Counting on Two Hands

I thought I'd open a post about anxiety and depression with a little
Supernatural humor. I like to think I'm like Sam: being "troubled"
only makes me more awesome!

An hour after publishing my last post about our irrational ideas about our own beauty, I found myself deep in conversation with my friend, Chris. Chris told me about his own battle with academic-induced anxiety. He told me about sitting on his bathroom floor shortly after starting a master’s degree and feeling literally as if the walls were shrinking. He called his mom, and he went home. Chris has since completed an MA in history and is working diligently on his PhD at Auburn, which is how I know him. Even so, he felt a similar anxiety his first semester of his PhD program, primarily because he had no idea how he was doing in one of his classes. He has since realized that, had he been doing poorly, someone would have made him aware of the fact. And I thought about what I wrote about depression and anxiety in my grad school follow-up post – that it makes you feel alone – and I realized it required an addendum.

 

Depression and anxiety make you highly irrational.

I started taking medication and seeing a counselor for generalized anxiety when I was in high school, but I can trace it back to a decade earlier. I distinctly remember, as a kindergartener, being afraid to ask the teacher if I could go to the bathroom. It was partially shyness, but the main problem was that I wasn’t sure if I should say “bathroom” or “restroom”. I had heard it called both, and I didn’t want to say the wrong thing to my teacher. Similarly, my parents picked me up in the middle of the night from countless sleepovers and church camp outs. I would stay the whole night at a relative’s house only if my big brother was there too. Even then, it wasn’t as simple as a phone call: “Come get me!” It was an agonizing process. I never simply admitted that I wanted to go home. I came up with what seemed an appropriate excuse –  I wasn’t feeling well or I couldn’t sleep – something that I thought would appear more reasonable to my disappointed host than “I’m homesick because I’m a child and we do that sometimes.” Of course, I understand that children are not the most rational of beings. They haven’t learned how the world works yet or that children can get away with saying anything at all. But my anxiety, perhaps based in a child’s timidity, was exacerbated by the desire to be well-thought of, a desire that long-outlasted elementary school.

I joined my high school’s newspaper staff because I thought I liked writing. My first article was well-received, which made me happy until it came time to write a second one. What if I couldn’t write anything as good as the first one? Making good grades on tests had the same effect: a high “A” was all well and good until you realized there was nowhere else to go but down. I loved being considered smart, but I lived in fear of someone finding out it wasn’t true.

Every time I moved somewhere new, where there were presumably no expectations of my intelligence, I thought I would be different. But I fell into this pattern again, to an even greater extent, when I went to college and finally graduate school, where it culminated in a near inability to look my professors in the eye because I was sure I must have done something disappointing.

Shall we analyze the irrationality of these situations? First of all, the only time one should be that stressed about high school or college, for that matter, is if one is making poor grades. (I don’t mention graduate school here because I gather that it is highly stressful even for the perfectly rational and mentally sound.) Second, there was no truth for anyone to discover. I’m not the “makes-good-grades-without-trying” type that we all know and hate, but I’ve always been a good student and a good writer. Even if I did poorly on a paper or test, it’s not a statement about my value as a human being.  

My anxiety has never been solely related to school, however, though that has always been a source of great stress because of the importance I have placed on academics (I’m Hermione, remember? Plain but clever). When I started driving, my anxiety increased dramatically, I suppose because I was expected to navigate the world without the buffer of my parents or older brother. I didn’t like putting gas in my car because pay-at-the-pump can be confusing, but paying inside required human interaction. Shopping alone was a traumatic experience. It is often hard to find what I want, and I feel perpetually in someone’s way. I feel guilty when I forget my reusable bags and like I’m inconveniencing the cashier when I bring them. There is a moment of fear every time I swipe my debit card, even if I know exactly how much money is in my account. Phone calls from numbers I don’t recognize frighten me: did I forget to pay a bill? Did something bad happen? And whenever someone says, “Come see me after this” I spend the entire class or meeting going over what I might have done wrong.

I assume that you recognize the irrationality in all this because even I can. I recognized it even as I was doing it, but here’s another addendum:

Like cigarettes and chocolate, anxiety is habit-forming.

Without even knowing I was doing it, I built my life around avoiding situations that made me anxious: I didn’t drive on the interstate, I didn’t pump my own gas, I didn’t go to the grocery store alone, I didn’t answer questions in class, I didn’t join extra-curricular organizations unless someone asked me to in which case I didn’t say “no”… Until the idea of having anxiety made me as nervous as the situations that caused it. I’ve had the same recurring nightmare from the time I was eighteen until a few months ago. While the details change, I have always forgotten to write a paper until the night before it is due. I completely freak out. It is the middle of the night, and I am alone with my panic. Basically, my recurring anxiety dream is about having severe anxiety.    

What can I say? It happens to the best of us.

