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| I have this poster for a good reason |
I'm really proud of this one, and am really enjoying writing lately. This is about overcoming anxiety. I'm hoping being open about this might help other people feel like it's okay to get help and also that they aren't alone. As an added bonus, it certainly was cathartic.
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It’s strange how you can be an inhabitant in your own mind for so long, and yet not notice when things have, slowly but surely, begun to go awry.
In my college admissions essay, I wrote about fear – that “it may drive, or inspire, or limit me, but with knowledge, and independence, and powerful motivation, I can conquer the things that strike dread into my soul.”
Little did I know that, sometimes, fear itself is what you have to conquer – and that you can’t always overcome it on your own.
When I wrote that essay, was I beginning to realize? Did I have any inkling whatsoever? Had I begun to look inside myself and see what was there for what it truly was?
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In professional training last week, the icebreaker exercise was to ask several other people an assigned question. Everyone’s was different, and mine was to “name your greatest conquest.” Aside from making it sound like we’re all Genghis Khans in-training, for over half of the people in the room, the response was “getting a job at Tech Company”.
What I didn’t realize was that when we shared others’ responses aloud, we also had to answer our own question. The mediator looked at me. I looked at her.
“So, Kimberly, what is your greatest conquest?” Her voice was kind, but her eyes seemed piercing.
My anxiety, I thought.
“Getting a degree in Computer Science,” I said aloud, voice sounding tiny to my own ears.
It’s true, in a sense. Looking back, I often feel it’s a wonder I managed to graduate, given the state my brain was in most of the time.
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Somehow, without meaning to, I’ve made this month about honesty. Honesty with myself; honesty with others. (Some might call that oversharing.)
So, in a manner of speaking, I am coming out: I have anxiety.
I have anxiety.
Maybe if I repeat it enough times, I’ll start to get used to saying it. Yet, talking about it feels so difficult, even now.
Telling people about my anxiety disorder typically goes something like this:
- Try to remember how to breathe.
- Breathe in. (Off to a good start, I think, ever-optimistically. We’ve got this breathing thing down. Breathing like a pro.)
- Pause.
- Try to remember what words are, using the writhing morass formerly known as my brain.
- Exhale.
- Panic, as time stretches out and blood begins to rush in my ears.
- Eventually figure out the right words and say them.
- Caveat with all sorts of reassuring additional words to prove I'm not crazy, unstable, or unhinged.
- Babble extensively and near-incoherently, providing plentiful evidence to contradict (8).
- Hope for the best.
The irony isn't lost on me: talking about having anxiety, as it so happens, gives me anxiety.
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I haven’t yet seen Silver Linings Playbook, but a quote from actress Jennifer Lawrence resonates with me: “It's just so bizarre how in this world if you have asthma, you take asthma medicine; if you have diabetes, you take diabetes medicine. If you have to take medication for your mind, there's such a stigma behind it.”
I know people with depression, anxiety, bipolar, phobias, panic disorders, and I’m sure a whole bevy of other interesting phenomena occurring within their respective crania, and still this feeling of besmirchment weighs heavily upon me.
I know people on anti-depressants, anti-anxiety medications, tranquilizers, mood stabilizers, and other drug combinations of which I haven't yet heard.
I’m certain my mom has severe, undiagnosed and untreated depression, most definitely anxiety, and possibly some form of agoraphobia – she can't walk across shiny floors without clinging to me or her shopping cart or a wall, teetering at panic’s edge.
Yet, whenever it comes to discussing mental illness – because that’s what it is – I always find my voice withers. In public, I speak in euphemisms. My condition, I say in hushed tones, as if saying it more quietly somehow makes it less true.
When it comes to matters of the brain, it seems that only whispers will do.
Why the stigma? Why the fear? Why the anxiety about admitting I have anxiety?
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I’ve probably had anxiety for as long as I can remember, in one form or another. Actually, technically, my anxiety is comorbid, meaning it is a secondary effect of a different primary problem. In my case, that problem is mood instability. It’s like the upswings and downswings of bipolar disorder, but without the acutely crushing depression or extreme mania. The highs are less high, and the lows are less low.
These small fluctuations in mood were enough that a good day would turn bad for no perceivable reason. The echo chamber of my brain magnified small failures into terrible tragedies, putting me in a dark mood for days. Sometimes, all I wanted to do was stay in bed – when I couldn’t rise up to face humanity, it quite logically felt like the path of least resistance.
To be honest, I hardly even noticed that all this was happening, because I was so caught up in feeling anxious the rest of the time.
I’d like to tell you I can trace it back to one crucial inflection point – a single moment, some scarring childhood experience, perhaps. In reality, it’s likely due to a chemical imbalance in my brain. It cannot be reasoned with. It simply is.
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What’s it feel like?
Take the nervous anticipation you feel before a big interview or important presentation. Multiply it a hundred-fold. A thousand-fold.
Imagine your heart beating so fast you think you’re having a heart attack. You can’t quite regulate your breathing. You try, desperately, to inhale slowly and calmly --
In—out—in—out—in—
It doesn’t work. Your stomach clenches, twists, gurgles. Acid rises in your throat. Your skin tingles with sweeping washes of cold fire. Ears ringing, your mind is numb, empty, inscrutable.
Although it was in my mind, my body reacted. And when my body reacted, my mind responded; an infinite loop of adrenaline and panic, panic and adrenaline.
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In the beginning, I didn’t have anxiety all the time. I could go days, weeks, months – longer, even – without feeling it. I’d forget the sensation; no sooner had I forgotten it, then it would be there, waiting for me like some long-lost and familiar, but sorely-unmissed companion.
