“Hello, my name is Michael Grace Fisher and I have generalized anxiety disorder. GAD is not only a real disease but also a chronic one that I have lived with my entire life. I do not take medication for it, and I manage it every day.” That’s how I want to open up every first day of class with a teacher. That way, we have a starting point from which I don’t have to explain myself constantly.
My anxiety is severe, but I am also high functioning. This is partially because I have had to live with this for my entire life, and partially because anxiety is not treated as a disorder or even really discussed so for a long time I simply thought that I was just a “cry baby.” I simply thought that I was a child that could not handle everyday life and that my crying after I broke something or someone said something upsetting came from being what many child-care providers call “sensitive.” “Sensitive” is one of those words that sounds better than what it means. What it really means is: this child is weak, and this child is unable to function.
Anxiety (and the symptoms associated with it) is a well-publicized disease, but not a well-understood one. “Everyone has anxiety” is what I often hear, but not everyone has the kind of all-consuming, constant, irrational thoughts that I experience. Not everyone walks down Middle Path at night thinking that their abusive ex-boyfriend is going to jump out of the bushes and stab them. Not everyone thinks that if they do badly on a test they will fail the class. Not everyone has the constant feeling that something bad will happen, surrounding them, engulfing them.
Anxious feelings are not the same as anxiety, and I think the conflation is what causes people to assume that anxiety is not a “real disorder.” This idea is so widespread that I often believe it. I find myself thinking that I don’t really need the time accommodation that I get for my anxiety, or that my anxiety attacks were a waste of time when I could have been doing “real work.”
So when teachers tell me that my diagnosed medical condition is just a cop out, or a way to get out of doing assignments, I get pissed. I have rarely heard of people with anxiety asking for absurd amounts of extensions and I know from my own experience that I only ever really ask for an extension when I actually need it to function.
In high school we had a time called open forum in which we could talk about any issue we wanted. When someone brought up how to deal with the stress of the workload we had at our rigorous high school, a lot of the responses were “just do the work” or “don’t worry, be happy.” These responses do not apply to people with anxiety. When people with GAD are put under stress, they have to deal with not only the stress at hand, but the triggering anxiety which results from being put under extreme stress.
I’ve heard all the speeches. People tell you to just get through it, to just move on, to fake it till you make it. But that shit doesn’t work and it isn’t even helpful. In fact, I would argue that it makes it worse. Telling someone with a disease to just “get through it” is basically like asking a person with a broken leg to run a mile.
Teachers need to be trained on this issues, and they need to understand that some of their students may not be able to cope, not because they are “weak” students but because they have actual cognitive errors going on in their brain.
In his Ted Talk, Depression, the secret we share, Andrew Solomon at one point says that he would take the worst depression imaginable instead of acute anxiety. Many people with both depression and anxiety understand this. Anxiety is one of the hardest things to have going on in your mind, because it is completely overwhelming. The other day, someone told me that I had to do something for the housing lottery and I cried. Because when I get anxiety attacks or I get overwhelmed, the feelings are so intense that my body cannot react in any other way but to cry. That’s the reality of anxiety. There is so much intensity that it manifests into chronic muscle pain, fidgeting, and (if you’re me) the inability to feel things like hunger. If your anxiety is pretty bad one day, it can take very little to push you over the edge. And this is coming from a person who has had five years of therapy to combat their own anxiety.
If you know a person with anxiety, or if you think you may know a child with anxiety, I encourage you to look at the signs and symptoms, and then to talk to them. Understand how their brain works. Understand that it is not them being weak, but rather their brain being fearful which is making them react in ways that our society deems “weak.” Listen to them, despite your possible preconceived notions about what anxiety is. As long as they want to be open with you, you will probably have something to learn about what it’s like to live with this disorder.