thoughts
Quick Note: I originally wrote this a few years ago when my anxiety and depression were pretty close to the worst they've ever been. In the years since, I've gotten on the right dosage of medication, found a job with a boss and co-workers I love, and have discovered much healthier ways to cope with my mental illness. So, while parts of this post might seem rather hopeless, I would like it to be known that I am currently in a much better place than when I wrote it.
Have you ever thought that maybe you don’t have anxiety, you’re just being a baby about everything? I stared at my computer screen, immediately feeling a tightening in my chest until I reminded myself to breathe. The question, tweeted by an old friend I followed on Twitter but had lost touch with in real life, wasn’t necessarily directed at me. My name wasn’t included anywhere, and she hadn’t posted it on my timeline. It was a subtweet at best, possibly not even a reference to me. But the timing was too suspicious to be coincidental. Just hours before, I’d posted a long, painful, semi-confessional piece on my personal blog, recounting how my increasing anxiety and depression led me to the decision to quit my teaching job. Before posting the piece, I’d asked a couple people to read it as I was afraid of sounding like I was whining or looking for attention. They all assured me that this wasn’t the case, so I went ahead and uploaded it, sharing it to Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr for the world to read. But now I was confronted with this tweet which my paranoia (a side effect of my anxiety, by the way) assured me was this former friend’s response to my blog post. My first instinct was to take down the post, delete my entire blog, curl up on my couch, and never leave my house again. After a few minutes of thought (and several frantic texts to one of the post’s early readers), I realized I needed to calm down, ignore the tweet, and go back to living my life. But it just keeps bothering me. One of the more annoying aspects of my anxiety is the inability to let go of things that bother me. I should have been able to assume that tweet had nothing to do with me and move on to something else. Instead, I continue to feel a desperate need to explain myself all the time. I want people to understand what it’s like to live with a brain that constantly tries to undermine the rest of your body. The courage to talk openly about my anxiety and depression came from the same source as most of my inspiration: a book. In this case, the book in question is Jenny Lawson’s memoir, Furiously Happy: A Funny Book About Horrible Things. In this book, Lawson writes about her struggles with mental illness, but also includes humorous anecdotes about finding ways to cope with the hand she’s been dealt in life. After reading Furiously Happy, I decided it was time to let people know what I was going through. But that tweet, which seemed to be calling me out and discrediting my words, now makes me wonder if I wasn’t clear enough about what it’s like to live with anxiety and depression. So please, allow me to explain further. The women in my family have a long history of anxiety and depression, but we’re all affected in different ways. Mine started to pop up in junior high, though at the time it was referred to as “teen angst” or a “phase” I would soon outgrow so no one really took it seriously. Through most of high school, I found ways to deal with the overwhelming numbness that would arrive unexpectedly every few weeks, leaving me unable to interact with my friends and family normally. Considering how my feelings had been brushed aside years before, I assumed that it was best to keep everything a secret. So instead of talking to someone about my frequent inability to make it through the day without locking myself in a bathroom stall to cry or hyperventilate, I struggled to find other ways to overcome these issues. Unfortunately, as a teenager, I didn’t know of too many outlets other than those showcased on television or in movies. This led to years of self-mutilation and eating disorders in desperate, misguided attempts to exert control over my own life in any way I could. As one might guess, these methods were less than successful. Once college rolled around, I started to find other people who suffered from similar alternating feelings of numbness and panic, so I tried to combat my issues the same way they did: alcohol. As many of you know, though, alcohol consumed in large quantities is actually a depressant; so I would wake up the next morning unable to get out of bed, not because of a hangover, but because of an overwhelming feeling of hopelessness. The constant partying also took a toll due to my inability to engage with large groups of people for extended periods of time. This led to an increase in the frequency and intensity of the panic attacks I’d experienced on and off for the past few years. I eventually severed ties with my wilder friends, graduated