Do you ever get anxious? I do.
In fact, anxiety has been part of my life for a really long time.
Most days it’s just a background noise, a little buzzing in my head but other days it becomes like the roar of the ocean in my ears and makes it impossible to focus on anything other than the fear.
This isn’t a blog post about how I’ve overcome my anxiety because I don’t think I ever will overcome it, it’s part of who I am, my temperament. What I want to write about here is living with anxiety because so many people who do are too embarrassed or ashamed to talk about it, because even in our modern age where depression and anxiety are not automatically equated with ‘madness’ there is still a prejudice. Inside, when people hear a person with an anxiety disorder talk about what they go through, they are thinking: “Just snap out of it”, “think positive”, “you’re just being melodramatic”. They think anxiety is simple, they think it’s something I can stop whenever I choose.
Anxiety isn’t a choice.
And it isn’t just confined to my thoughts. It gets physical and is more than mildly uncomfortable. The best description I can give is that it’s like motion sickness. When anxiety sets in the roaring of the waves fills my ears and I find myself in a little boat in the middle of a choppy sea. I can’t concentrate and begin to feel physically sick because everything is moving around me, going up and down and pounding in my head. I don’t just feel uncomfortable or worried. I feel ill and on a few occasions it has been so bad that I’ve vomited or nearly fainted.
That, for me, is what an anxiety attack is like. And while talking myself through it helps a bit, a drink of cold water and a few breaths of fresh air help just as much. The thing is, once it’s in full swing I can’t actually stop it through sheer force of will. It takes time and occasionally, anxiety attacks just happen, regardless of my attempts to keep them at bay.
As well as telling you what an anxiety attack feels like, I’d also like to let you know that having an anxiety disorder does not mean I’m neurotic of paranoid. My fears aren’t unfounded and they aren’t phobias. Yes, throughout my life I’ve struggled with self esteem issues, mostly due to bullying in school, and self esteem plays a big part in anxiety, but even on a good day, when I feel good about myself, it’s there.
These days most of the anxiety is focused around the physical health of my daughter and the mental and emotional health of my son. I know he has inherited my nature and that he is prone to anxiety. Even though I refuse to lose it, refuse to let my anxiety show in front of my kids (even if it has meant running off to be sick in the toilet on one occasion), which can cause me a whole lot of physical discomfort, I know that he experiences anxiety and that he has inherited that from me.
I don’t think that the anxiety I feel with regard to my children in unfounded. My son has Sensory Processing Disorder and my daughter has Spinal Muscular Atrophy. Life for them can be really hard sometimes and no one can tell me what the future will be like, or even how long my daughter will be with us. Unfortunately anxiety is how my body deals with the stresses in my life. Some people get violent, or swear, or drink, or smoke, or exercise, or binge eat, or sleep a lot, or cry, or bottle things up or get really pro-active. My body gets the jitters - it gets anxious.
I also get anxious about pain. I deal with pain every single day, from when I wake up in the morning until I struggle to sleep at night and it isn’t just from my crushed vertebrae and badly healed hip fracture. I have Ehlers Danlos Syndrome. Everything hurts. And so I get anxious about being in pain, about not wanting to be in more pain and about the possibility that what I do during the day will lead to a whole lot of pain at night. I have to plan and judge what I’m going to be able to do so as not to become overtired or physically overworked. With two young kids with special needs that isn’t always an easy task.
And I’m rubbish at asking for help and admitting that I’m struggling.
So there you have it. This may seem all a bit too revealing, like posting a photo of myself in my underwear. It is a bit.
But I’m sick of having to pretend that I’m not on anti-anxiety medication. I am. And I’m sick of people not understanding what anxiety is and what it feels like. I figure if we want more people to understand this disorder then we have to tell them about it, because they won’t learn any other way.
I wrote this post because I was appalled when I was told that my son needed to toughen up and that I needed to stop worrying about him. I was told to toughen up too many times as I grew up and it had the opposite affect. If it weren’t for my fantastic family I’d be a right mess. So I am determined that being of an anxious disposition should no longer have a stigma attached to it and that my son and I should not be seen as weak because of it, because we’re not.
We just get anxious. We, like every human being, are in need of compassion from those around us.
And if you tell me you never feel anxious, you’re lying.
