My Struggle with Anxiety

The story of how a run-of-the mill software engineering suffered in silence from anxiety disorder his whole life and what steps he took to get better.

Introduction

I have struggled with anxiety my whole life, it has greatly affected my career, my social life, and my inner life. Anxiety caused me to develop a drinking problem, caused me to quit a job I really liked and cost me a couple of friendships along the way. This text documents how I got there and what I’ve done recently to get better.

The things that have helped me get to a better place and that I am going
to talk about here are:

• Therapy
• Medication
• Mindfulness
• Getting Organized

The first section outlines my story with anxiety up until I started to work on getting better. The remaining sections discuss each of the above topics in turn and how they helped me.

Disclaimer

This document is mainly written as a therapeutic exercise and to prove to myself that I could do it. Also putting my thoughts and feelings about this part of my life into writing has helped me organize my thoughts about this subject.

I publish it to share my story and with the thought that maybe it could help someone. I am however NOT a medical professional and I can only speak to my own experiences. If any of the issues I describe in here seem familiar to you I highly encourage you to seek help. Be it a therapist, a partner, a friend or an anonymous post on the Internet. Simply opening up and letting someone in is an important first step.

My Story

I am a 30 something software engineer, living in the bay area. I have a Ph.D. behind me and have as of writing been working in different tech companies for 5 years. I have a car, an apartment and a girlfriend of almost 1 year. I grew up in a European country. All of my family still lives in my home country. My native language is not English.

Anxiety in My Youth

Anxiety has been part of my life for as long as I can remember, although I did not fully recognize this until recently. I have always been a worrier and over thinker, ruminating endlessly over everything big and small in my life. Early in my life this made me a timid kid, never speaking up or participating in anything out of generalized fear and anxiety. I was mostly a loner with a few friends that I never got really close with. This fear of doing carried into my early adult life as well: I hurried through the education system with above average but not stellar grades, sticking mostly to myself and forming very few non-superficial relationships. In short, I put very little effort into life and got
very little out of it.

Increasing anxiety

After finishing school I got a job at a big tech company doing research. This is where my anxiety started to escalate. Now my anxiety went from an intermittently occurring thing to a permanent state I could not escape from.

To illustrate the difference, let me start with an example of how anxiety would affect me in school before I started working: Exams were always a source of anxiety (as I am sure they are for many). In the days leading up to an exam I would be nervous. I had a hard time concentrating on anything else, I was worried about the outcome and in the final days I had a hard time sleeping. Then the exam would happen, tension would release and I would feel better.

This is is how anxiety works when it works FOR me, motivating me to work hard on something I consider important. What happened after I left school and started working is that I gradually began feeling that nervousness and unease constantly without any way to release the tension. In the beginning, it was mostly job matters I worried about. A lot of my rumination focused on how people perceived me or my performance at work.

I am an observant guy and notice details that a lot of people miss. This is usually an asset but coupled with anxiety and a strong negativity bias it leads me to over-interpret small things and ascribe them a negative meaning. For instance I would notice that a co-worker started an email with my name instead of the usual “hi,”. I would then jump to the conclusion that he was upset with me and that I had irreparably damaged my relationship with that person not ever considering the many other plausible explanations.

After a while, I could not even identify the source of my anxiety. I was stuck in a permanent state of worry and fear.

Negative Consequences

I eventually left the big company and joined a small fast growing startup. At this point anxiety was a permanent part of my life and as we will see I was coping with it in various ways.

This permanent state of anxiety started to greatly affect my day to day life. When at work I was ineffectual because I was unable to concentrate, constantly distracting myself with social media or just staring at an empty screen without getting anything done.

The company was growing with a pace that was hard to keep up with so there was always some fire happening in production. I spend many anxious hours worrying about potential scenarios of how my code or my work could be laid to blame for a problem, and how this would put me in a negative light. I spent endless hours playing out conversations in my head about why some imaginary problem wasn’t really MY fault. A draining and unproductive way to spend time. As a result, I was afraid to really do anything. My productivity and ability to finish things was low.

