Tuesday 3 March 2015 08.41 AEDT
‘At the height of my illness – because that is what it is – I had
anxiety attacks from the moment I woke up until I could finally sleep.’
Last week, while I waited for a meeting to begin, two people pondered mental illness. Is it real? It’s probably a buzzword, they said. But I mean, I guess you have to feel sorry for them. Still. You know. You know.
I sat at the other end of the table and listened to my heart drumming in my chest. Fast as you like, bam-bam-bam-bam, then skipping a few times, heart palpitations, bam-bam . . . bam-bam. They congratulated themselves on their empathy and I excused myself to sit in a corridor and breathe as far into my body as I could, to find myself again.
About a quarter of Australians will experience an anxiety condition in their lives. It is the realest thing I can imagine.
As a child I would lie in bed and look up at the glow-in-the-dark stars my dad had carefully mounted, and I would think: the stars are so far away; the stars are infinite; the stars will be here long after I’m gone. I will be gone. One day, I will be gone.
It was a sharp intake of breath and a surge of adrenalin and then flight, out of bed in a flurry of blankets, through the lounge room, along the hallway, faster and faster with my lungs clanging in my ears and the knowledge that one day I will be gone chasing me, chasing me along the hallway until I rounded the corner and threw myself under my parents’ bed and stayed there.
I was six years old.
It didn’t seem abnormal, and if my parents thought it was, they never mentioned. Anyone would react that way, given to think about the certainty of their death (something I have always been inclined to do). I wasn’t afraid of many other things. Well, elevators. And sure, heights. And the ocean. And the boy who lived next door. And getting trapped in a fridge. And Astro Boy. And lemons. But apart from that, fearless.
In grade four I ran away from school because I thought for too long about how eyes work.
In grade six I spent half an hour crying in the toilets because I thought my hand was on backwards.
And so it went. Now, at 32, I experience frequent and intense periods of anxiety.
I have been afraid since before I knew what it was to be afraid, before I knew there was any danger. I feel the fear not in my head but in my very self, cracking and thrashing against the part of me that knows how to be a person at all. I feel it before I know I am feeling it, hissing there in the soles of my feet, shouting at me from the pain in my knees, from the weakness in my hands, from the tingling in my jaw. It lurches from my throat like a wave of black tar and I choke on it and the world caves in around me and I am drowning.
And it is always so final, the panic. Every time I feel it, it could be the last feeling I have. The most acute and insurmountable feelings anyone has ever felt. A face-to-face meeting with mortality, every time. I can’t breathe. My throat has closed. I’m going blind.
I will die, I will die.
So far, I haven’t died once. And I can try to rationalise the panic by remembering that: “I’ve felt exactly like this before and I didn’t die.” Except that maybe this is the time. Maybe all of the panicking I’ve done in the past has given me a stomach ulcer and now I’m bleeding internally and this time I’m going to die for real.
I have generalised anxiety disorder.
The anxiety disorder exists separately from my personality. Anna the Person is tough and smart and honest. None of these things about me are rendered untrue because of my anxiety, it’s just that sometimes, someone throws a heavy blanket over them. I am tough, but I can’t get to the shops today. I am smart, but I think that if I go outside I will float away into the atmosphere. I am honest, but my brain is lying to me.
Chronic anxiety is miserable. There’s the waiting: will I panic? when? will it be as bad as last time? will I be safe? can I get out? It is often co-morbid with depression: I can’t do this forever, I just want it to stop, I want to be normal, I want to stop worrying, maybe I should just drive into the ocean. It seems relentless. Years of relentless, agonising fear.
We’re chronic anxiety people. Our anxiety has been treated and it hasn’t gone away. Sometimes it bores the people around us. It definitely bores us. God, it’s boring. So we push forward in spite of our very boring fear. We climb out of bed every (OK, most) days and we exist in the world inside a fog, and some days the fog is light and it blows away for a while, and some days the fog is thick and it rolls in around us and we suffocate.
People don’t make ad campaigns for us. Our anxiety is not so easily classified. Our symptoms aren’t always identifiable. When I’m at my most anxious, I look right into the face of the man I love and I can’t remember who he is. How do you put that in a mood-lit commercial? I am insane, I am crazy, I am the only one who feels this way.
I’m not. I’m just a person with an anxiety disorder. There are millions of us, out there in the world. We carry our anxiety with us like a colostomy bag, filling it with fear, emptying it into the quiet corners where we sit and we breathe. Sometimes, we find pockets of peace.
I will die, I will die.
But not from this.
