ANXIETY
“I would rather work at a highly stressful job that pays more then work a low stress job
that pays me less.”
I was the only person standing in the far right corner at the back of the room. Most of our
psychology 101 class was at the front of the room, marked by my teacher as the “agree/
highly agree,” area. There were a few individuals in the “disagree,” corner, and I was the
only one who stood firmly in the “strongly disagree corner.”
Even after a moment’s pause, as people glanced over at me standing there all by myself, I
didn’t change corners –one of the few things I’ve ever prided myself on was being
honest.
Everyone in the room debated on why they had chosen their respective corners, and when
all eyes were on me I cleared my throat.
If you asked my to tell you exactly when it all started, I would reply that, like most things
in life, the answer is complicated. Looking back now, I can remember the feelings that
I’ve now come to identify as my own personal illness. My earliest memory of this feeling
is road trips when I was just a little older than ten. I don’t know how it began, or why, but
whenever we went on a road trip I remember being so terrified that there was no
bathroom.
It was never the actual fact that there was no restroom, just the knowledge that if I had to
go, I would have to ask someone to pull over. What scared me most was that, not only
did I have to rely on someone else to get me there, but more so that I was afraid of
annoying them, or making them angry over something I couldn’t control.
Like anyone with social anxiety, or any kind of anxiety would probably tell you, is this
quickly becomes a vicious cycle. The more I worried about having to go, the more I felt I
had to. This resulted in a strange fear of long car rides marked by shame and confusion
on my end, and many infuriating stops on my mothers’ end.
Somewhere between forcing myself to be calm, and getting an iPod to keep me
distracted, this irrational fear receded. But of course, it was replaced a few years later by
an equally frustrating terror.
My father lost his mother in a car accident when he was five years old. When asked about
the particular event, he claims he can only remember the flashing of police lights on his
ceiling as he lay in bed late into the night. Fast forward to the present time, and my father
still worries when people leave for long periods of time -and god forbid someone doesn’t
answer their cell phone when he’s worried. Though he rarely admits these fears outright,
on numerous occasions I would watch as he paced the house, looking out the kitchen
window, muttering to himself how for all he knew my mother could be dead. I was a little
over twelve years old, and these comments took root like crab grass to a well watered
lawn.
And they grew.
I remember being huddled on the couch, supposedly watching my brother and sister
while my Mom left for sometimes as little as an hour, and how the thoughts grew,
smothering every shred of rationality and sanity from the sunlight.
And so, these parts of my mind began dying.
I would hover over the kitchen window, eyes brimming with tears as the thoughts, the
fear, crouched over my brain, a black figure whose skeleton hands draped these
horrifying images in front of my eyes.
I often saw visions of my Mother’s car smashed and mangled in a ditch somewhere.
When she wouldn’t answer her cell phone, I saw her body mutilated and dead somewhere
beyond human reach. Each car that passed through our complex made my stomach lift
and as the realization that it wasn’t her hit, it would fall even lower, the fear growing with
each passing stranger. Even now, I have trouble remembering this time, because the
thought of the fear I must have instilled in my poor siblings’ minds is enough to make me
want to vomit.
Slowly, I grew out of this stage. For a long time I was nerve free, except for a few small
spells here or there. One particularly bad one was when my Mother came down with the
flu very badly. I remember entering the bathroom to check on her, her thin body hunched
over the tub, her mouth aiming for the bowl that we affectionately began calling the
“puke bowl.” Looking up, she smiled, her cheek bones hollowed out so as I could see all
the muscles working behind her tight skin.
“You’re going to have to watch the kids for me,” she said weekly, her hooded eyes
practically closed as she looked at me.
I nodded, left the bathroom, and stood just outside the door. It took less then a minute for
the hives to rise on my skin, angry, hot and itchy. I’d never had hives before, and haven’t
since, but as I re-entered the bathroom to ask her what they were, I remember feeling so
useless.
Years went by with little incident. Of course, back then, all those things never seemed
connected, and I never knew of my anxiety. In 2009 I became a senior in high school. I’d
been in the same school district my whole life. I grew up with the same handful of kids,
knew all there names and faces, it’s that sort of town. I guess it never occurred to me that
I’d ever leave high school. I mean of course graduating was the big topic when we were
juniors, so it’s not like I was oblivious, but I think for the longest time it didn’t occur to
me that I would soon have to leave the only thing I’d known for thirteen years.
