Inside My Mind..

The irrationality of anxiety is something people say they understand, but most truly don’t.

This misunderstanding, or just unwillingness to understand, is so detrimental to the learning and healing process for people who deal with anxiety. Who suffer from it.

This is more than just feeling worried, my anxiety makes me panic. My anxiety feeds into my depression.

My anxiety takes me to dark places, places right next to the dark places my depression keeps me in.

So, by now, hopefully you might begin to understand where I am.

People tell me they understand, people tell me they know it’s irrational. But they don’t understand, because they can’t.

I wasn’t diagnosed with anxiety until I was nineteen. And until then, I didn’t understand what it truly meant to suffer from it.

I didn’t know that my racing heartbeat and never ending thoughts of dread and worry were fed by anxiety. I didn’t realize that I wasn’t crazy.

When I was younger, we didn’t understand anxiety. We didn’t understand what it could do.

When I was a kid, I had these tantrums that would cause me to scream and cry and my chest would get tight as the world around me swayed.

We called them meltdowns, breakdowns, tantrums, episodes… we called them everything except what they were.

These meltdowns would result in me sitting in my room, throwing things against the walls and screaming because for some reason nothing inside of me could think rationally and the panic inside me wouldn’t stop.

I felt trapped and scared.

These would result in being sent to bed at 4PM in the afternoon with no supper because my mother had had enough of my nonsense. She didn’t know what else to do.

I remember these times when I would sit in my room, screaming and crying and afraid of another spanking but unable to stop myself because of the panic.

During these times, I remember distinctly wanting to die. I remember wondering what would happen if I suffocated myself with a pillow.

I didn’t understand what was going on. My mother didn’t understand what was going on. No one knew what was wrong, we all just thought these were the tantrums of an upset child.

The depression began to show heavily when I was fourteen. This resulted in barely-there cuts in my arms that were only visible if you searched.

I wore thick wristbands because I thought it made me look cool and I fought with my mother to try to release my anger. I didn’t care that every scream I sent towards her hurt her too.

I still wanted to die.

The depression showed itself through the fights with my parents that would eventually end with them sitting on the end of my bed while I stared mindlessly at the ceiling repeatedly yelling “I DON’T KNOW” at the top of my lungs in response to their question of what was wrong because I didn’t know what was wrong.

But something was wrong.

Everything was wrong.

Nothing was okay.

I was miserable.

I hated everyone and everything.

I hated the world and everything in it.

But most importantly, I hated myself.

I was miserable all the time and the constant, indescribable pain in my head did nothing to help.

As I got older, I realized I didn’t fear death as much as I should. Or at least, the idea of death. I wanted to die.

I hated life and I wanted to feel better.

I thought death would bring peace.

But, as my fifteen-year-old self would say, I was too much of a coward.

As I sat alone in the dark of my room, staring down at the blade in my hand as I cried and begged God to tell me what to do.

Everything inside of me wanted to die.

To end everything.

I felt worthless and useless and miserable.

I thought the world was better off without me.

As I grew older, it got better, but we never truly realized what those times were until I ended up in the hospital.

We knew I had depression, though I refused to see a doctor to be diagnosed.

Because I wasn’t crazy and I didn’t need some shrink to shove meds at me.

I thought accepting the disease, accepting that I needed help, made me crazy.

When I was nineteen, I came home to the dorm one night and screamed I was done.

I couldn’t take the constant ache in my heart and the throbbing in my head that was impossible to describe and just as impossible to escape.

I begged my mother to forgive me, to understand my decision.

Five days later, upon my release from the hospital, I was officially diagnosed with severe anxiety disorder, major depressive disorder, and adjustment disorder. I was prescribed an antidepressant and sent home.

My mother made the connection before I did. My “tantrums” growing up were anxiety attacks and my lashing out was my attempt to understand and escape the panic and hopelessness I constantly felt.

I finally realized that the thoughts of hopelessness I felt weren’t normal. A child wishing for death during a timeout wasn’t normal. Thinking of different ways to kill yourself during your free time and seeing yourself as a coward for not doing it was. not. normal.

The journey through medications and counselors and more hopelessness is one for another day.

Time moved forward, I slowly began to improve.

And now, here I am today.

Still suffering, still growing, still anxious as ever.

In a way, coping better than before.

My panic attacks subsided for a long time, but recently, they’ve gotten worse.

What had been happening once every few months became every few weeks, and then finally every few days.

Those around me couldn’t handle it. They couldn’t handle the fear it instilled in them to see me break in the most vulnerable way. They couldn’t handle seeing my mind cave in on itself as every thought I had took me to a darker place.

It terrified my boyfriend to watch helplessly as the woman he loved, the woman he knew, disappear and be replaced by a different person right before his eyes. Replaced with someone with no will to live and no concern for herself.

The panic rises and I descend into the deep abyss that welcomes me with open arms and a cruel smile.

It’s been waiting for me to return.

But how to explain the whirlwind of emotions and thoughts I have when I stumble mentally and find myself in this abyss?

How to explain to someone who has never experienced the feeling of worthlessness and self-hatred as you emerge, feeling battleworn and miserable and weak because you weren’t able to stop it from happening?

The wave of self-hatred that comes next is unstoppable.

“I’m sorry I couldn’t stop it” I would say, my voice quiet as depression envelopes me. “I’m sorry I’m like this.”

When I was first diagnosed, I would apologize over and over for not being able to control it. For not being able to be normal. All I wanted was to be normal.

I apologized for existing often.

The lightheaded feeling of hyperventilating as you know what’s happening and you try, with everything in you, to fight it. The panic as you realize you can’t stop it in time. The hatred directed at no one but yourself.

“It’s just irrational,” they say, trying to pull me out. They try to calm me with logic, not realizing that it falls on the deaf ears of a woman already deep in the abyss of everything irrational and illogical.

There is no logic in this abyss.

No logic will ever help escape the abyss.

Admittedly, in my darkest times, I start to wish for death again. But I don’t wish to die or to kill myself, I just wish to stop existing. It would be so much simpler if I didn’t exist. For me.