My Anxiety

My whole life, I’ve struggled with anxiety. Debilitating, sickening, knock-me-on-my-ass anxiety at its worst. Annoying OCD tendencies and general worry and paranoia at its best. Over the course of my life, I’ve learned coping mechanisms and have been able to reduce my anxiety, which is good. I’ve been doing breathing and meditation exercises since I was a child, I’ve learned that taking care of myself in simple ways by eating healthy, staying hydrated, spending time outdoors, and getting enough sleep helps. But it’s still there.

Most of the time, my anxiety is well-controlled or what is referred to as “high-functioning anxiety.” For me, this basically means I can interact with life normally and I’m fairly successful at appearing to be okay, but I’m in a constant state of low-level anxiety and I am constantly fidgeting. For some people, this means shaking their leg or biting their nails. I used to do those things, but I don’t anymore (except for when I break a nail and don’t have a file! THE WORST). I do things now that are less noticeable to people who aren’t paying attention: playing with my fingers, playing with/picking at my hair, clenching my jaw, or biting the inside of my cheek.

Rarely do I have any massive anxiety attacks or nervous breakdowns anymore. When I was a child they were much more frequent. I used to go home sick from school or would have to immediately remove myself from an uncomfortable social situation. I can recall memories of having to convince the school nurse I was sick because I didn’t have a fever but I NEEDED to go home. As I grew older, and I developed coping methods, anxiety attacks became less frequent to the point where I went years without having a really bad one.

Then, one night in my mid-20’s, they came back. It caught me off guard, as they do. It had been so long since my last anxiety attack, I couldn’t figure out what was wrong with me until after the main effects wore off and I was able to think clearly about what I had just gone through. That year was bad. Suddenly I was having anxiety attacks regularly and rather severely. (I was dealing with a lot of work and personal relationship issues at that point in my life). They’ve calmed down again since then, for the most part.

My whole life, I wished I felt comfortable talking about my anxiety. Maybe then I could’ve helped friends, coworkers, teachers, or employers understand why I suddenly needed a break out of the blue, or why I was running late or wanted to leave early, or had to cancel plans last minute. I still don’t really feel that comfortable talking about it. I do talk about it with other people who openly have anxiety. Their courage to talk about it is inspiring. But this is my first public announcement about it.

I remember the first time I talked about my anxiety with a coworker. I was working at a coffee shop and in the middle of a closing shift, I felt an anxiety attack coming on. I had to remove myself from the front for a bit until I could calm down. My coworker was super supportive (and fortunately competent in running the floor without me). She didn’t deal with anxiety so she didn’t quite understand what I was going through. But she was the first person I remember ever asking about what was happening and what it was like, without judgment. I think that was part of the key to my comfort, she wanted to know what it was like.

That experience was refreshing, most of the time people who don’t understand anxiety don’t know what to do, how to act, or what to say to someone who’s experiencing it. And to be honest, sometimes I don’t know either. Often when I’m dealing with an anxiety attack, I don’t have answers for questions like “What’s wrong?” or “What can I do to help?” While those questions are well-intended, they’re too ambiguous for my anxiety-ridden mind to answer because the only answer I can think of at the time is “just make it stop.” Because everything is wrong and it feels like there’s nothing I can do about it. When an anxiety attack hits, I become a vacuum sucking in every tiny problem I’ve ever ignored and all the nothingness that exists in the Universe until I implode.

Everyone deals with their anxiety differently. For me, it usually starts with this sudden all-knowing sense that something is terribly wrong. Every cell in my body feels it. My stomach starts to turn. I feel uneasy and nauseous and weak. I don’t typically feel so nauseous that I want to vomit, but a type of nausea that feels uncomfortable and makes me lose my appetite. Sometimes my whole body tightens, sometimes it shakes. I get light-headed and dizzy. A mental fog rolls in and I lose my focus. My heart begins to pound so hard it feels like it’s going to explode and my lungs feel like they’re going to collapse as I feel weight set in on my chest. My throat tightens and it makes me want to gag. My mouth dries up in an undying thirst for water. And I want to cry. And then I do cry. And I cry until all the anxiety has been released. And then I sleep. Because after my body goes through all of that internal stress and trauma, I have no energy left to do anything else. THAT is anxiety.

I think part of the problem people with anxiety, or any mental health issue, have is giving too much of ourselves because we don’t want others to feel the pain that we feel, and we forget to take care of ourselves. I also think we hide our anxiety because we are ashamed of it, or our brains tell us that it’s not worth talking about, or society tells us it’s not real.

I’m glad the stigma about mental illness is breaking and mental health is becoming more of a priority, but we still have walls to break, walls which are mostly our own and are only ours to break.