Anxiety. The ruiner of good moods, the uninvited guest, the feral cat clawing away at your sanity. Approximately 18% of the U.S. population is afflicted with anxiety disorders. That’s 40 million adults over the age of 18.*
It’s hard to pin down exactly what kind of anxiety(rather, -ies) I suffer from. I would say it’s Generalized Anxiety Disorder, or GAD, but more often than not, my anxiety and panic attacks are brought on by my phobic thoughts. I have emetophobia… emet- referring to the Greek root word for vomiting.
Listen. No one likes to vomit. Well, I do remember some kid in my elementary school thinking it was gross in a cool way, but he was probably alone in that opinion. I couldn’t tell you EXACTLY what it is about vomiting that freaks me out to the point of a panic attack, but I can venture a guess that it’s a weird combination of the anticipation leading up to it and being out of control of one’s own body. Throw in some fears about being in public when it happens and being repulsive to everyone around me, and you’ve got a full-blown emetophobic.
So here’s my anxiety story. Enjoy:
I had my first bout of panic attacks when I was a kid, probably around 8 years old. Almost every night, my parents would sit with me on the edge of my bed, gently stroking my hair, lightly scratching my arm, making up soothing and happy stories to yank my thoughts away from those poisonous, incorrect assumptions that I was going to be sick…
“Breathe in, breathe out….imagine you’re on a row boat with Jonathan Taylor Thomas…breathe, just breathe…” They were wickedly awesome parents, I gotta tell you!
My mom would tell my teacher at the start of each school year about my fears so they would be aware of a potential panic episode should one of my classmates fall ill. My fourth grade teacher actually had me keep a weekly journal, which I didn’t understand at the time and thought was a cruel extra homework assignment only meant for me, but now I see she was actually helping me more than I could have imagined.
Anyway, my fears dwindled away for several years. Always present in my mind, but only active when triggered. Fast forward to Thanksgiving 2014. I am the last kid of my family to still live at home. My parents and I all came down with a respiratory infection, that was harsh enough to force us to cancel Thanksgiving, which was supposed to be at our house. My mom developed a particularly horrible cough, for which the doctor prescribed codeine. This was an unknowingly bad move, because my mom ended up taking the medicine on an empty stomach and proceeded to get sick from it. And I heard it happen. Enter: Panic. Mom started feeling better right after, so my panic subsided.
Then, two days later, my mom needs to go back to work because she’d been out for so long. She’s feeling better, but decides she’d probably be fine taking the codeine because this time she had a full stomach. I’m still at home recuperating from this wicked sinus infection, so imagine my shock when I hear her come through the door 30 minutes after she left, telling me she got sick in the car. ENTER: PANIC!!!!!!!! I left and escaped to my boyfriend’s house, where he was spending a vacation day cleaning his room. From that day onward, I couldn’t shake my constant and irrational thoughts about all things stomach-related. To this day, 7 months later, I cannot wake up without one of my first thoughts centering around it. My poor mother, my goodness I do not blame her….but it is clear to me that those incidents flipped a switch in my brain that I have since been unable to switch off.
TL;DR version: I suffer from fairly severe anxiety, with a recent onset of full-blown anxiety within the past 7 months, stemming from emetophobia. I’m on a teeny, daily dose of Lexapro, and I carry around Ativan and Zofran as security blankets. I have a panic attack about twice a month, which is A LOT better than I was in January, when it was occurring almost daily. It’s onward and upward from here.
I am starting this blog as an outlet for me to voice my thoughts, opinions, frustrations, and even creativity….and more importantly, I’m starting it so that I can hopefully reach some people out there who need a comrade, someone experiencing similar thoughts and situations, to turn to for advice or ideas they haven’t thought of before.
I’ll be talking about anxiety, wellness, being a 20-something, student loan debt, relationships, publishing, books, animals…and I may even throw in some of my own short stories and poems. Reader- I hope that some of my words on this blog will inspire you, or at least get you thinking about something new. There’s a lot in this world to consider. And I want to sort through as much of it as I can, here with you.
Love and Peace to you always.
*http://www.adaa.org/about-adaa/press-room/facts-statistics
