About a month and a half ago I was laying down in my room on my day off, watching Friends on Netflix because I was planning on writing a blog post about how though I love the show it made me feel grossly inadequate for my age compared to the characters in Friends. While watching the show, I had this weird moment of déjà vu. And not just because I’d seen that episode a thousand times before. In that moment, this thought popped in my head that said: “I have six months to live”… Needless to say it was a thought that gave me room for pause and then freaked me the fuck out. I shook it off thinking it was nothing more than a passing thought, one of many that come in and out of my head regularly as thoughts do. But then about two-week later, as I was sitting with two old friends having a birthday brunch and watching TV and having general catch-ups and a slew of weird negative thoughts filled my head:
“I need to leave New York.”
“I need to move back to Vegas”
“I’m dying of cancer”
“There is a tumor in my back”
“I’m going to die alone”
“I’m not worthy of love.”
“I’ll be single forever”
“I’ll never reach my potential or realize my dreams”
“It would be easier to not be alive. Then I wouldn’t have to pay my student loans off”
Etc. This of course meant that keeping any kind of positivity going during the brunch was hard. But I smiled on. On my way back to the train station I briefly mentioned this in tears to my friend, saying I had this thought, that I don’t know what to do with it, and how it scared the shit out of me. She said if I ever needed to talk to let her know, but that it was probably just that. Just a thought. So why allow it to have so much power over me? Why this thought and not any of the others? Cue my anxiety.
Anxiety is something that I have had since I was a little kid. It runs in my family. I get it from my Dad. I remember being incredibly anxious as a child, always afraid that I was going to be kidnapped or molested, left behind at the grocery store, separated from my parents, or worse than all of that: that the world would end during my lifetime because Jesus was going to come back and we were living in the end times. My grandparents on one side are Evangelicals so I heard the latter at church almost each time they took me-not the best story for an anxious child. Fear of the worst-case scenario always filled my head and has for as long as I can remember. As a child I’d watch TV shows like America’s Most Wanted or Unsolved Mysteries and think the horrible things I saw on TV would happen to me. One of my first major anxiety attacks that I can remember was after seeing an episode of Unsolved Mysteries where a strange man would go to houses where kids were staying home alone without after school, ask to use their phone book/phone and then tie the kids up while he raided their homes or something. About a week or two later, while my sister and I were home alone one Saturday afternoon, I remember a man coming to the door, asking to borrow a phone book, asking if our parents were home, and then me proceeding to FREAK THE FUCK OUT. I started to cry, I was unable to breath; I called my Mom at work, ran next door to our neighbor freaking out, and vaguely remember her staying with us until my Mom came home from work. After that we went to work with my Mom a lot because I couldn’t handle staying home alone for a while. Turned out the strange man was the uncle of the kids who lived in the house next door to us. And he just wanted to borrow the phone book. And the kids were safe with him, and I just assumed the absolute worst and thought my Sister and I were as good as dead thanks to Unsolved Mysteries. I had a lot of events like this as a kid. If we were traveling alone to see my grandparents and the flight got delayed and we couldn’t get a hold of my parents, I would freak out. If as a family we were walking around a fair or amusement park and I ran off, and turned around and my family wasn’t right beside me, I would freak out. Going to the grocery store with my mother usually meant either getting lost, left in the wrong aisle, or sent to grab something and not being able to find her after, and usually involved her name being paged over the store intercom and her collecting me in tears. Anxiety was not something I could identify as a child, but it was always present and always at the surface waiting for something to trigger it before I went off and let it take over.
Anxiety comes in so many shapes and sizes. Mine has always come in the form of worry, and thinking the absolute worst. It is made worse by the fact I also suffer from depression, and my depression triggers more anxiety. They are basically BFF’s. I’m not particularly OCD though I definitely have my own way of doing things, and being my mother’s child I like them done a certain way. I am fine when it comes to most general gatherings and can hold my own talking to strangers at a party (though I may be more likely to leave early if I am bored and don’t know anyone) so I don’t really suffer from social anxiety. But I do have generalized anxiety disorder. And it does affect my day-to-day mental health and well-being. I worry about everything from being five minutes late because the trains are slow to ripping my tights to huge catastrophic disasters. I worry a lot about dying young before I get the chance to accomplish what I want to in life. I worry about getting old because old people kind of freak me out and I don’t know if I’d age well. I worry about never being able to find love because I’m fat. I worry about whether I will ever be able to just love myself as I am, fat and all. I worry about whether expressing myself creatively through my hair and my clothing will hold me back in the creative industry I am trying to make a career for myself in. I worry that I will never be successful and I worry that if I do start to gain any sort of success that I won’t be able to hack it as a real life-professional director and fail miserably. For some reason, I don’t believe good things should happen to me. And if things start to look like they’re falling into place, I don’t trust it. I worry. A lot. Thanks Anxiety! Thing is, I think anxiety is something that a lot of people, including myself, don’t truly understand. My thoughts, when good, can keep my anxiety at bay and allow me to float through life as if everything is okay. In fact, I once went to a clairvoyant who said I was prone to anxiety and had a tendency to always wear a smile and act if everything is okay. Which, regardless about what you may believe about that or not, was pretty spot on in my case. In the past few months I have tried to take steps forward to conquer my anxiety. I have significantly cut back on my alcohol intake. I have greatly reduced the amount of sugar I consume, and am no longer drinking like five cups of coffee a day or drinking soda, so my caffeine intake has also gone down. Most days I can get through with a cup of tea, or maybe if I’m very tired a cup of decaf with a splash of regular coffee on top. But those triggers have been reduced and it has helped greatly. Or it had helped greatly… Until today.