college, and accepted a job teaching high school English. For a few months, things seemed to settle down. I was coping with my depression better than I had in years and I’d stopped having panic attacks. But shortly before Thanksgiving that year, my anxiety returned in full force. It caused me to become physically ill every single morning before I left for school, and I often taught my classes with a trash can beside me, just in case. Several times I called in sick because no amount of self-bribery could convince me to drag myself out of bed. I visited several doctors during that year of teaching, each of them diagnosing me with something different: irritable bowel syndrome, a potential ulcer in the lining of my stomach, gall bladder issues, etc. But extensive testing proved all of these wrong. Eventually, as I explained in one of my first blog posts, my anxiety was one of the biggest factors in my decision to quit teaching. In the years following, I’ve continued to suffer from extreme anxiety and depression. I finally found a doctor who seems to understand, though. Through a series of appointments, she not only finally found medication that helps me cope without turning me into a zombie, but she also helped me understand exactly what is wrong me. Allow me to provide a breakdown of how my anxiety and depression affect me. I have trichotillomania – pulling out one’s own hair – to a fairly manageable extent. For the most part, I ignore the hair on top of my head, though in the past I’ve been forced to create some rather unique hairstyles to cover up small bald patches. I primarily focus on less noticeable sections of hair. For instance, I often pull out my eyelashes in clumps. Fortunately, I wear thick-rimmed glasses that I can easily hide behind. I always wish that my fingers would naturally gravitate toward my eyebrows instead, as that would save me a lot of money on waxing appointments, but it’s probably for the best as I would likely just pluck out the entire middle section of one eyebrow instead of just focusing on the stray hairs popping up outside of my brow line. I also have dermatillomania, more commonly known as skin-picking disorder, which causes my face to look like I’m perpetually caught in a cycle of acne most people outgrow after high school. When I get particularly stressed, my legs break out in spots. When these spots originally showed up several summers ago, I assumed they were mosquito bites, but their continued presence into the winter months ruled out that possibility. A rather preoccupied nurse at a health fair once glanced at them for about a second before assuring me they were the adult manifestation of being in close proximity for a prolonged period with a small child who was suffering a chest cold. This would have been an acceptable diagnosis, had I been around any ill children during the three months since they’d started appearing. Regardless of where these spots come from, I pick at them until they bleed and eventually become infected (especially if I continue attempting to shave my legs in spite of them), leading parts of my legs to appear as though I once suffered from a mild case of smallpox. My hands suffer the brunt of my anxiety, though. I bite my fingernails until they’re bloody messes. Then, when my teeth can no longer grip the fingernail, I’ll chew at the skin around my fingernails, sometimes peeling off strips of skin all the way to the distal interphalangeal joint (yeah, I had to look up the name of that). Not only has this knocked me out of the running for a hand-modeling contract, it also causes a lot of pain whenever I wash my hands or try to cook or eat anything containing salt or citrus. Washing my hands with hot water or showering also exacerbates the rash that often covers the backs of my hands when I’m feeling particularly anxious about a situation. As my anxiety has worsened over the years, I’ve found myself increasingly unable to engage in activities I used to enjoy. I’m the youngest of six children, I have thirteen nieces and nephews, and there are a boatload of cousins on both sides of the family. We get together for family dinners way more often than just Thanksgiving or Christmas, so we’re all close. These miniature family reunions were once my favorite things, but the past couple years have found me searching for excuses to get out of them, or making up a reason to arrive late and leave early. Most of my family members have a vague understanding of why I’m suddenly terrified of being pulled into a conversation with people I’ve known my entire life, but I constantly worry they’ll believe I’m just being rude or that I need to grow out of whatever I’m currently going through. Going out with my friends has also become a dread-inspiring experience. I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve cancelled on plans at the last minute because, even though I managed to drive to the restaurant, I can’t convince myself to get out of my car and join my friends inside. Some