Coming out:

Part 1:

I’ve walked this earth for 41 years and at 35 I began understanding how I wanted to “be” in this world. Anxiety has held a place in my body and mind since childhood. It’s only now that I can see how it manifested and what I did to let it fly out into the open or quell it.

I grew up with three older brothers and took care of a younger one during my tween and teen years. My life was filled with noise and physical activity at every turn. I spent a lot of time “proving” that I was just as good (or better than) the boys at the games we played which of course included a variety of sports. I did fine in school, always on the honor roll, but never distinguished. I was good at the sports I played, never the best, but good enough to land on varsity teams as a high school freshman. Between elementary, middle, and high school, I spent much of my time and energy moving from sport to sport all year long. I was an active kid and being adept at each sport meant I also received various accolades over the years.

Upon entering college, I continued to engage in a team sport my first year. An injury put me on the sidelines, and I shifted towards intramural sports in place of more formal participation. As time wore on, I moved toward options to make money and away from sporting activities. I did not fully appreciate how much the movement these sports brought helped me manage anxiety.

In my later college years, I started an exploration of drugs as a mechanism to escape constant swirling thoughts and worries crowding my mind. At the time, I didn’t fully understand why I had sunken to a place of panic attacks and thought instead that I was a person driven by introspection and hyper analytics (too smart for my own good). Marijuana and alcohol became places for escape and opportunities to calm my mind. I learned of stronger escapist products like ecstasy, psychedelic mushrooms, and nitrous to open up space for what felt like happiness and glee in short spurts. These experiences became highly attractive to draw me away from an over-active mind.

Upon graduation, I moved into my first full time job, one that was created for me as an outcropping of my position with the same non-profit organization I’d worked during college. It involved overseeing an early childhood classroom and school age afterschool program. I felt ill-equipped to be:

A. supervising people twice my age who had years of experience, and

B. overseeing programs for which I didn’t have any academic background.

I worked hard, regularly putting in more hours than required on a menial salary. As time wore on, my anxiety grew, and marijuana and alcohol only went so far to quell it. I decided to move on and go back to school.

This pattern continued over the next 10 years as I earned a Master of Arts, worked for the university for a few years, went back to school for a Master of Science and worked for another few years to enter into my new career. I sought out therapy for the first time in my life and put myself in a place where I felt my combined education and experience brought me into a good place for a long-term career. One thing that never changed was the crippling anxiety that followed.

When I moved into my latest job that I thought upon starting would be one I kept for the long haul, I jumped in with both feet. Coming from a fast-paced environment into one that was just the opposite was difficult. While I felt myself doing well, I also became worried about how I was doing the work, what I was/was not accomplishing, and perception of my colleagues. Again, I went back into therapy and while talking seemed like the healthy thing to do and provided some relief, I could not escape the panic attacks and negative self-talk.