Coming to Terms With My Anxiety
I had WAY more than the normal number the amount of breakdowns beginning my sophomore year of college. I had always felt anxious about school and socializing, but I wrote it off as stress time after time. Bottling up these kind of emotions for an entire semester can lead to quite the break down. I was enrolled in 15 hours that second semester. I finally broke from my bottled up emotion. I couldn’t do it. I dropped to 6 hours telling myself I wasn’t even sure if I could handle that. I went and saw several doctors and they gave me titles like having “Clinical anxiety” or “the anxiety disorder” or “Generalized anxiety disorder”. All the things that made me feel 100 times worse than better. A label did not change the fact how I anxiously lived everyday.
I tried to act completely normal and fine to my friends, but now looking back my emotions and struggles were so obvious. The next 6-9 months led to more anxiety as I was prescribed the wrong medicine 3 times. You know when you verbalize having anxiety and go to a doctor, then they prescribe you meds— your like.. okay yay normal life is back. Wrong. The medicine made it worse, made me restless, more anxious and unable to sleep through the nights. It affected all my relationships. I was in and out of therapy, seeing a psychiatrist, getting blood work done to see if why my body is acting so poorly to the medicine. I’m clearly leaving a lot of detail out but saving you the time as each day was long and even harder.
Long story short, I was finally put on the correct medicine (thanks to my parents somehow getting me into this “world renowned psychiatrist that worked directly with a blood work lab” Things were good for a while but then my anxiety got bad again. Back to the therapists twice a week, back to the psychiatrist. The whole deal. Medicine got upped and I was calming down. My therapist wanted to move to once every other week because she said I was doing extremely better, but that in itself gave me more anxiety that I couldn’t have her as a crutch. I ended up being weaned off of therapy and my psychiatrist visits turned from once a month to every 3 months.
All of this to say, this was two years ago. Since then, these two years have been full of ups and downs. I have along periods of good and some low hits of bad. Had to upped my dosage again, to then realize the job I had post grad was contributing immensely to this already very present disorder I had. I was prescribed a pill that worked instantly incase of panic attacks (because my job literally was making that happen regularly) Good news, I made a good decision for my mental health and left the job even though every adult around me was saying, "stick it out 2 more years” or “If you quit now it will look bad on your resume”.
I went down a little on the dosage. And have been smooth sailing more than usual as I actually have a job now that is good for my mental health. I do have to remind myself that this is a FOR LIFE battle. Just as I think wow i’ve been doing great!!! I get hit with an insane panic attack. But through this whole process and journey, I have learned so much about myself and my limits. I can control my anxiety to certain extents by not being in situations that will make it worse.
To whoever is reading this, you’re not crazy and you’re not alone.