I can vividly remember the first time I was so consumed with anxiety that I couldn’t function. I was in 3rd or 4th grade, and I had just failed a science test; it may seem small, but it shook my belief in myself and my intelligence to my core. Although I was allowed to retake it, for weeks I was on the verge of tears every time I opened my textbook to study. Anxiety has been a constant companion throughout my life. To a certain extent, it is a normal human experience – it can even be positive when it alerts us to caution in a risky or dangerous situation. However, when something that is healthy in appropriate proportions goes into overdrive, it can become a big issue.
I can point to the times in my life when that anxiety went into overdrive and made functioning difficult. True to that formative experience, my most common triggers have been school and work. However, after my spinal cord injury, new triggers emerged that I was not expecting. I became overly anxious about meeting new people, about proving myself to others, about finding caregivers, about how I was supposed to move forward with my life. I became anxious about if my boyfriend at the time would wake up one day and change his mind. I became anxious about the fragility of life. In short, I was consumed with fear and worry about the future of my drastically changed life.
Six months after marrying my then boyfriend, now husband, I was having such frequent anxiety attacks that I finally decided to give therapy another try. At the time, making this decision felt like an admonition of weakness, a shameful secret that if I told people, they would just point accusingly and say – Have you tried praying more? I thought you had more grit than that. Where is your faith? It felt like defeat. And given my previous experience, I wasn’t even sure if it would be helpful. But to my surprise, that first session felt like setting down a heavy weight, like breathing a sigh of relief after holding my breath for too long. I had a space to speak my fears out loud and face them, to build skills for identifying negative thoughts cycles and patterns, to learn how to cope with the physiological responses tied to anxiety. It was the beginning of understanding myself in a way that I never had before.
It’s been six years since that first session, I am now therapist, and I have a much better understanding of my own relationship to anxiety, but it is still there. There is no magical cure to get rid of anxiety. So, it will continue to be a companion to me, but one that I understand now; it’s a wave that I’m equipped to ride whereas before I felt like I was drowning. And I also realize that the work of therapy is a lifelong process; I will always be learning about myself and reflecting and growing. A huge part of that growth has been to realize that I do not need to suffer alone; sharing my experiences with others has helped to shed the shame and stigma I felt when I first reached out for help. If you are in that space, I hope that this is an encouragement to you not to suffer alone either; remember, we are #StrongWheeled together.
