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I wasn’t even aware I had anxiety until it literally took a physical toll on me a few months ago and I decided to seek out help for it. I went to therapy for the first time. I was very scared. I was embarrassed. I felt weak. My entire life, my family had never placed stock in the idea of mental illnesses like depression or anxiety. If I had a problem? “Get over it,” they would tell me. I was always too sensitive. I always needed to get over it. To this day, I don’t know how right or wrong this mantra was -- the line blurs in places -- but I do know that I fully believed it. I do know that I believed that whenever I felt bad, it was my fault for not being strong enough to get over it, and I learned to hate myself for that.

Growing up, I believed that depression was an exaggeration. Anxiety was an excuse. Therapy was unnecessary, a luxury, a waste of everyone’s time and money. For twenty years, when I was scared, when I cried without knowing why, when something drove me to the point of feeling isolated and suffocated and paralyzed, I would try to forget about it. Today, I recognize this as repressing the hell out of that shit. But for the longest time, it had never been that nuanced or complex to me. It was a black or white, yes or no thing. If I had a problem I would, as my mother would say -- this didn’t even merit a response from my father; it was that abstract a concept to him -- “Get over it.” Mental health was a conversation I never had. It was a conversation I was thoroughly convinced I was not a part of. Quite frankly, it was a conversation that I believed was not even worth having.

But then I had my first panic attack. When I was sprawled on the floor of my dimly lit dorm room, my chest throbbing from the thunk-thunk-thunking of my heart against my ribcage; my lungs hyperventilating air up and out to keep my throat from sealing itself up entirely; my head spinning and my body shaking, trembling, confused about whether it should be fighting or flighting; my mind not being able to process anything other than sheer terror and the warm, salty tears that just wouldn’t stop coming -- it was then that I admitted to myself that I needed help. I needed to do something, because something was obviously wrong. Something was wrong, and for the first time in my life, I couldn’t just get over it.

When my therapist, Kary (shout out to Kary; seriously, Kary, I don’t know what I would do without you), sat me down and told me in no uncertain terms that I was stuck in a alternating cycle of anxiety, depression and self-hate that feeds and grows off of itself (and that ultimately culminated in those very real, very physical and very terrifying panic attacks), everything suddenly made sense. Since I can remember, I’d always found things to dislike about myself -- my body, my voice, my language, my name, my humor, my interests, my brain, my reputation -- that I justified as constructive criticism. I’d always been prone to the occasional bout of paralyzing sadness that I easily dismissed as mopey. I’d always been a paranoid kid, worry, worry, worrying about everything but what was going on inside of my head. I’d just thought it was normal. I’d just get over it. 

Kary, looking at me with equal parts empathy and resolve, told me that twenty years of “getting over it” drove my body to have tell me what my mind had always refused to admit: I need to get this gunk out. And if I was ever going to get better, I needed to allowed to feel what I was feeling. She was absolutely right. All of this emotional residue needs to get cleaned out of my head, and I can’t get that done by ignoring the fact that it exists or by hating myself whenever I get close to it. I need to address it. I need to let myself be vulnerable. Yes, it’s messy. Yes, it stinks. Yes, different issues need to be disposed of differently and yes, that is going to take forever. But this year -- slowly -- I’ve been tackling these things little by little, one by one. 

I have never been particularly proud or happy with myself. I know now that it’s because I have always run away from things that hurt me, from unpleasant or negative thoughts, because I never believed that addressing them was particularly important. But they’ve always been there -- every insecurity, every fear, every doubt I’ve ever had, just festering and mutating and growing upon itself until I broke from the weight of so much warped negativity.