A few months ago, I noticed during one of my many hours of reading that a small gray square blocked out part of the vision in my right eye. It wasn’t terrible. It blocked out the bottoms of gs or ys or anything that curled below the normal line. I freaked out, of course. I was in the middle of reading to my boys, and I felt the warm breath of anxiety blow out onto my neck and chest and upper arms. My knees nearly gave out. I couldn’t breathe for a minute, my eyes burned, my left arm went numb.
I’m familiar with these symptoms, of course. It’s not the first panic attack I’ve had in my life, although the first time it happened and I noticed it, I thought I was dying and headed straight back to the emergency room I’d just left. There’s nothing like a panic attack about the fact that you might be dying to make you feel like you actually are dying.
I have lived with anxiety all my life, although I didn’t really know what to call it way back when. I only knew that when my mom was more than five minutes late to pick me up after my middle school volleyball practice, my mouth would go dry, my eyes would gush and my brain would sort through all the information it could grasp so that I would survive—she was probably dead on the side of the road, but I would pick up the pieces. I would take care of my brother and sister, even though I was only eleven. I would quit school, get a job, make sure we could eat. But first I had to walk myself the six miles home. And I’d start.
And then she’d drive up, asking what in the world I was doing walking down a highway, and I would turn my face to the scene outside the passenger window so she wouldn’t notice my panicked crying or the way I was breathing all weird or the exhausted relief I felt on seeing her.
If Husband is a little late coming home and I don’t hear from him and he doesn’t answer his cell phone when I call, I panic. If bad news comes and we don’t know if we’ll be able to put food on our table this week, I panic. If I notice anything different about my moles or my vision or the way I happen to feel today, I panic.
Sometimes the anxiety drags me under. That happened a couple of weeks ago. I was on Sabbatical, not doing any writing. I was supposed to be relaxing, because it was my anniversary. I was supposed to be celebrating thirteen years of marriage, and all I could think about was the small gray square in my eye. I thought about it when I woke and when I made lunch and when I went to sleep at night. I tried to figure it out. I worried endlessly about the MRI my doctor ordered just to make sure everything was okay. I was sure it would be everything I feared most.
It wasn’t. But I spent hours and hours of my time worrying that it was. I could not stop the worry. It was a deep, dark ocean that reminded me of the same ocean I’d almost drowned in when I was 3. A rip tide caught me and pulled me out to sea. I still remember it like it happened yesterday. The brown salty water would cover me, and then it would spit me back out to look at the perfect blue sky and feel the burn of the sun on my face just long enough to think maybe I would make it, and then the sea would tear me back under.
Anxiety is the sea that tore me back under two weeks ago.
Everything is normal. It’s possible that anxiety is the reason for the small gray square. It’s even possible that I’ve imagined it, and now that I’ve imagined it, it won’t go away, because imagination is a powerful thing.
When anxiety pulls me under like it did a couple of weeks ago, my first response is to go into hiding. There is something shameful about not being able to handle your everyday circumstances when they’re this good. I have six children. There are many women who would give anything to have one. I have a loving husband. There are so many women who don’t. I have a roof over my head and food on my table today. Not everyone does.
But those things do not change the reality of anxiety for me. It is a brain imbalance, a deep, dark ocean with a rip tide I can’t out swim. No amount of convincing myself that I’m okay will make me okay. I am not okay. And this is okay.
There are many of us with mental health issues. Most of us go into hiding, because it’s not glamorous to admit that we worry incessantly or that we have really high highs and really low lows or that we couldn’t get out of bed today. This is not a person who is celebrated in our world. So we choose, instead, to hide. We choose, instead, to pretend that we have everything in our lives perfectly handled, everything under control, nothing really bothers us.
The problem is that our issues—which do not define us, by the way—will eventually catch up to us. The last couple of weeks have shown me that. I wake up and I can’t breathe. I take my 4-year-olds upstairs for their naps and my legs want to give out with the panic of the next possibility. I read a book, and I see a gray square that means I’m dying probably.
Here’s what I want you to know: We are not unacceptable people just because of our mental health issues. We don’t have to go into hiding. We don’t have to feel ashamed if we can’t make it through today without the help of a pill or a therapist or our own journaling practice. Life is hard. There is nothing harder. And sometimes our brains and our bodies and our emotions just can’t do it.
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Our mental health issues don’t define us. We may have bipolar disorder, but we are not bipolar. We may struggle with depression, but we are not depression. We may fight every single moment of every single day against the deep, dark sea of an anxiety disorder, but we are not that anxiety disorder. So we have no reason to hide away and pretend we are someone different, someone better, someone more acceptable to the world’s people.
Be brave. Tell your stories. Get the help you need without feeling like it’s shameful. And know that you’re not alone.
I hope you’ve enjoyed this inside look at my life and struggles. Every Friday, I publish a short blog on something personal that includes a valuable takeaway. For more of my essays and memoir writings, visit Wing Chair Musings.
