Having anxiety is like living your life in fast-forward, you see what’s coming and you have no idea how to stop it. It’s an incessant, aggressive mental illness that feeds off your worries and doubts, magnifying them until you don’t know what is real anymore. You start thinking that the person sitting next to you on the bus flashed you a dirty look, even though he’s probably just making sure that he gets off at the right stop. You start reevaluating every social interaction you had that day or every important relationship you have in your life and wonder if it’s all a lie. Every test, evaluation and formal judgement feels like an extra weight, holding you down while you try to muster the strength to push through it. Every morning, you have about twenty seconds of calm before your worries start flooding in. Each thought pushes past the last, creating greater waves and leaving behind stronger wakes.
Think of every irrational thought that crosses your mind on a daily basis. Now imagine what would happen if you took each thought seriously? What if you allowed each thought to carry an astronomical weight in your chest until you become so overwhelmed you can’t think logically about anything?
The first time I had a panic attack, I was sitting in the back row of my math class. I don’t think I realized that it was a panic attack until I looked back and thought about how scared I had been for my life in that moment. My body acted as though it was faced with the threat of death even though I knew that I wasn’t dying. My math teacher was talking about our first unit test and the edges of the classroom started to turn dark. My heart started beating, so fast, that it hurt my chest. All noise had become background music to the drum of my own beating heart. My head was pounding as my vision blurred. I remember having a conversation with the girl sitting next to me when it was happening. The strange thing is, my voice maintained its calm. My body, my composure was normal. I pushed myself to create a calm surface despite the fact that my body was shaking and my mind was on fire. And I did that every day, for months.
I would like to say that that was me last year and now it’s all gone, the festering disease has been eradicated from my mind and has left no remnants behind. I would like to say that. But the truth is, mental illness isn’t like a regular illness. There is nothing regular about it. It is inconsistent and erratic and so damn confusing. Things have gotten better, way better. At some point I realized that pushing through each day trying to avoid another panic attack wasn’t sustainable. Going to therapy helped more than I could have imagined despite the fact that it was a really hard step to take. But to be completely honest, it was the realization that I deserved better. We all deserve better.
It’s not all sunshines and rainbows. Somedays I feel a hurricane beginning to churn or a storm beginning to brew in my mind. I will never be “fixed” and I am starting to feel ok with it. Not being “fixed” doesn’t mean I am broken or any less capable than someone without anxiety. I’d like to believe that blue skies can exist despite the storms that may occur beneath it.