of them who understand this. Some of them either think it’s weird or that I’m just being flaky. The times I do manage to make it inside the restaurant, sit down, and order as little as possible in case my stomach decides to go on strike that day, I almost always have to excuse myself to the bathroom, not because nature is calling, but because I can feel my lungs starting to rebel against their natural proclivity to breathe. While in the bathroom, I run through a list of excuses for why I suddenly need to leave, though I ultimately reject all of them because I can’t remember which ones I’ve already used on this friend. Eventually, I sulk back to the table and do my best to keep up with the conversation while simultaneously counting every breath to keep myself calm: four seconds in, six seconds out, four seconds in, six seconds out. Despite my best efforts, the back of my neck will usually start to get hot, which used to indicate I had a 45-second grace period before passing out, but now just means that I’m slipping into panic mode. To combat this, I’ll wrap my hands around my ice-filled drink for a few seconds before trying, and likely failing, to appear nonchalant as I place my cool hands on my neck. There are times I don’t even bother to order food when I eat out with my friends, both because my stomach can’t handle much when I’m anxious and because it’s too much for me to try to eat, follow and contribute to the conversation, and continue breathing at a pace that won’t induce hyperventilation. While I’ve never been known as a people person, these past years have rendered me borderline reclusive. Though my anxiety hounds me almost relentlessly, I almost prefer it to the days when depression slinks in, usually just before dawn, wraps around my slowly awakening brain, and renders me immobile until it grows weary and falls temporarily dormant. But maybe I’m overdramatizing the situation. Let me try again. Have you ever carried a book bag completely stuffed with large, hardcover textbooks, a few novels, some notebooks, a laptop, and assorted other school-related items up three flights of stairs? I did that every day in college. But for me, when I finally reach the top and gratefully let the bag slide off my shoulders, the weight remains. My depression continues to drape itself across my shoulders, caressing the back of my neck and gently curving my spine before delivering a sucker punch in the general area of my kidneys. I cannot remove it. I wear it like the itchy sweater you didn’t have the heart to throw out because your grandma knitted it just for you. But fortunately for me, my depression occasionally takes a vacation. I sometimes spend days, even weeks, leaving my house, showing up to work on time, buying groceries, and behaving like any other human being. And I hoard those experiences, as mundane as they may seem, because I know, with no warning, the day will come when I’ll have to struggle to even turn on my phone long enough to call in sick to work. This is accompanied by the additional brain power of having to manufacture an excuse for my absence as it’s hard to find a boss who will accept the truth that I physically cannot get out of bed due to the overwhelming sense of hopelessness that’s trying to seduce me with the temptation that it would be easier to forfeit living in order to escape ever feeling this way again. I’m not writing this to garner sympathy, though. I don’t expect anyone to read this and suddenly drop everything to coddle me and assure me that things aren’t as bad as they seem. I just want people to understand that I don’t act the way I do because I want attention or because I’m being a baby. I have a legitimate illness; it’s just not one that people can see, so if they don’t suffer from something similar, they find it difficult to empathize. But I haven’t given up hope. I take medication every day that helps subdue my tendency to panic. I was recently prescribed additional medicine that I’m only allowed to take in case of a full-blown anxiety attack, which I fortunately haven’t had to use yet. Through my blog posts, I’ve discovered that some of my friends are dealing with similar issues, which has provided me with a network of people I can rely on if I need to talk to someone. And I’m slowly learning how to drag myself back when my depression tries to entice me closer to the edge. The road to normalcy is long, overgrown, and lonely, but I refuse to turn around because nothing good awaits me back there. The stigmas associated with anxiety and depression are finally beginning to fall away in our society, and I for one am extraordinarily grateful that, at least to my face, I’ve been met with only positive responses to my writing about my struggles. And if the only negativity I’ve earned is through an ambiguous tweet, then I think things are going to turn out all right.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Jacinta M. CarterProfessional Book Nerd Archives
March 2019
Categories |