I think a lot of people who come from the normal working brains stock often wonder or simply cannot understand what it's like to live with Clinical Anxiety on an everyday basis. I see success or "how I got better" stories all the time and let me tell you - take those people with a grain of salt. I personally don't believe you just recover and POOF no more anxiety. That's a load of shit to me. Real success comes from living in spite of it. You relearn how to function as a human again, despite that asshole on your shoulder or in your chest that grips your insides until you can't breath anymore. And so what is it like really? To live day to day with a condition that tells you to run away from everything?
Despite awareness, every single damn day I feel like a walking excuse. Anxiety for the most part is invisible. It's in my head; literally, my brain refuses to pump information and chemicals where they should go and pushes them somewhere else instead. I can't enjoy being in a room with a lot of people for periods longer than a couple of hours. It's too much and I have to fight the urge to run out of the room and keep myself planted where I am and force myself to socialise. It's suffocating. I don't focus and my vision kinds of blurs in and out. But damnit, I'm there. Sometimes it's not just about day to day living, new quirks crop up every now and again. They can last anywhere from 2weeks, a couple of months to forever. For me, I've experienced over-salivation, the irresistible urge to try and crack my shoulder blade every 20 minutes, twitches, phantom sensations and more. A new one for me lately, over the past year is verbally transposing. I speak too fast without thinking and mix two or multiple words together. Rush and fast will become fash as an example and it's making me very paranoid of my surroundings and how people perceive me. My short term memory is also a mess as a result. Tell me your name and watch me forget it within half an hour. Drink every time I ask you what it is and take a double shot for every time I apologise. I feel stupid. Like my intelligence is slowly dying and in reality it's not, I'm just worked up or nervous and that little asshole is messing with the language centre of my brain. It takes advantage of my vulnerability I guess you could say. It's not a reflection of my intelligence, but no one knows that but me.
There's also a great level of isolation at play. Sure there are other people who live with anxiety, but like DNA itself everyone will experience it differently. I don't connect well with others and making friends is a difficult task for me which feeds into the whole 'feeling excluded' experience. It feels unbelievably cliche to say that I feel like an outsider looking in but that is my life every time I'm out in a crowd of people. I am usually by myself. Thankfully I'm fine with that most of the time, but as a Uni student it makes interaction hard. Teachers really love that whole 'working as a group' thing and spring it on you whenever they get the damn chance. It is a learning tactic, but I think you'll find people will naturally work in a group if need be. Force a couple of people to speak to each other analytically for half an hour and watch 1 out of 3 slowly lose their mind. I try to make small talk. Some puns, make jokes, but I'm the type to say something dark or run my mouth. By the end of it I'm usually left worse for wear. Which follows up with the oh so fucking fun endeavour of 'Over thinking' about said interaction. I will go over everything I said and beat myself over it.
In the grand scheme of things these are all rather minor. Long term suffering is probably the worst thing to deal with. To lose passion, motivation or the will to live is without a doubt the hardest things to struggle with every single week. I recently had to change medication because I was just sinking and felt nothing anymore. You dissociate and forget how to feel an emotion for anything you're experiencing or doing at the time. You're working on auto-pilot at this point and a long term coma becomes super appealing, which results in over-sleeping and drinking heavily, like myself. It becomes depression at this point (something I also have). No one wants to be like this. Never tell anyone it'll go away. Don't ask why we're like this. It's no less debilitating than a brick to the head and I don't want to live this way, but I have the choice of pushing through every day or throwing it away and taking the easy way out. I choose to push through all this because in spite of this, there is so, so much I want to do and regardless of how hard it is for me, I want to see the rewards, no matter how many times I fail every single day.
Gidget xx
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