Anxious

Anxious: a word all too common to the average person. Everyone has felt anxious, but have people really felt anxious? This word took on a different meaning to me after I learned I was dealing with anxiety. This can be as innocuous as reading my emails ten times before I send them because I was convinced I misspelled something wrong or left something out. Or as severe as having a panic attack because I had no idea, at the exact moment, about how I would accomplish anything on my plate. I sit in the middle with having to know exactly what my future plans are.

Anxiety, for me particularly, was the fear of messing up. It was always fearing letting everyone down. And I felt like if I wasn’t hanging out with everyone and doing well in school while working 15-20 hours a week, I was failing. Obviously doing all three of these things isn’t necessarily impossible, but trying to do everything well at the same time isn’t ideal or even healthy. When I did mess up, which as one can guess was often, I would take it so personally. I took beating myself up (metaphorically) to a new level. I near bullied myself and thought I could berate myself into being productive. I became obsessed with being consistent, but I set myself up to never be consistent.

Like any college student, I just thought I was getting stressed out. And I was stressed out, often. That comes with trying to get a degree. But it became different. It turned into situations where any little failure felt like my life was going to fall into shambles. This leaked into all areas of my life. Whenever I felt like I failed with a potential romance or being a good friend, I would think for hours about everything I could do different. Any time I messed up or fell short at work, I would take it too personally. There were extremely rough times, particularly prior to when I went public about my struggles. Finals weeks were a nightmare. Not because I didn’t prepare, but I tricked myself into feeling unprepared. In any case, anxiety is something I’ve now learned to manage. I think I do it well, but it’s all still a continuing journey.

My journey continues by finding my own identity. That is, my identity in the present and not the future. I use writing, specifically poetry, to express myself in public and private. I try to at least observe and enjoy things just for the fun of it. I read for pleasure now. Being proud of reading for pleasure sounds silly, but when you get so used to reading to gather information, it’s a refreshing feeling to read for pleasure. I try to run, and watch Netflix. These are all way I enjoy the present and times where I don’t have to stress about future plans. Overall, I try not to stress too much about the future. I still have daily habits that will benefit me later on, and I still keep a clear path in mind, but I am more relaxed.

Anxiety is more common than you think. Our society is oddly secretive when it comes to dealing with mental illness and its associated challenges. The idea of people struggling with these challenges is a highly stigmatized idea. When I went public with my anxiety, I was floored with how many people came forward and told me about their daily struggles and what they were going through. It’s incredible that it took people feeling like I was in a grave condition to open up. And I’ve never felt more loved and hopeful in my life before or since. Sadly, that’s the norm. It doesn’t make good dinner conversation to talk about what we all deal with, but it sure as hell can make a difference.

If there are others struggling with anxiety out there—and I know there are – they should be honest with themselves about their struggles. That’s easier said than done, especially with a condition that typically forces one to overanalyze everything and makes one belittle themselves. At the very least, I would suggest taking time to celebrate. Each and every one of us is unique and doing awesome things. That sounds like a line out of a kids’ movie, but it’s true and needed reminder.

On Edge

Depression hurts.

It hurts physically, but even more, it possesses a kind of soul crushing pain and agony that comes from knowing that your situation is hopeless, that your future is in doubt, and that the only thing you feel is worthlessness. Pure physical pain would be so much better. That’s why you look at your reflection in the blade of a knife and really consider cutting yourself, because at least then you can have control of the pain.

These are irrational thoughts that I had during intense episodes of depression, and they were made worse by the fact that I knew and understood that my thoughts were flawed. That leads to disgust. I was disgusted that I had such a great life but couldn’t shake off the knowledge that I was hopeless and so incredibly filled with intangible and unexplainable sorrow. It seems that everything is your fault, and try as you might to pull yourself out of your downward spiral, all you want to do is curl up in bed and sleep. At least sleep is somewhat of an escape, but when you wake up, things don’t look any better.

