I knew from childhood, I always knew quite simply that there was something awry with me; as if everyone else glided effortlessly through life on a frothy cloud of buoyant emotional buoyancy while I dangled precariously on the edge of the cliff. My first conscious recollections of anxiety are similarly immediate: damp hands that drenched my pages of scribbled homework, a pounding heart that made it difficult to inhale, a sinister pit of dread that I could not shake. It wasn’t episodic and it wasn’t occasional. It was constant; it coloured my childhood and it set in motion the drama of the years to follow into adulthood.
In class, my heart would pound and my breath would quicken as I tried to follow what the teacher was saying. When I couldn’t stop the dreaded heart-pounding, I would shift my focus to my teacher’s face as she talked. Just as I started to pay attention to what she was saying, the ominous surge would hit again. And, if that happened, anxiety would rear its ugly head. If the teacher called on me, the mere thought of speaking in front of the class would provoke mind-spinning anxiety filled with what-ifs and worst-case scenarios.
My parents, aware of my issues, took me to various professionals and although it produced results, it was never really the solution. Instead, for me, anxiety was something that was always lingering there, ready to jump on me at any given moment. And, the fact that I am naturally an extremely sensitive person, whose moods and energies I feel from the people around me loosely, doesn’t help matters. I felt other people’s misery, other people’s sadness.
Now that I was out of school and into the working world, the way that my anxiety manifested, the way it affected me, has changed. I believe that there is more at stake.
I carry with me a heavier burden of pressure and expectation, a rougher set of tongs with which to forge the anxious metal that wound around my thoughts. When the phone rings or a message beeps, there is that bout of anxiety again. When my hands start to tremble while filling out a form, that is anxiety. When my supervisor walks up to my cubicle, bringing with him a series of projects I am clearly unequipped to handle, that is anxiety. It is as if all the tiny particles of my anxious being, any of which may have started to break my heart even a moment before, now coalesces into a monstrous juggernaut of fears and anxieties. The size of my anxiety no longer matters, only the chance that it will spin out of control.
To have a heartbreak is to live through a disorienting and, in an immaterial sense, a large-scale event. So much wire has been wound around my heart. And without even knowing it, it has settled under my skin, becoming all-encompassing, filling my mind, degrading the quality of my life. The anxiety isn’t just a mental illness, it is a physical one. I work myself into the ground, but how can I sleep when I am still ruminating over everything I have to do and everything that has gone wrong during the day? Social interactions have become landmines. Extroverted small-talk strike me like a hot coal to the foot.
Heartbreak and grief, be it the daily devastations of living or the life-changing horror of losing someone, only reinforces the terrible sense of something being wrong, like my hand on something dangerous or something that will erupt in flames at any moment.
I have built defences to distract from the zillion thoughts relentlessly rattling around my brain. I read, to lose myself in other people’s stories. I play with the cats, cuddle them, as their purrs soothe my nerves. I take refuge in their simple joys and unthinking affection. The rhythmic roll of their purrs blankets what chaos my dog-chewed brain can dish, the regularity of their needs anchoring and comforting a mind otherwise pulled every which way.
But, however much you might try to quell it, the fear never quite disappears: there’s always this feeling that something’s going to go wrong. A dark cloud hovers over every situation, blotting out the happy days. Being on a permanent alert to attack has given me an anxious state of being, one I have learnt to function with but is a far cry from living.
Now, being able to live just means being able to get through each day, even as it happens in the middle of a fight with anxiety, finding the small victories, finding the calm, finding it even if it is only for five minutes. It means learning to accept that anxiety is me, and then learning to tame it, learning to live with myself, learning to fight. It means remaining in treatment, it means staying on medication and being open to using whatever tools come to mind as quickly as they do to create better coping skills, just because you are doing it one small step at a time doesn’t mean you don’t win at the end of the day as long as you are reaching.
Perhaps the most important thing I have learnt is that it is essential to be kind to myself: noticing the times when I feel guilty or ashamed for not doing more, and trying to remind myself that trying my best is good enough. Anxiety can make even the smallest things seem monumental, and returning power back to myself by being kind and showing gratitude just for the doing, gives me the upper hand sometimes. It makes me better able to tame the beast.
The ups and downs aren’t over yet. There are good days and bad, lightness and dark, and the thing that keeps me going is that I believe that things can get better. Maybe not tomorrow or next week but eventually, with practice, in time, the terror will relent enough for me to carve out a life that doesn’t leave me paralysed by fear. I cling to that. It is balancing on the tightrope, when you can no longer cry and no longer tremble, seeking out solid ground, grasping onto the flowers you plant and tend, the experiences that lift you from the terror because sometimes, when you have an anxiety disorder, you will never be free of it, you will just find the rope steadying among the flowers.
Perhaps by telling my story, I can help other people see that the anxiety struggle is real. It is a struggle, not a war, and it is ok to admit it. And if you, too, feel screwy in the head sometimes, you are not alone. This is us, and we will get along just fine.
abhishek purkayastha 