Today I woke up very early, groggy, and on only a few hours of sleep I went to my counseling session. I’ve started counseling again because I’ve found it to be helpful in the past and wanted to get CBT but my counselor in the UK wasn’t into it. We had a good session and then I went home to get ready for work. Now some context for you: I’ve not been sleeping well the last few weeks. This past week I’ve been fighting off a cold with raw garlic, cold medicine, tea, and soup. Today I kind of broke and had one of those coconut water coffee drinks. It has caffeine and sugar. Now, I’m not saying it was the only trigger (oh hai sleep deprivation and stress!), but as I was getting ready for work another terrifying thought came into my head. This time it was “this is my last day alive” or “this is my last day on earth” something to that effect. I immediately shook my head and thought “how ridiculous” and proceeded to get ready. But my anxiety wanted to hold on to it a little bit longer than that. Being at work only made it worse. My stomach was in knots. I kept running to the toilet and I thought maybe it was the gastrointestinal thing that has been going around with my co-workers and came home on the off-chance it was because naturally I didn’t want to get anyone sick. And maybe it was. But now I think it was just my anxiety focusing on this one thought and IBS was the symptom I was displaying at the time. I came home and tried to take a nap, but my anxiety keep running awful thoughts through my head, my legs felt heavy and warm while my arms felt light and cool and I was shaking, my muscles tense with worry. “What if it is true,” I kept thinking. I had to get up and walk around and call my Mom to tell her I love her and ask for her prayers and positive thoughts. I called my sister and left her a voicemail. I even called my Dad after two and a half years of not speaking to him. Now, my father and I have not had the best relationship over the years. We have not always seen eye to eye about how I choose to live my life, or how he lives his. But in the back of my head I was thinking, if on the off-chance this is true, if it is more than just a thought, I don’t want to be mad at him anymore. And it just seemed that today was as good a day as any to forgive him and tell him that. So I made the call. Told him I was sorry, that I didn’t want to be mad at him anymore, and that I loved him.
Now I don’t genuinely know if today is my last day on earth. I don’t know if any of us knows when that day does come, or if it just… happens. I truly hope it isn’t. But if it is, I wanted to write this post. This post that I had been putting off for the past few months. This post where I basically exposed my anxiety and what it does to me every day of my life and how it affects the quality of my day-to-day existence. I know I am not the only person who suffers from anxiety. My problems are not unique or limited just to me. I have friends who go through similar ordeals, and friends who have been through much worse. But on the off-chance it was not just a fleeting thought that came in my head, I guess I wanted to say thank you for reading this blog and hearing me ramble about the ridiculous and funny things that have happened in my life thus far. Thank you for being a friend (cue the theme song), thank you for the influence you have had on me as a person and how you have made an impact on my life, regardless of how great or small. We don’t say those things enough. And it shouldn’t take a six-hour long anxiety attack and the fear of dying, or of our own negative thoughts to make any of us say that. Far too often we sit behind our computer screens and phone screens forgetting there are real people on the other side of them. We text when we should really take the time to call or FaceTime if geographically speaking it is hard to meet up face to face. We judge, we snark at those who suffer, we troll on those we perceive to be weaker or lesser than ourselves. And it really isn’t cool. In fact, it is exhausting. We forget how to love. And we get caught up in our own petty egos and we don’t forgive as often as we should. And that includes our selves. While not everyone may suffer from anxiety the way I do, we each carry a little bit of mental illness, some far worse than others. However, I think it is accurate to say that we, as a species, are pretty tough on each other and ourselves. We beat ourselves up for not being pretty enough/thin enough/smart enough/rich enough/successful enough/everything enough and I really hope that as I work towards taking control of my anxiety and my own negative thoughts about myself and my existence and find a way to transform them into positive ones that I can write about it here. It may not always be sitcom worthy as I originally hoped this blog would be, but perhaps a bit more truthful along the way. Regardless of what happens next, like if I do not wake up tomorrow (which trust me, I really hope it is legitimately nothing more than a fleeting thought, because I do have a lot more to share) I am taking the time out to be grateful for everything that has happened in my life so far. From the painful to the positive it has made me who I am. But mostly I am grateful for the friends who have been there for me when I’m panicking and shaking and think my world is under attack and my anxiety takes over. You guys are the ones who help me see my thoughts for what they really are. Just thoughts. And while they contribute to the anxiety of everyday living, they are not enough to make me want to give up on trying to live a long and creative life.
If Hannah were 30 