Anxiety Confession

When I started writing professionally, one of the things that was drummed into my head was nobody wanted to hear my thoughts or struggles. All these years later, times have changed. People want to hear about the struggles of those they like or someone who at least has the same issues they do. So in the hopes of helping someone, and hopefully not torpedoing my career, I want to share my struggle with anxiety.

For me, this has been building for a while. Late in 2018, two of my friends died within weeks of one another. This set the stage for my usual defense, shutting down and focusing on something logical, to fail me. Grief is not logical and should not be ignored or it will lead to some heavier stuff later on. On top of dealing with the loss of my friends, I was working and for some reason thought it was a good idea to take on editing an anthology for a writing club that I co-founded.

The first sign of trouble came when my fellow co-founder and now former friend decided she was not happy with how the book was formatted and waited until we had uploaded it to Amazon to tell me. After seeing a movie with another friend, I came out of the theatre to find a massive amount of texts from her. To this day, I don't know what she said that set me off but I lost control and put her on blast. At the time, I didn't realize that anger was a function of anxiety, but a therapist friend of mine told me it was. The storm of angry texts accomplished ending the friendship, something I am not happy about but realized it might have been for the best, especially since she had been told I was done working for the night and insisted on pushing her agenda and my buttons without thought.

Over the next several months, there were small attacks but nothing significant. That is until I found an apartment with friends. The process was fraught with false starts and setbacks. One of them that sent my nerves over the edge was when one bank moved money over to my other bank after I asked them not to. This put the move on hold and annoyed at least one of my future roommates. It also left me unable to breathe and shaking on a New York City subway. My mind played out all kinds of scenarios, including my guy deciding he wanted nothing to do with me. It makes no sense but those who suffer from this understand that the mind doesn't always work in a logical fashion.

The Netflix sitcom One Day at a Time deals with anxiety in a realistic way, one that proves helpful and educational for those that don't understand what is happening. In the episode, Penelope is under a ton of stress and begins imagining worst-case scenarios. Watching the episode was hard because I recognized myself in Penelope's situation. It also taught me how to deal with an attack.

The one thing it didn't teach me is how to deal with one when asleep. Quite a few nights, I have woken up unable to move and not being able to breathe because an attack is underway. Once my brain is awake enough to start kicking in and helping me, I can usually bring myself out of it. Make no mistake though, those few minutes between waking up and being able to regain control are some of the most difficult.

Will this help someone? It is my hope that another person will read this and say "I'm not alone." Or at the very least know that there are many of us out there that suffer from the same condition and are working hard to fight against it. You are not alone.