When the realization hit, it hit hard. It started where I would get sick to my stomach
every. Single. Morning. At first I would hide in the bathroom, my heart racing, mouth dry
as I tried to swallow back the fear which honestly is the equivalent to trying to swallow
fistfuls of sand.
Later it got worse as I became a regular face in the nurse’s office, claiming that I was in
fact going to throw up. Soon I stopped going to school all together.
Three days straight I stayed holed up in my room, lights off, Tv on as I laid in bed half of
me wishing the mattress would swallow me and the other half numbed to the fear of what
was actually happening to me, only for it to hiccup awake at random moments of me
crying into my pillow, and for what would be the first time, different types of thoughts
surfaced. Thoughts that would come and go often for the following years to come.
What is wrong with me?
Please, someone, help me.
Will I ever be the same again?
What is happening to me?
I must be going crazy.
Sadly, this was not my lowest point. My lowest point came a few days later when I
convinced myself that I was not breathing correctly. I remember coming down the stairs,
a shell not quiet empty, as the fear and confusion had taken up what seemed to be a
permanent residence in my head. I remember looking my Mother in the eyes, and the
look in them… when I recall it now I begin tearing up. My Mother thought for months
that her child was going crazy, insane. She thought she was losing me, a small sailboat
disappearing over a dark horizon. I can never take back the pain I caused my Mother, and
for that, I will never forgive myself.
“Mom, I… There’s something wrong with my lungs…” I said, hearing the obsurdity in
my own words. She looked at me in the eyes, both of us knowing we were playing a
dangerous game.
“Are you sure?” she asked through tight lips. I looked at her a very long time, my breath
seeming to catch with each intake. I nodded my head.
The waiting room at First Care was filled with sick people. It was around Thanksgiving
and it was getting cold out. Flu season had come on strong. I sat silently, guilt mingling
with the thought of “Maybe if there really is something wrong with me, I’m not crazy…”
We were ushered into a room where I was asked the same questions I’d been asked often
in the last few months, the most prevalent one being “Any chance you might be
pregnant?”
At first I was patient, after all I was seventeen years old complaining of fatigue and
morning sickness, I could understand their suspicion. But after many visits of insisting
“No, I am not pregnant.” And having snooty old doctors testing me anyway because they
didn’t believe me, I was so done with the questioning.
At the end of the checkup, they sent me for chest x-rays just to be safe. I walked into the
dark room, stripped of my shirt and put in front of a bright light as a man in a booth in the
corner asked, yet again, more questions.
“When was your last period?” he asked.
“I don’t know.”
I nearly laughed out loud when I was asked again whether I could be pregnant. Because I
totally had a line of suitors busting down my door to get with the crazy fat chick.
The x-rays came out normal. Nothing was wrong with my breathing.
Thanksgiving came quickly that year, one of my favorite holidays. I was in the bathtub,
still not sure whether my ailments where physical or mental. I couldn’t think that my
mind was doing all this damage to my body, to my spirit. I sat in the warm water in a
daze.
I’ve only hallucinated once in my entire life, and it was that night in the bathtub. I saw
black slime ooze out of the tile in our and down into the water, dispersing outward as it
hit like ink. I jumped out of the bathtub, hair unwashed, and ran into my room with only a
towel. I cried in my Mother’s arms that night, I knew my brain was doing this to me.
If someone asked me back then if I ever thought I’d be where I am now, I would say
absolutely not. I never would have thought I could be comfortable in college. I would
have never thought I could hold down a stressful job for nearly a year. I would have
never thought anyone would be attracted to me, or like me enough to stick around. So far
I’ve done well proving myself wrong.
Every day I wake up and prepare for battle. Because, the truth of the matter is that I will
never be as I was. Every single day of my life will be a struggle, and some days I lose. I
find that lately I’ve begun digging in my heels when it comes to transferring, putting
things off until the last moment so that I don’t have to worry about the big decisions I
will soon have to face. But as each day comes and goes, I realize more and more that I
can’t do that any longer.
The longer I dig my heels in, the worse it will get. Because something I’ve come to see
more and more is that, life is like the ocean. It’s huge, and beautiful and unpredictable
and it holds a power that is ungraspable by man. And if I keep my heels dug into the sand
at the bottom, I will surely, and quickly, drown.