Of course, people told me this way of thinking made no sense. But you know how married people talk about falling in love and they say, “When it happens, you just know”, and you think you’re going to be the one person in the world who doesn’t “just know” and are, therefore, going to miss the marriage boat? That’s sort of what it feels like. People told me that the world is not actually that frightening of a place. They said that no one is paying that much attention to what I do. They told me it doesn’t matter if I mess something up on occasion. And I knew, in my head, that they were right, but I felt like those were rules that applied to their life, their world, not mine. These were people who spoke without thinking and drove to Atlanta and back in the rain.

I was so afraid of disappointing people that I became an expert at figuring out what they wanted to hear and saying it. And people liked me, which is what I wanted, but I feared that maybe they didn’t really know me: that the person they liked was someone I had invented. Until I couldn’t tell which version was me and which was invented. I couldn’t tell the difference between what I wanted and what I thought other people wanted for me.

But the absolutely worst part of it was that I really believed that was just how it felt to be me. I did make a couple of efforts, mostly in college, to reinvent myself and the person I wanted to be. But by last year, I had accepted that this was who I was. I had come to define myself to myself as nervous, high-strung, cowardly, and close to only a privileged few. There was a time when I could count the number of people I wholeheartedly loved and opened up to on one hand. I thought I was going to feel like that and be like that for the rest of my life. I thought I was going to ruin Austin’s happiness by dragging him into it.

I repeat: anxiety and depression make you highly irrational.

I definitely am not trivializing anxiety here or suggesting it can be turned off like a switch. It can’t. But it doesn’t last forever. I promise it doesn’t. I’ve been anxious and depressed for a long time before, but I’ve always been happy again.

I feel so much better since leaving school, and not simply because of the academic stress. I’ve mentioned before that the act of quitting gave me courage, but it did more than this. I feel as if I walked around with a veil over my face that showed people what they wanted to see, but when I took it off they still loved me. And for the first time I could see how silly it was to think they would judge the choices I made about my life.

I’m still anxious every day. I still often don’t sleep well. I still get nervous when the phone rings. I agonize over sending emails at work. I had my first post-graduate school “freak out” as a result of car trouble that I thought was going to interfere with my job. I didn’t feel properly me again for three days. On top of the familiar anxiety was a feeling that I’d failed or relapsed. But do you know what’s really strange? It’s been two months since I’d really panicked and, until then, I’d nearly forgotten what it felt like.

A little advice for keeping anxiety at bay.

That’s fine with me.

I didn’t make a conscious effort to put that behind me when I left grad school because I honestly didn’t think it was possible. Now I know that I can deal with it. I’ve learned that I can keep it at bay with a haircut and a purpose: I joined a book club, volunteer at a library, write a blog, join service Saturdays, take vegan cooking lessons, and go out with friends. Still, every time I am confronted with something I am nervous about doing (which, let’s be honest, is still at least 5 days a week), I think about putting it off. Anxiety is habit-forming. And then I think, “No. I’m not going back there.”

I wanted to write this post partly as encouragement because I so remember thinking it was forever. And it wasn’t. But there is another reason too. As Chris and I discussed our experiences, he told me he wished he’d known how I was feeling last year so we could have talked about it then. A year ago, I never would have told him. I was obsessed with being liked and I didn’t see what about my neurosis was likeable or even acceptable. So I spent years trying to hide that I hate driving and that writing papers terrified me. Since I opened up in my grad school post, I’ve talked to a lot of people and a lot of conversations have started with “I don’t tell people this, but…”

The truth is, I would not relive that level of anxiety for anything – not even if it was my only opportunity to travel with the Doctor in the TARDIS. But now that it’s over, I’m glad it happened. I’m glad I know what it feels like, and I’m glad I get to talk about it. Because by not talking about it, we send the message to ourselves and others needing encouragement and support that there is something wrong, even shameful, about the way we think and feel.

I kind of wish the Dowager Countess narrated my life.

So the facts are these: I am high-strung. I ask an annoying number of questions because I’m terrified of screwing up. I hate driving in the rain. I don’t do roads with more than 4 lanes. I’m shy at first but once you know me, I’m hilarious. I have no sense of rhythm but love dancing. I hate shopping alone, but I do it. I find inspiration in stories, fictional and real. I love history but have a terrible memory. I find people fascinating. I have strong opinions that may or may not mesh with yours: it’s okay with me if it’s okay with you. This is me, and you can take it or leave it.  

And since I’ve accepted that people will either like me or not, I have found myself so much more open to them. I’m not thinking so much about what will make me more impressive to others. Honestly, I think I’ve always liked people, but I used to be afraid of their judgment. Now I see an opportunity to hear stories, to learn, to connect with my world. I know that the anxiety will probably always be there, in the back of my mind, waiting to creep up to the front of my mind. But I also know that I can handle it and still be happy as long as I keep saying, “No. You are not welcome here.”

And since accepting this, the people I love can't be counted on two hands.