As is common with anxiety my concerns were entirely disconnected from reality. At no point did anyone actually blame me for an issue nor have any of the tense conversations I played over and over in my head ever come to pass.

It gradually got worse and worse. I was unable to get proper sleep, always exhausted and unwell. I started getting sick more. My weekends were usually spent mindlessly binge watching TV shows in my apartment while idly browsing the same websites over and over, not really paying attention to either. I even convinced myself this is what I wanted. I told friends that I “needed” to spend an entire day doing nothing at all because I was an introvert. In retrospect, this was a complete self-deceit. Those countless unproductive hours only exacerbated my anxiety. I would spend my Sundays slowly counting the hours until I had to go to sleep and then to work, trying to fill those hours with as much distraction as possible.

The fight or flight instinct eventually got to me, and I quit the job. Again I convinced myself that leaving was a good career move, and concocted multiple reasons why I didn’t like being there. In hindsight it was all lies: I had just gotten transferred to a very interesting project, I liked my co-workers and the company was doing phenomenally. I was leaving because of my anxiety and misguided idea that leaving would improve it. I vividly remember being in my exit interview and was asked why I had decided to quit. I did not have an answer so I straight up lied.

I took some time off between jobs and traveled. Even this supposedly carefree time was marked by strong anxiety and negative emotions.

After my time off I joined a big prestigious tech company in the bay area. I had convinced myself this that is what I wanted. I didn’t spend long at this company before all the same problems came back.

Drinking

Along the way, I picked up a drinking habit. It started out as an appreciation for Gin and ended up being an incredibly unhealthy coping mechanism. It got to the point where I would look forward to coming home and getting drunk and when a situation at work was stressing me out I would think “I am having a drink tonight”. I have shown up to work severely hungover multiple times and even thrown up at work once. I usually drank alone. The scary part is, it
worked. When I got drunk I was genuinely relaxed and able to put my worries aside for a bit. Recognizing that I had effectively become reliant on alcohol is one of the things that lead me to finally seek help.

Procrastination and productivity

I have always procrastinated on pretty much everything. I would start endless projects and barely even get started before I abandoned it for the next thing. Usually, I would abandon a project once it got hard or challenging. Whether my tendency to procrastinate is a source or a consequence of anxiety I do not know, but I do know that feeling unproductive is a major contributor to my anxiety. When at work I would get nothing accomplished so I left feeling defeated. At home, I would be feeling anxious about work, coping by either drinking or staying up too late (or both) leading me to feeling horrible the next day and the cycle would continue.

My ability to focus on things got worse and worse over time. I used to be an avid reader of science fiction and fantasy. I still recall in detail reading the Dragonlance and Wheel Of Time series when I was younger and how much I enjoyed immersing myself into those books. In recent years I have been essentially unable to read a book. Due to the constant worry and anxiety, I could not concentrate well enough to actually absorb any book, almost instantly forgetting anything I read. Usually, I would buy and start a book,
read a few chapters and then lose interest. At times I got so frustrated that I would throw away books that I couldn’t finish so I wouldn’t need to look at them.

Instead, I was spending my time on things that required no effort and no concentration: Endless TV watching, lurking on Reddit, eating unhealthy and drinking. All things that require little effort and provide some immediate pleasure. The ability of these things to distract me from my constant anxiety rumination lessened over time so I ramped them up. Watching TV for entire days, drinking more etc.

Getting Help

I had been at my prestigious tech job for 6 months and I was miserable. I was in a constant state of near panic, unable to relax or focus on anything. At work my heart was racing constantly, my mind wandering and I spend most of my time lost in a huge imposter complex. I was constantly comparing myself to my co-workers, and coming up with excuses as to why I was not as productive as I wanted. I was adrift with no goal or purpose.