In college, my anxiety worsened. Sitting in a physics lecture hall for the final, I was stumped not by the real portion of the question, but by a simple mental math problem. It was as if my brain had disappeared, leaving nothing but ringing emptiness between my ears.
This bout of test anxiety was the first of many. On practically every midterm and final in my math, science, and computer science classes - the high pressure, competitive classes I needed for my degree - I wasted precious minutes staring at the page, words blurring together, making no sense in my mind’s jumbled madness.
I, the person who explained concepts to others and helped them figure out problems, who began studying days in advance, who always started the homework assignments early, debugged them extensively, pored over them with perfectionism, and got good grades, would score lower on the exams than the people I explained concepts to; people who hadn’t attended lectures for weeks, or who started the homework the night before it was due, or who crammed all night long.
It messed with my confidence. I passed up on even applying to an international exchange program when I learned that the grades abroad were almost exclusively dependent on examinations. I knew I couldn't handle the pressure.
Awash with the knowledge of my own constant failure, a dark part of my mind contemplated dropping out of school after nearly every exam.
I knew the material. I knew that I knew it. But when it came down to the moment, my brain was my biggest betrayer.
I was depressed. My relationship suffered – my then-boyfriend told me that I needed to just get over it, as if anxiety and depression were logical things which could be reasoned away. In turn, I worsened, riddled with guilt that my issues were my fault, and too filled with debilitating dread to do anything about it.
For some reason, it never really occurred to me that I needed help. It felt like my cross to bear. On one hand, my quality of life was clearly suffering. On the other, I'd spent so much time in my mind's chaos that it had become standard fare.
Every day, I woke up to feelings of panic. My body would pump out stress hormones even before I had gained consciousness. Before I opened my eyes, the anxiety was there waiting for me.
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It took a close friend disclosing their own struggles to make me realize that my feelings weren’t normal. They’d begun seeing a therapist and had gone on medication with great success – feeling, for the first time in years, like themselves again.
Having come from a household where therapists were scorned and medication shunned in favor of a toxic cocktail of bottled up emotions, perpetual self-hatred, and naturopathic remedies, it took a lot of courage to begin the healing process.
I saw a therapist on a weekly basis and met with a psychiatrist. Afraid that medication would change who I was – that I would swallow a pill and no longer be me – I was adamant that anything I took would have few to no side effects. Messing with the chemistry of my body, I could handle – but altering my mind seemed terrifying.
Thankfully, my therapist and psychiatrist listened to my concerns and encouraged open dialogue about my fears and reservations. They didn’t criticize when I came to them with medical questions, or when looking up side effects online resulted in a panicked frenzy of self-diagnosis.
We didn’t get it right on the first try – lithium upset my stomach, and increasing the dose on another medication triggered my one (and hopefully only) manic episode. It wasn’t my best day ever, but I was willing to work through it. I was ready to change. I was ready to be me.
Today, I take two medications – an anti-epileptic called lamotrigine and another anti-epileptic/neuropathic pain reliever called gabapentin. Both have off-label uses as treatments for depression and anxiety. I've been on them for close to two years now, and haven't had any ill effects.
I don’t really go to see my therapist anymore. She’s wonderful, but we both realized that I didn’t really need her once discussions became about living everyday life rather than surviving it.
There are still good days and bad days. One week, I forgot to fill my prescriptions in time. I thought nothing of it, but over the course several days, anxiety crept back into my mornings like a noxious cloud unfurling over everything I did.
I still feel failures more deeply than most, am harder on myself than I should be, and sweat the small stuff from time to time. I can’t take nasal decongestants, have to request non-epinephrine numbing shots at the dentist, and, to the chagrin of baristas everywhere, drink decaf coffee now because caffeine jitters feel too much like those familiar tendrils of anxiousness.
I still get a little nervous or shaky during important presentations and public speaking, but these are the normal kinds of nervousness that everyone feels from time to time, not the debilitating, constant trepidation from before.
I sleep through the night and wake up refreshed. For the most part, I feel normal. I take two pills at night, and I feel like me – or maybe who me should have always been.
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Still, when I share with people that I’ve struggled with anxiety, their reactions are almost always surprised.
“But you’ve got it so together!” They exclaim. “You’re so confident! So poised!” Often this is followed by reassurances, as if the anxiety can be smoothed away with a little extra comfort.
Perhaps I did a better job of appearing buttoned up and put together on the outside than I realized, even when, underneath the surface, I was a roiling sea of uncertainty, self-doubt, and fear.
But, more importantly, I think what’s to be learned here is that so many people silently cope with mental illness. It isn’t always obvious who’s struggling and who isn’t. From one moment to the next, I could appear calm and collected, but barely be treading water below the surface.
Taking “mental health” days off from work is frowned upon, but how else do you explain that you’re under the weather not due to a sickness of the body, but one of the mind? We need to have non-stigmatizing dialogues about mental illness. It’s too easy to be silent about something so difficult to discuss.
I think I’m ready to start talking. Even if it’s just to do what my friend did for me – by sharing their experiences with anxiety, therapy, and medication, they helped me address my fears and get my questions answered in a safe place, from a trusted source.
Fear used to drive me. It used to inspire me. I thought I could wield it, control it, use it to conquer whatever I needed to face. But, more than anything else, fear used to limit me.
It’s all right to admit you can’t face everything yourself. It’s all right to get a little help.
It’s all right to be okay again.
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