When Your Anxiety Isn't You, and Other Obvious Revelations

A few days ago, I conferenced with a student who was preparing to take the ACT. She scribbled furiously in her planner, requested to schedule tutoring sessions 5 days a week, and told me she would breathe after the test was over. It took everything in me not to hold a counseling session with her right then and there. But I later realized that holding an emergency therapy session wouldn't do much good, as I was in the exact same position as her.

When asked if I want to have students that remind me of me, I usually say "no that would be horrible! My office hours would be packed, and I'd be berated with essay drafts and constant requests for reassurance." I love learning from students who know how to enjoy life, how to live in the moment--except when said moment leads to poorly executed essays. That I could do without. But with this girl, I felt tremendous compassion and drive to show her that maybe relaxing and getting help at 17 would prevent a nervous breakdown at 25.

Because nothing says "good teacher" quite like projecting your own shit onto your students.

The thing about anxiety is that it's sneaky. Unlike an eating disorder, which is, y'know, clearly bad, anxiety lends itself to efficiency, discipline, and organization. Many of us anxious types are graduate students in the making, thriving in a culture driven by intense desire to please and claw one's way to the top. Yet these positive qualities, when left unchecked, can be overshadowed by panic attacks, obsessive tendencies, and irrational thought.

So that's fun.

As it has been well-documented, I am a millennial stereotype, so my "check yourself" moment was incentivized by a breakup. It hadn't really hit me until that moment that my mental health issues were turning me into a bit of a terrible person, and that I should maybe examine that further. To further stereotype myself, I read a book called "You Are a Badass" (which is true), and deemed myself totally cured of all anxious thoughts forever and ever (which is not). I was on such an empowerment high, that I started doing all the things: I bought a "single and thriving" table (apparently furniture stores are very popular post-breakup venues). I took pole dancing classes. I asked out a guy I liked. I decided that I would finally be good at things like cooking and fixing household items. Ask me how many times I've made a dish from the symbolic "life is different now" cookbook I bought.

For the first week of this empowerment high, I felt totally unstoppable, despite others' repeated attempts to stop me. As it turns out though, feminism is still a necessity due to people's highly volatile reaction to strong, confident women who also happen to look like they're 18 years old, but that's a story for another time.*

The thing about highs, however, is that they are bound to end (why this took me 25 years to figure out, I still don't know). I saw the anxious thoughts start to creep in, and grew irritated that it was getting in the way of my master plan to be okay. I watched myself get irrational and weird. It felt as though I were another person, watching myself crumble under the stress of a negative work situation and ten thousand life events that were happening all at once. Those pesky panic attacks were getting in the way of my female empowerment, damnit, and I was not going to let that happen.

When this out-of-body experience happens, it's almost easier to get help--rather than feel like I have to change the very core of my being, I'm just trying to rid myself of this pesky fear that I will be a homeless bum if I stop doing everything, or that everyone I care about has surely died in a car crash. The American health care system hasn't made it easier to get help however, which further blocks out people who feel like they're spiraling and don't know where to start.

While part of me is oversharing because I'm me and that's what I do, the other part is thinking about that student that I conferenced with. It can be very easy to write off getting help when you're conquering the world and thinking more logically because maybe, just maybe, things aren't so bad. You may know every possible way to take care of yourself, but you can't self-care a certain brain chemistry away.

The mental health stigma is very real and very ingrained in people who make it their sole purpose to be "just fine." But it is way harder to come to terms with the fact that you waited until your body was like "hey, we're kind of freaking out here" than to feel awkward and judged in a therapist's lobby. Sometimes therapy isn't available for those who don't fall into a privileged elite class (what is a blog post without a little political commentary, right?), but sometimes it's a matter of preventing lasting health consequences.

*There are, obviously, more pressing needs for feminism like abuse and intersectional issues, but women hating other women is a product of misogyny, and should be examined as a feminist issue.