Let's Talk Anxiety.

As a child, I was terrified of dying, and I thought about it constantly. This was due to a combination of my religious upbringing and a mom who cultivated a sense of fear in me from a very young age because she was so afraid I would die.

When I was around 7 or 8 years old, I convinced myself that if I thought about breathing too much, I would stop doing it altogether, and I would die. If I ever accidentally thought about breathing, observing my breath, I couldn’t figure out how to go back to doing it naturally. I would try my hardest to focus on breathing slowly, slowly, slowly, but the stress of the situation would quicken my pace, and that, of course, would exacerbate the problem. This would often lead to me hyperventilating, at which point I would inevitably panic, go through the motions of what I now know were early panic attacks, and then move on, remembering to breathe just fine on my own.

Around this time, I also began obsessively learning directions around my town anytime we would go out. I would write them down in a little notebook that I kept from my parents, and I would commit them to memory as best as I could. I would then try and will the car to turn in the direction of the park. My parents never told me where we were going when we’d leave the house, and I don’t remember ever going to the park outside of the occasional visit to the pool or birthday party. Regardless of those facts, I always wanted to go to the park. I would sit in the back seat and try to control the vehicle by focusing really, really hard on which direction I wanted them to turn. I would raise my hand to attempt to make the lights turn green to get there faster, and I would extend my hand palm facing out to get the car to stop at stop signs. 

When that didn’t work, I decided that it must be the opposite approach entirely. I would try my hardest to focus on the car going in the opposite direction. If the park was left, left, roundabout, right, I would think right, right, roundabout, left. 

When this didn’t work, I decided that my method was flawed altogether, and I needed to not think of it at all. So every time I got in the car, I would force myself to try and think about anything else. My new logic was simple—if I accidentally thought about the park, I wouldn’t get to go. Without fail, I almost always thought about going to the park. 

It never occurred to me, at any point in my childhood, to ask my parents to take me to the park. 

This set up an ideology that I am still unraveling: I can think about something too much and ruin it. 

There was a period in college when I realized that I had general anxiety disorder. Still, I convinced myself that I was making it up because I was aware of every step of my anxiety. In my mind, if I knew about it, I could choose not to feel it or participate in it. I was choosing to be anxious, and all of my anxiety symptoms? I was allowing them to happen. Panic attacks? I was breathing too heavily, and then it got out of control. Insomnia? I must be eating the wrong thing or drinking the wrong thing. Near-constant fear of my mom dying? Must not be trusting God enough. 

I knew I had anxiety, but I thought I was making it much worse because I wasn’t disciplined enough to keep it under wraps. 

When I started going to therapy, I went not because I was dealing with a mental illness but because I had always thought I would go to therapy in adulthood. Many adults in movies in the late 90s and early 2000s were either therapists or in therapy, so I just sort of transitioned into adulthood assuming I should give it a whirl. I started believing I was a happy and healthy person. 

During my first session, my therapist asked me how long I’d known I had general anxiety disorder—a standard question for a new patient. But I had never indicated that I had it. She could just tell from my mannerisms. I told her I’d had it since college, which I’m sure she knew even then wasn’t true. 

Now that I know more about anxiety, after many years in therapy and lots of understanding about my journey with it, I know I was damn near born with it. It started showing up as soon as I was verbal and making memories, and in many ways, most of my early childhood memories are colored by it. 

In fact,I don’t have many childhood memories at all. When I do, they are crystal clear, sometimes meaningless, sometimes riddled with fear. The rest is foggy. 

In adulthood, and at its worst, my anxiety (and its friend depression) had me spend an entire summer in bed every chance I could get. I would just sleep and lay around and think about how life could be different. I was late to everything, and I was evasive when my closest friends asked me to hang out. I was tired nearly every moment of 2017 and into 2018. And then, a turn happened, and I became hyper-functioning. I said yes to everything, I had plans all the time, I would forget to eat, and I would work all the time. My body didn’t know how to regulate, but that was fine—I was moving too fast to care. I would go into therapy, and my therapist would tell me I needed to spend slow time alone, and I would tell her I couldn’t do that. I knew if I slowed down, it would catch up to me and eat me alive. In 2019 I finally managed to slow down. I found solitude for the first time, and after some difficulty, I began to enjoy it. I learned what enjoying one’s time felt like. I learned to do nothing. And with it, I began managing my anxiety for the first time in my life. 

As of today, I haven’t been in therapy for almost seven months, and I think about my anxiety often. I am also in a season where it’s difficult not to let it wrap its arms around me at any given moment. I constantly worry about whether I’m doing the right thing when it comes to the banal decisions of life. In turn, I have to continually remind myself that, most of the time, there’s no clear, correct answer when it comes to whether or not I should go to a party or stay home and watch tv. Anxiety isn’t something I’ll be rid of anytime soon, but it’s something I know how to manage better today than I ever have before. I managed it for a long time through talk therapy. Now I manage it through walks, spiritual practice, reducing my alcohol consumption, daily writing, and understanding anxiety is not linear. I am grateful that as of right now I can manage my anxiety; the panic attacks are no longer daily, they’re every few months. I can sleep at night. I can find new ways to calm my mind.

As Mental Health Awareness month wraps up, I wanted to finally press publish on a newsletter about my journey with my anxiety. 

If this sounds like you, and you haven’t sought out a therapist yet, I would encourage you. If money is a barrier, there are lots of great resources online. Here are some of my favorites:

One of my favorites is Good Therapy. You can use this tool to sort through preferences, and you can also filter by who has a sliding scale. 

If you’re not ready to go in person yet, you can check out Talk Space, a completely online service that gives you access to licensed therapists at all times. 

Some of my favorite books that have helped me along my journey of understanding my humanity and my brain a bit better:

Codependent No More by Melody Beattie

The Body Keeps The Score by Bessel Van Der Kolk

You Are Here by Thich Nhat Hanh

Be Here Now by Ram Dass

how a photo and video-sharing social networking service gave me my best friends, true love, a beautiful career, and made me want to die by Marlee Grace

The Untethered Soul by Michael A. Singer

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