I do not recall what it was exactly that made me seek help. But eventually, I reached out to a Cognitive Behavioral Therapist in my area and scheduled an appointment. This was not the first time I had considered getting help, but my tendency to procrastinate and not “stay the course” prevented it from going from thought to action.

I booked an appointment at the earliest possible moment so I wouldn’t lose my nerve.

Therapy

Going into my first therapy session I did not know what to expect. I spend a long time formulating what I believed my problem was and what I wanted to fix. “I am constantly anxious and unable to relax or focus” was what I ended up with. The first few sessions revolved about the therapist laying out the ground rules of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) to me. CBT is a problem-focused and action-oriented approach to therapy, the focus is on identifying concrete problems in a person’s behavior and then formulate actions to remedy them. I have not experienced any other kinds of therapy so I cannot really compare.

Demystifying the Body

As mentioned health and body was a big source of anxiety for me. I almost never went to the doctor, and when I did drag myself it was incredible anxiety-inducing. Given that my anxiety often caused an elevated heart rate I was worried about possibly having or getting some kind of heart disease. Therefore the thing that made me most anxious about going to the doctor was getting my blood pressure measured by the nurse before seeing the actual doctor. Whenever I would get my blood pressure taken, my heart would start racing, my breathing would quicken and I could feel panic starting to rise. So given all of this, of course, my blood pressure was high. One time it was nearly 180 systolic (a medical emergency I am told). So this became a vicious cycle: I had tons of anxiety about having a heart-related illness, and it was impossible to get a reliable reading of my BP due to anxiety.

The solution presented by my therapist was simple: Exposure therapy. Measuring my BP enough times until I convinced my brain that there was nothing to be worried about. So, using an at-home BP gauge, I set to work. Committing to my therapist that I would measure my BP 2 times a day and 10 times during the weekend. Gradually over time, my measured BP came down, until it was within a healthy range. As my anxiety about BP went down, so did my reluctance to visit the doctor. I have since been several times and gotten both a physical and getting some long-standing medical issues addressed.

Getting Educated

After starting in therapy I asked the therapist to recommend me some books about the subject. The one I ended up getting was “The Anxiety and Worry Workbook: The Cognitive Behavioral Solution”, an action-oriented book about identifying sources of anxiety and addressing them. The most revelatory experience of reading this book came not from the actual exercises but from realizing that I was not alone, in fact my problems were quite common and shared by thousands of people (enough for a cottage industry of self-help books). The book accurately described many of my issues and even repeated almost word-for-word my problem statement about not being able to relax or focus. Realizing that the struggles I was having were not special, was the first step that lead me to open up more

Different Kinds of Anxiety

Getting educated also gave me a minor understanding of the various kinds of anxiety and associated effects. I am going to summarize my understanding of them here. They may be incomplete or downright wrong, but at least the reader will know how I use the terms.

Broadly anxiety can be defined as intolerance of uncertainty. When anxious I spend energy on worrying about some future event. Everyone obviously does this to some extent, it becomes a disorder when the worry becomes unproductive or persistent and affects daily life in an unhelpful manner.

While anxiety is associated with a specific thing or event such as driving new places, social interactions or doctor/dentist visits. Generalized Anxiety, on the other hand, is a persistent state of excessive worry about ill defined areas such as health, financial, family matters or work. In other cases, it can be even worrying without any identifiable cause.

I certainly I have both kinds of anxiety, and I imagine most people do. For instance I would always avoid driving in SF due to uncertainty about traffic or parking, instead opting for Cal Train or expensive Uber rides. However what impacted my life the most was the generalized anxiety, the constant state of worry and rumination rendering me unable to relax or focus. Frequently I would be unable to identify what it was that causing me to worry, making it
impossible to address.

Behavioral Experiments

One key element of CBT that worked for me is the homework. At the end of each session I would be assigned homework that usually revolved around facing things that were causing my anxiety. For instance to measure my BP 10 times. I would then either do them or not and we’d talk about it in the following session. This accountability really helped me push through and not
procrastinate. Given that anxiety stems from uncertainty and perceived future threat the only way to overcome it that really worked for me has been to reduce the uncertainty by facing the thing that’s causing it and becoming familiar with it.

