Living With Fear : My History With Anxiety

I’ve always dealt with some level of stress and anxiety in my life. When I was too young to remember I would sit and stare off into space and when asked what I was doing I would say “looking at the trees, it helps my stress”. When I was 8 the doctor even told my mom that I had extremely high stress levels which is why I kept getting sick. She refused to believe an 8 year old in my position could experience stress and nothing was done about it. I don’t blame my mom for this at all, I did have a fairly good home life and was admittedly spoiled rotten and given whatever I wanted. However, I do believe there was something to what the doctor said. I had no idea where the feelings of stress and anxiety came from or even what they were, but they were definitely there.

As I got older, I learned to mask everything I was feeling through constant smiles and an upbeat attitude. I was the person that everyone commented on, I must be so happy they never saw me when I wasn’t smiling and happy. Underneath it all though I was an absolute mess. I kept a bottle of pills in my bedroom and would often sit with the bottle in my hands for hours trying to work up the nerve to take them and just be done with everything. I eventually did work up the nerve to do it which resulted in a horrible experience at the emergency room. Between my mom telling me that they were going to take me away because she’s an unfit mother and the emergency room attendants telling me to really focus and remember all of the pain they were putting me through so that I never did this again.

I will say that the experience made me never want to attempt suicide via an overdose again. But I can’t say that the ER attendants did anything to quash my desire to kill myself. I lied my way out of counseling by “confessing” to my mom that I had done it all for attention and didn’t really want to die. She bought it and things continued on as they had always been.

After getting through puberty (which is when this attempted suicide happened) I learned to deal with everything better and was able to just live my life for a while. Cut to 23 years old when things really started going down hill.

I found out when I was 23 that I had Grave’s Disease and had to have radiation treatments to destroy my thyroid. This was after living with the disease undiagnosed for the past 3 years. I was studied by med students because I had the most acute case of the disease they had ever seen. This disruption of the natural balance of hormones in my body made my mental illness so much worse.

I was married at this time and we were both working in a restaurant making $2.13/hour + tips, had no medical insurance and no money for my thyroid meds. Things progressed from here and this is also where things start to get kind of fuzzy for me.

I developed a major sensitivity to noise. Any sudden or loud noises sent my heart racing and my body flooding with adrenaline. Any little noise would send my body into fight or flight mode so I was constantly on edge and feeling terrified. Add to that the fact that we were living in the middle of Memphis TN, the home of loud, booming bass at all hours of the day and night and I was a total wreck.

I would cry and scream, call the cops which never did anything. In a way, I could see myself from inside and knew that I had literally gone crazy, but there was nothing I could do to stop it. My husband was wonderful through these times, doing anything he could to try to make things easier on me. Neither of us really understood what was wrong with me, we just assumed it was because we couldn’t afford my thyroid meds.

This went on for years with us moving around to different places trying to find somewhere where I could gain some peace through quiet. However, when you have no money the chances of finding a quiet place to live is pretty much nil. Like I said before, this time is really hazy to me and I don’t remember a lot of what happened. I was terrified that I would end up institutionalized and might have had my husband not worked so hard to keep me grounded.

Luckily I’ve since found a great doctor who worked me out a combined dosage of Levothyroxine for my thyroid and Prozac for my anxiety and I’m now able to live a pretty normal life. Obviously I still have my ups and downs, and the anxiety comes back from time to time to a much lesser extent than before.

I have to admit that the times when the anxiety starts to creep back in terrify me. I suddenly think that I’m regressing or that my meds aren’t working like they should anymore and that I’m going to go back to the way I was before. But I try to get my logical brain through the fear and remember that it’s going to pass like it always does and I’ll be back to my old self in just a few days.

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