Happy Mental Health Awareness Month!
We're just over halfway through the month of May, which if you didn't know is mental health awareness month. I'm a huge advocate for mental health, mainly because I've lived my entire life suffering from mental health issues. As someone who knows how the stigma can affect you, I thought I'd write about my lifelong experiences with anxiety, my main mental illness.
So I'm pretty certain I've had anxiety my entire life. That wasn't the word I always used for what happens in my brain, but it's been the main feeling I've had since I was little. One of the reasons I can deduce that I've had anxiety my entire life is a couple very vivid memories I have from my childhood dealing with relatives.
Now don't get me wrong, I do love my family, even if most of the time they get on my nerves. But when I was a kid I can remember visiting my father's side of the family in southern Indiana and being absolutely terrified of being the first one through the door. Especially if we got there late at night or when no one was in the house. There was some part of me that thought something was going to go wrong or bad, even though it never did.
That's really one of the first big memories of anxiety I have. The other one I have that involves my extended family, is I was afraid to go in the basement of the first house they had when I was a really little kid. And it was a totally illogical anxiety-induced reason. But as a 5-year-old kid, I couldn't realize that what I was thinking didn't make sense. To me, the basement was scary because of the creepy picture hanging in the stairway.
As I've been working on living with my mental health conditions and improving them it's been interesting looking back and realizing that for much of my childhood I would act out of a place of anxiety. Which in more layman's terms means that most of my actions throughout my life have been motivated by a constant sense of fear and worry.
So I haven't watched Inside Out yet despite it being out for a couple years, but if you think of minds in terms of that movie, fear is at my brain's control console. Trust me, being piloted and ruled by fear is not a good way to live. Which I've noticed and really been made aware of over the past four to five years.
As you may be able to tell from my brief accounts above, I wasn't really aware that my anxiety was causing so many problems in my life. When I tried to talk to anyone about those issues growing up, I was shut down pretty quickly and told that what was happening had nothing to do with anxiety. So I never worked on fixing it until I got to college.
Moving to Indianapolis and going to school away from home really made me realize that I had some more serious mental health issues. And that became excruciatingly obvious to me between my freshman and sophomore years. That summer and then most of my sophomore year was one of the worst times of my life. I was severely depressed, actively suicidal as opposed to just passive ideation, and I was just sinking further and further into my unhealthy thought spirals.
That was when I realized I had some pretty serious issues that needed to be sorted out. I started going to therapy at school because they did offer 8 sessions for free every semester. But I found the counselor I worked with there to not work for me. She didn't challenge me enough and instead was too agreeable. I knew I needed to be held accountable for my actions, so I gave up on therapy at that time.
So my anxiety continued to get worse as I did less and less. Anxiety kept me holed up in my dorm room mindlessly watching Youtube videos on my computer. I started missing morning classes regularly, (sorry World Geography Teacher!) I didn't put any effort into most of my work, and just generally made poor decisions because I was so afraid of the world outside of my bed.
And I think that's something about anxiety a lot of people don't understand. It can make you so fearful that you can't do anything. It just completely paralyzes you to the point that the only safe place is your apartment, or your room, or in my case back then, your dorm bed. That fear and worry can sometimes be brushed off as something that you can push through. But there are times when you just absolutely can't.
Another thing I don't think people realize about anxiety is that it can show up in several different forms. One way my anxiety works is that I will have what I've deemed "irritability attacks". There are just some times where nothing can calm me down and I'm just consistently mad for no reason, feeling restless and wanting to have a reason to lash out.
And of course, they happen at the worst times. Like this Monday I had an irritability attack the last couple hours of my shift at work while I was trying to finish my last couple of stories and newscasts for the day. So I may or may not have snapped at my partner when he texted me while I was working about how fun of a night he was having with his family. I definitely regretted that a couple hours later when the attack had subsided.
Some other weird things that anxiety can cause are things like memory loss. I have a horrible memory because of my mental illnesses. Some of it is my mind trying to protect me from a lot of traumatic memories from my childhood. But others are just completely gone. I can't remember most of my childhood if I'm being honest. My memory starts around 7th grade or so with little flashes of moments from before then.
As time goes on, I discover more and more what anxiety has robbed from me. I'm always wondering what my life would be like if I wasn't so held back by anxiety and mental illness. Would I actually be accomplishing my dreams right now? Would I be happier with my life? Would I feel like I'm successful and good at what I do? Would I be confident in myself and all my abilities? There are so many what if's as to what my life would look like had I not struggled my entire life with mental illness.
And it is so so so hard to talk about those feelings. I saw a post on Facebook posted by a dear friend of mine from college that kind of sums up how I feel when I talk about how my anxiety and mental illness affects me. This was the image:
I swear I'm not miserable. I may feel a little miserable right now, but down in my core I know I'm passionate and excited about life. I just have a brain that makes it really hard to remember a lot of the time. Which is why I try to talk about how anxiety and depression have shaped my life, so others can feel comfortable talking about it too.
I won't consider you a miserable person if you struggle. I understand and I want you to feel safe and supported. Our society doesn't do that right now, but I know I'm trying my hardest to change that, even if it's little baby steps like sharing when I'm having a rough day.
I want people to know that this is something millions struggle with and can't find the voice to talk about. Understand that you probably know several people going through similar struggles. Be kind to others, try to be understanding instead of just dismissing someone when they're going through a hard time.
There are so many moments where I feel like people have given up on me because I still struggle with feeling alone. And it's the worst feeling to know that someone decided not to be friends with you or support you because of the times where it's hard for you to put on a happy face. I don't think a lot of people realize when they're doing this, which just increases the stigma around mental health.
So why I wrote this article this week is sort of two-fold. Part of it is to help educate people on what it's like to live with anxiety and address some of the lesser known side effects of anxiety or depression. And the other part is to help in getting rid of the stigma surrounding mental health by talking about my own mental health.
Hopefully, by reading this expose of sorts, you learned something about living with anxiety and mental health. So now that you know more about mental health I hope you're able to help the people in your life who struggle with it and help stick up for them. Mental health is hard to deal with and talk about because it is so stigmatized and ostracized in society. So raise the awareness of mental health this month, and lets work towards acceptance too, not just awareness. But awareness is a good place to start.