. My depression isn't gone. I'm still irritable when I'm not at work, something I have to continue to work on, and classes and responsibilities are still hard. My depression still sits on my shoulders from time to time, keeping me lazy, keeping me from trying to accomplish my dreams, but I shake it off as best I can. I'm so much better than I was when I got these issues, and in my lifetime it's been my greatest achievement. I'll continue to struggle and move forward because it's all I can do. I'll reel myself back in as new symptoms manifest themselves. I'll keep going, because I love life too much to stop.
This is the short history of my anxiety. It isn't all inclusive--there were reasons for my illnesses to rear their ugly heads again and again, but that's life. This is my story, but it can be anyone's. Our lives will always throw diversity our way, but it's our perseverance that will show who we really are. The circumstances that occur are irrelevant in the long run; it's how we overcome them that truly matters.