It becomes perceived loss of all control. You cannot control your outlook, and you are powerless to better yourself or your situation. You are afraid of confiding in close friends for the fear of being judged as crazy or ungrateful for the life you have, so you keep up the façade of a happy existence and bury the pain. But alone in the privacy of your mind, hopelessness is inescapable. The loneliness that results from your hatred of yourself is a constant barrage on you. That knife looks so tempting, like your own secret to finally have some control of your life. How sweet it would be to draw cold steel across your body, the last thing you have power over. It would hurt, but it would be your pain, something that is finally yours.

– ’15 OU Alumnus

Day X

11:32 p.m.

I am exhausted, having barely gotten any sleep last night, and yet my body doesn’t allow me to go to bed. Thoughts are running across my head, everything that went wrong this day and everything that might go wrong this week, and how I feel like I’m losing my best friend with many miles between us. So many thoughts. It’s like a loud television news channel, but there is no way to turn this noise off. I find my mp3 player and plug headphones in, listening to a soft song on repeat. It helps me drown out my thoughts sometimes by helping my mind focus on the lyrics until that is the only thing running through my head. Typically I can fall asleep to that. It doesn’t work tonight. The room feels stuffy. I feel trapped. I hate feeling trapped. I can’t feel trapped. I can’t. I stand and stumble towards the window, opening it up. Even though the night air is cold, it is welcome because there is a feeling of freedom with that air. I finally am able to fall asleep.

4:39 a.m.

I jolt awake, and there is this tight feeling in my chest and a bitter taste in my mouth. This is the fifth or sixth night I’ve had a bad dream. I’m losing count, and sometimes it’s more than one bad dream in a night.

9 a.m.

It’s time to get up to go to work. There was no more dreaming, thank goodness. I go to work. I feel good, I feel fine.

9:40 a.m. – 11:40 a.m.

I feel productive with small victories such as cleaning up my desktop. These little victories are something that get me through in life now. At one point the phone rings. I freeze. I haven’t been trained on phone protocol for this part time job yet. I’m terrified of picking it up, of saying the wrong things, of not knowing how to help the person on the other line. My boss comes out of his office, gives me a perplex look and answers the phone and takes care of the student. Afterwards I stammer out that I didn’t want to answer wrong. He tells me to not worry about it. I just have answer and state our office name so they know whom they are calling.

12 p.m. – 1 p.m.

I’m done with my part time for the day and now I’m at my other job, manning another office at our university for a student organization. I’m still doing fine. I’m doing fine until a friend back home messages me. Things back home have been a bit turbulent. I left. I escaped because it was full of triggers and my mental illnesses were controlling everything in my life. They are bringing things up. They need someone to talk to. I try to listen. I try to be okay, but then it gets too be too much. Back home there is this pressure that I wasn’t good enough, that they are happy I am not there anymore, that I will not be welcomed back when I come back. They want me to never come back. These are my thoughts, the ways I feel. Reading my friend’s message it brings it all back and I feel my chest tightening. I want to flee. It is my responsibility to stay in the office until 1 and then I have class at 1:30 but, but, but I want to flee. I feel like I am about to lose control. I feel like it is going to consume me.

1 p.m.

I hurry out the building. I have to hide. It is raining and people have their umbrellas out to shield them from the rain. I use my umbrella to shield my face from others. Don’t look at me. Please, don’t look at me. I’m shaking, struggling to breathe. My breath is coming out ragged, and I’m trying to swallow it down. I don’t want them to hear. I don’t want them to stare at the freak I am for not being able to control myself. I start dry heaving, but I see the dormitories. I rush inside, into the elevator. It’s not empty. There’s another girl there. I turn my back to her. I want to imagine she is not there. My right hand is clutching my left wrist tightly something I find myself doing when I cross certain lines in anxiety. I’m on my floor inside my room. I haven’t been taking medication over here again. It is too expensive. But I have some left, some I leave for dire situations like this. I take it and crawl into bed, hiding into the covers, clutching a ragged stuffed animal because holding something in my arms is something I need to do. I can dig my fingers into it instead of into myself. I cannot go to my classes. Not like this. I don’t know when the medicine will kick in. How will I explain this to my teachers? How do you tell them you cannot go to class sometimes because of things like this? I was perfectly fine this morning. My friend messages me again. I feel like the worst friend in the planet. That thought is also berating me inside my head. I tell him let’s not talk about this again, it’s a trigger, I’m sorry I cannot deal with this right now. I feel like I can’t be a proper friend, a proper student, a proper human being.

