What to do when you feel so foreign in your own body? Itching to get out. Clenching of the jaw, nails to the palm, trying to escape your skin. Anxiety so crippling you can’t leave the house, surrendered to the frame of your own bed. Cancelling work shifts with no explanation because if you say you’re anxious you won’t be taken seriously, you won’t be heard.
You’re told anxiety affects everyone differently, but question why you face the worst symptoms. Feeling close to fainting most mornings, can’t eat, hurling into the bin beside your bed whilst you shake in dismay at the feeling you’ve surrendered your body to.
Therapy helps but doesn’t remove the physical symptoms. It doesn’t change the thoughts in your head or make them disappear. Medication assists but is a journey within itself.
The feelings just get worse before they get better.
When 9pm hits I know it’s time. Time to pop my Lexapro. Time to feel mindless about the flooding thoughts filling up in my mind. Time to feel better.
Lexapro, an antidepressant used to treat anxiety, classed as an SSRI that helps to restore serotonin in the brain. An SSRI is also known as a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor and its side effects can be gut-wrenching. It can overcome your mind and body more than generalised anxiety disorder does at times.
It takes four to six weeks for the meds to start working their magic, but the waiting is painful. The high success rate pushes you through, thinking about the light out of this miserable tunnel.
You want to escape your problems, so that is exactly what you do. Vacationing in Europe over the Australian summer keeps you distracted. With flare-ups along the way, you make it through the trip. Still not knowing how to cope, you land yourself back in the position you were in before you left - feeling slightly better but taking days off because your heart is reaching for good health, but you can’t manage to capture your breath.
It is something still so new, so raw.
Feeling unrecognisable when you look into the mirror - a mirror of endless stories, worries, and cries for help. Unfamiliarity within yourself and who you are with this anxiety. The overwhelming heaviness that now defines you and what your future will look like. Once the thoughts begin to ruminate within your mind, there is no noise loud enough to silence it. You change as a person, and your view of the world is not the same.
You lie awake in bed alone, feeling haunted by the fear of being unable to leave your house. You wonder if a change of diet and lifestyle will fix everything? Is there a cure to this never-ending madness? What are you doing wrong?
You began to skip caffeine, avoid alcohol, and watch what you eat because you feel that if you make the wrong move, you may just end up feeling helpless and be stuck in your room again. Adjusting your routine assisted, exercising helps but the anxiety wasn’t going away overnight.
Staying awake at night, avoiding friends and family, crying alone in your room over nothingness and everything all at once. All the intrusive, inevitable thoughts are like rapid-fire through your head, not feeling alone at any moment.
My anxiety has become my best friend; I live with her, I'm comforted by her, and now I am her.
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