All of my friends have anxiety. That’s not true, but it’s the name of this blog, because many of them do, along with myself. If I had to tell you why we decided to start this, I would tell you I’m not entirely sure, yet. When one creates something, he often doesn’t understand its purpose until it’s done. What I can say in this moment, is that if you are reading this, and you, too, have anxiety, you are not alone. This blog is for people who don’t suffer from the mental illness upon which we focus, just as much as it is for those who share our common affliction. The unfortunate truth is that even if you don’t have it, you know someone who does. And you might not know they have it, because part of the feeling alone comes from hiding the parts of yourself you don’t want others to see. For a long time, I chose to suffer in solitude, because it was shameful, and I knew no other way.
It’s hard to determine where to start in telling my story. I’ve always been host to something unnamable. As you’re growing up, adults tell you that it’s normal to feel like no one understands you, that all of these foreign feelings fade away as you grow up, and they couldn’t have been more wrong. I carry the same emptiness I did as a child. I always felt at odds with myself, as if parts of me seemed to exist in opposition to each other, and I never knew why. You carry it for a long time before it claws it’s way up from the depths of you, and swallows your life whole. I come from a family prone to mental illness. I suffer from depression, and anxiety. And those things do not define me, which is why I’m writing this. Because all of us are more than our illness, more than the parts of us society has taught us to be ashamed of.
I had my first panic attack during my senior year of college. I was lying in a bed next to my ex-girlfriend of four years, after not having talked to her in months, when she told me she had sex with a guy she thought wanted to date her, only to find out that same evening that he didn’t. I was still in love with her, then, as she cried in my arms, and the darkness that would follow me for the rest of my life consumed me. Through a dilation of time, and a deafness to the sounds of her crying, I lay, my heart thundering throughout my entire body, as the heaviness of the room made me unable to breathe. I’m not embellishing when I tell you I thought I was dying. I felt like I was having a heart attack. I was certain of it. I was consumed by an absolute terror that felt as if it would never end.
She asked if I was okay, and I told her I wasn’t. “What do you want from me?” I asked. “I don’t know,” she said. “Do you want me to leave?” I said. “You can stay here tonight, but I don’t want you to get the wrong idea.” That was it. I got up, I put on my shoes, and I left. I walked out into the winter night, dark and infinite, more lost than I had ever been. The stars reached out, but their light never found me. I laid on a patch of frosted grass, below the desolate sky, wanting nothing more of what my life had become. I don’t know how long I laid out in the cold, but I didn’t feel anything beyond the sense of impending doom that claimed the night, the stars, and all that was left of me. When I walked back to my apartment, I knew my life would always be tainted by whatever came to me that night, whatever rose up from the ashes of my dying fire, ravenous in its destruction of me.
In the years that followed that night, I lived days where I thought I was getting better, that I could be normal one day; I, too, lived days in equal measure where I knew I would never again be well. I’ll talk about my darkest days, and my seeking treatment years later, in the future. But first, I’ll start with an explanation of what anxiety is, and more so, what it feels like to carry it seamlessly integrated into your consciousness.
It’s more than just the panic attacks, the desolate feelings of unrelenting doom, and the exhausting bouts of unnecessary adrenaline that leave you suspended in fight or flight mode when there is not a semblance of pertinent danger involved. It’s the disparate voices that exist inside of you. There is a logical voice, which dictates your actions, your thoughts, your sense of self, your relation to others, and the world around you. However, you live with another voice inside of you, one that feels foreign, as it whispers black lies across the whole of you, surging across your being like a pestilence, creating unrest, uncertainty, and melancholy.
The worst part about anxiety is that you understand the logical voice inside is right, literally almost all the time, but you can’t for the life of yourself silence the haunting phantom of your anxious mind. It seeps into every part of your life, every situation, every interaction, and makes it really fucking hard to be the person you want to be, the person you deserve to be, for yourself, and for the people you care about most deeply. The tenseness it creates is just as much physical as it is mental and emotional. If you’ve ever been in a car accident, and experienced the lapse of time before impact where the uncertain terror of what the outcome will yield as you are powerless to affect any change upon that situation, I can tell you it feels a hell of a lot like that, except there is no car accident, nor is there an impact upon which the feeling dissipates. Most of the time, it feels like an effect without a cause. Even if there is a cause, it usually doesn’t warrant the mind’s extreme reaction to whatever lies at hand.
This is merely an introduction. This doesn’t determine what others will write, nor what I will write in the future. In ending, I have something far more important to say than anything stated above. This is called “All My Friends Have Anxiety” for a simple reason. These people are not my friends because of their affliction. They are my friends because they are some of the greatest people I’ve ever known. They augment the light that exists in me, and help me see the person I am beyond my mental illness. We are just like you. We struggle. We hide. We feel the stigma society has given us, as it tells us to be silent. We fall short of ourselves more often than we’d like to. And that’s normal. What matters most is this: we are not defined by our darkness, but for the way we shine in spite of it; I am writing this so you know that you are not alone.
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