5:30 p.m.

It takes five hours before I am okay enough to leave my room. And even then, the anxiety is still there, like a small tangled mess inside my chest. It’s manageable now though. For now, it’s manageable. I have to go to my internship tonight so I’m thankful that’s at least one place I will not have to explain this sort of thing that seems to rule my life. At least not yet.

-OU Student, Human Relations Major

Growing Into Vulnerability

I’ve had a lucky life. I grew up with wonderful parents and a caring sister (though it’s taken me a while to realize that). My family hasn’t really dealt with substantial money problems, and I was lucky enough to earn an academic scholarship to the University of Oklahoma. I have great friends who are there whenever I need them, and a girlfriend that treats me better than I possibly deserve. From the outside, I live a great life. And honestly, from the inside I live a great life.

But sometimes I’m not happy. Sometimes, no matter how great things are, I can only focus on the bad. Sometimes, all I want to do is lie in bed and pretend the world around me isn’t there.

It began in middle school. In 7^th grade, my first significant relationship ended (as significant as a 7^th grade relationship can be, I know). It sucked, and for the first few weeks I felt just like anyone else who loses that first special someone. But then it didn’t stop. First it was a few weeks, then it was a few months. My friends couldn’t understand. I couldn’t understand. All I knew was that no matter how many times people said “it will get better,” it didn’t.

Finally high school started, and by the end of freshman year things actually were better. I couldn’t figure out what had changed, but I had just woken up one morning and I was okay again. I would still go through weeklong periods of sadness in reaction to one small thing or another, but never as bad as that again. And so I wrote that sadness off to just being a kid—being a high schooler still figuring everything out. Then second semester of junior year happened.

I’ve always been very good at empathizing with others. One of my best strengths has always been my ability to put myself in another’s shoes—to understand what they’re going through. My junior year of high school, a classmate of mine killed himself. It was the second suicide in less than a year, and it hit me especially hard. I kept asking myself, what more could I have done? What more could I have done to make that boy feel valued and appreciated and worth keeping alive? Would that that one day be me? So I spiraled.

Depression looks different to everyone. Some people go through episodes of mania and depression, alternating between the incredibly high and the incredibly low. Others experience a constant, but manageable level of depression. My depression is usually like that, but with deep valleys that I can’t predict. For three months, I lived in that valley. I stayed up until at least 3:00AM every morning, watching The Office and dreading waking up the next day. At school, I put in headphones between classes and just stared at the wall during classes. I had one thought that I repeated over and over:

What difference did my grades and my test scores make if there were people all around me that needed my help right then and there?

I can’t fully explain that thought process. One fairly constant thing I’ve seen in the people I speak to with depression is the desire to be part of something bigger. Depression can cause you to feel as though none of what you’re doing really matters. To counter this, you try to make a difference in the lives of others. I may not have been able to make myself happy, but at least I could make others happy. That would have to be sufficient for a time. Helping others was the medicine I self-prescribed. It would be a while before I was ready to accept my mental illness and ask for help.

As a high school kid, asking for help is hard. Being a teenager means trying desperately to fit in. Wear the right clothes. Say the right things. Watch the right shows. Being different means separating yourself from that; it means making yourself vulnerable. And as a teenager, that vulnerability is terrifying.

Acknowledging mental illness means acknowledging inherent vulnerability. It means accepting that not only are you different, but you are different in a way that very few people will be able to understand. And, in many cases, you will always be different. That stigma is both societally imposed and self-imposed. Everything I had ever heard about mental illness led me to see it as a weakness. And this false self-perception of who I was, who I should be, stopped me from getting better for a very long time. The belief that mental illness makes you inherently weak was what led to me taking so long to acknowledge I struggled with it, and to taking so long to finally ask for help. Believing I was inherently broken was what kept me from taking steps towards finally putting the pieces back together. It was only when I made it past that fear and asked for help that I was able to start getting things back in place.

-Cooper Lund, OU Class of ’16