You may be able to tell from my earlier posts that I
suffer from the occasional panic attack or two.
Life often feels like a balancing act: caffeine intake, exercise, sleep,
food choices, movie selections, goals accomplished… you get the recipe wrong,
and you’re asking for an attack.
But my experience isn’t everyone’s. I read so many lists of things that “every”
person with anxiety supposedly experiences, that “every” friend should know if
they want to help… and sure, some of it rings true, but so much of it has
nothing to do with me and it drives me crazy to be defined by others’ too-broad
lists. It’s a symptom of a greater evil –
a desire to classify and cure all forms of mental illness, to compartmentalize
and, intentionally or accidentally, to marginalize. So here’s a list of what, to me, is NOT true
about anxiety.
Myth #1: The
symptoms of anxiety are common to all anxious people
Anxiety runs the gamut from a mild difficulty around
which one can still function to a crippling daily bombardment of terror. It can come suddenly out of nowhere or
predictably in certain circumstances, and it can be about any number of subjects
or even nothing at all.
For years I convinced myself I didn’t really have an
anxiety problem because I couldn’t easily pigeonhole it into one of the classic
anxiety disorders defined by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. My attacks weren’t about nothing, they were
always about death. I could trigger them
myself if I thought about death long enough.
They didn’t happen very often or over a specific period of time. And not being able to define my problem in
the context of an external diagnostic system made me feel like a phony. I didn’t have anxiety and I didn’t deserve to
complain about it. I was just being
silly. And that’s a bullshit thing for a
teenager to have to feel when they’re sitting there in the shower bawling their
eyes out because one day they will, inevitably, die.
This is a truism that applies to so many different aspects
of life and self-identification: External sources don’t know your
experience. They can’t. If you’ve got anxiety, you’ve got anxiety and
no manual is going to justify or deny that for you. What those manuals can do is help inform you
of the wide variety of methods you can use to help yourself out of whatever you’re
experiencing. Which brings us to another
myth…
Myth #2: There is
one best way to help all people who experience anxiety
The other night I told my husband we couldn’t watch the
Nostalgia Critic review of the movie Casper.
I didn’t have to say why. He
knows me well enough by now to leave it alone and watch it on his own
time. So tell me – exactly how many
other people with anxiety would this no-watching-Casper treatment apply to?
I hope it’s obvious that a mental hardship (not necessarily
a disease, a disorder, or even a problem) with symptoms as broad as anxiety would also
have a wide range of legitimate treatment options. And the most important part should go without
saying, that the person with the anxiety is the one with the final word on what
they will and will not allow for treatment and help.
This is something we often miss with mental hardship. It’s your brain that’s “broken”, so it must
be a reasonable assumption that a broken thing can’t be trusted to fix
itself. And in certain extreme cases,
that may be true. But it’s a rare case
of anxiety that doesn’t come and go. A
person not currently in the throes of anxious grief is certainly capable of
explaining how they want to be handled when they are having a problem. The phrase,
“What can I do to help?” is a powerful one.
Use it. As genuine and good a
place as you’re probably coming from, you can really, really mess with an anxious person in the middle of an attack by
doing and saying the wrong things.
But if I can presume, a word of caution to fellow anxious
folks: you know yourself best, but please be open to others’ insights. The
best help I got was from a counselor I was almost too proud even to go see for
the two sessions I really needed him. I
thought I could take care of it myself and no one could tell me anything I hadn’t
already considered. I knew in my bones
the book was closed on the afterlife, and the inevitability of my cessation was crushing. And all the
counselor had to say was, “I know you think you know, I know it feels concrete
to you, but what if you can tell yourself, logically, it’s impossible to know? What if
you can force that room for doubt?” At
the time I smiled and nodded and thought to myself that was a nice load of crap. Now I tell myself this every single time the
panic looms. It still feels like a lie
and it probably always will, but humbly I admit I don’t own the answer, and it
helps. Help can come out of anywhere.
Myth #3: When
people are anxious, it shows
That depends. For
the big stuff, probably you’ll see some classic symptoms. Maybe it involves panic attacks, maybe it’s
physically apparent – but maybe it’s not.
To beat to death a tired cliché… that whole iceberg thing. Ten percent above water and all that. You know it.
I don’t like getting people all riled up about my anxiety.
It’s tiresome. So unless I really need a hug, I’m likely not
to mention how long it takes me to calm down enough to get to sleep some
nights. If someone never looks anxious,
always seems bubbly and happy, doesn’t seem to have a care in the world… it’s still
not reasonable to assume they never have a moment of oh-my-God-I’m-going-to-die-right-now pants-soiling fear for no
reason. You just never know. And it doesn’t make their troubles any less
real or worthy of regard if they do
open up to you about it.
Myth #4: Everyone
who has anxiety wants to be fixed
Confession: I do. I
really do. But not with drugs, and not at the expense of
anxiety’s benefits – that high-strung, “dancing on the edge of something
awesome” kind of feeling. I don’t
believe it’s possible to simply excise the part of me that breaks down in
terror at the thought of death while leaving the rest of me intact. It’s a lament I hear often with various forms
of “mental illness”: No treatment, please, if it means any kind of loss of “self”.
That’s the real bitch about it. Much as we may want to, we can’t ignore that the
problem is in our brains and our brains are ourselves and our selves have been
built with anxiety (or whatever) as a fundamental component. So sure, I’d love for mental illness to be
taken as seriously by both the medical community and society at large as a
tumor or diabetes is – but I’m tired of the concomitant assumption that viewing
it in that light means it needs to be treated with the same sterile hand. It’s been my experience (and I’m positive I’m
not alone) that like it or not, my brain is myself and altering that means
altering me, which seriously limits the options on “fixing”. I also know dozens of people who feel that
life is much better, and they feel more like themselves, when they can manage
their symptoms with a pill. Both are
fully understandable, legitimate approaches to dealing with mental
illness.
Understanding goes a long way toward helping someone with
their anxiety. If you see a problem in
someone else, maybe ask them about it and see if they’d like you to do anything
or even just be there for them. If you
see it in yourself, find someone to talk to who will listen. That last bit’s critical. And most importantly, don’t let this post or
any other external source make you think your problems aren’t worth tackling.
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