When I was 11 years old, seeing “Moana” in the movie theater, I had an anxiety attack thinking about how one day I would die. Several years before that, I cried in the back seat of my parents’ car about the same thing. In middle school I spent hours researching online school in hopes that I could stop going to in-person school because of how stressed it made me. When I changed schools in high school, I was too scared to talk to anyone. I wasn’t able to make the first move for friendship, and the one time I did, it caused me an immense amount of stress.
Everyone experiences anxiety from time to time, but when it is constantly interfering with one’s daily life, it is a sign something may be wrong. Anxiety disorders are a group of mental health conditions that cause a person to experience more fear and dread than normal. There are several different types, but the ones I know well are generalized anxiety disorder and social anxiety.
For me, being scared has always been the default. I never asked questions or for help. I once stood in the kitchen with my hand mangled in a kitchen mixer for almost five minutes because I was too scared of inconveniencing my family to ask for help. Such a situation sounds ridiculous, but this mental illness can make people go through ridiculous things.
When my anxiety gets extremely bad, I can’t think straight. I pace and bite things and pick at my skin. My symptoms are often physical. Breathing becomes difficult and I get nauseous.
The worst of it was when I gave someone my number and then went home and threw up. After that, I spent over a year regularly vomiting when I was stressed. Getting sick would also cause the blood vessels in my face to pop and cause petechiae, leaving behind a face full splotchy red marks of my lowest moments.
The best way I have found to describe how severe anxiety feels is saying it feels like I am being possessed by a demon. It strikes when I least expect it and makes me act ridiculous, sabotaging my ability to do work, maintain relationships and just go through life normally.
There are several different ways to treat anxiety, the main two being therapy and medication. Therapy has helped me learn certain coping mechanisms. I find that square breathing, where you inhale, hold, exhale and hold in even increments, can help me when I start to panic. I am also sometimes able to pause and identify what is causing me stress at a certain moment so that I can try to rectify it.
While therapy can be incredibly useful, it is not what helped me the most.
After throwing up a certain amount of times, I went to the doctor. It wasn’t the first time I had been made to take an anxiety screening test, but it was the first time I talked to a doctor about getting medicated for my anxiety. We talked about a couple of options and landed on escitalopram, more commonly known by the brand name Lexapro.
People will often speak down on the idea of relying on medication to function in everyday life. I understand the sentiment, but after being on Lexapro and having it work for me, I don’t really care. Being on anxiety medicine has genuinely changed my life.
Navigating my day-to-day has become so much more bearable without having breakdowns twice a week and without constantly going through crises about what I am doing with my life, if my friends hate me or how far away from home I am.
It isn’t like medication is a magical panacea that has completely wiped away all my fears. I still get very anxious pretty often, but it is way less powerful than it used to be. Instead of spending all my energy trying to keep myself afloat in a vicious ocean of worries, I can work on calming myself down and trying to solve my problems rationally.
The same things won’t work for everyone. I am lucky to have the first medication I tried be the one that worked. But if you have anxiety do not give up on yourself. Relief and happiness are possible for you, you just have to do the hard part of finding and accessing the resources.