This is how I got rid of my anxiety related to driving in SF. Once I had identified this is a source of anxiety, I committed to myself to drive into SF until I got comfortable with it, which I eventually got.

Opening Up

My therapist was the first person I ever spoke to about my problems with anxiety. Before that, I had struggled in complete silence. I have strong self-control and I was able to present a healthy looking facade to the people around me. Sharing my thoughts and feelings does not come naturally to me at all. Whenever a conversation would turn personal I would either slide off with ambiguous answers or simply lie instead of showing vulnerability. While I think stoicism has its place I definitely overdid it.

I held quite a bit back in my first therapy sessions and didn’t tell the whole story. This meant that it took us a lot longer to get to the issues that mattered. In hindsight, a pointless waste of time and money, a therapist cannot help you if you are not honest.

As therapy went on I became more comfortable with opening up and decided to let other people in my life in. I have since told my girlfriend and several of my close friends about what I have been going through. Letting other people and realizing that they accept you and don’t treat you differently after defuses the anxiety in some way.

Ending the Self-deceit

Going to regular therapy has helped me be more self-aware. As mentioned I used to lie to myself about my various unhealthy coping habits. I repeatedly told myself and others that sitting at home doing nothing by myself and mindless binge TV all day was something I wanted or that my drinking was fine and a “sophisticated” habit. A complete fabrication, I was habitual drinker for sure, often getting drunk on weekdays. By all accounts a pretty serious problem that I would have no problem recognizing and calling out in others but for myself I was blind to it.

On a smaller scale, a lot of procrastination stems from various false excuses I tell myself. Recognizing these, allows me to catch myself when I would otherwise procrastinate on something

Medication

While the therapy greatly helped me address my anxiety related to concrete things such as health and work. I had a harder time addressing my generalized anxiety, the persistent state of worry and unease I had been in for years. My therapist suggested talking to my doctor and maybe trying anti-depressants.

So I did. After a quick chat, my doctor prescribed me 5mg a day of Escitalopram Oxalate also known under its brand name Lexapro. When I just started I felt nothing. Lexapro takes a while to build up in your system and 5mg is a small dose so this is expected. After 2 weeks without any signs of adverse reactions I was ramped up to 10mg per day. Now I started to feel something!

The first effect I noticed was an increased ability to sit still. Before starting the drug I would often fidget and usually have some part of my body in constant motion. I also started having much more vivid dreams, a common side
effect.

So Does it Work?

In a word, yes. I have a hard time saying exactly how much the Lexapro has helped though. I have been on it for 5 months or so and my anxiety has been reduced significantly. Aside from starting Lexapro I have taken several other steps to improve my life (as detailed in this post) and I’d like to think that those things have helped reduce my anxiety as well. However, given the timing of my generalized anxiety going down it is safe to say that Lexapro can
take a big chunk of the credit.

The idea that a chemical compound can affect a personality trait so strongly is still a bit scary to me. I don’t like the thought that a major change in my life and attitudes is potentially derived from an artificial modification of my brain chemistry. I currently have a years worth of refills available to me and I like where I am at so I intend to continue to take it.

Will I eventually stop taking it? I hope so. However, the thought of reverting back to old habits outweigh my dislike of taking the pills.

Side Effects

Lexapro is an SSRI and considered to be the one with the mildest side effects. In the beginning, when I started taking it, I experienced trouble sleeping and vivid dreams. However, these issues went away after awhile. The only persistent side effect I have now is problems achieving orgasm. Various kinds of sexual dysfunction is a very common side effect of SSRIs and are the most common reason that people go off the drug. My sex drive is unaffected, and I
have made my peace with the fact that orgasm takes more work and doesn’t happen every time. My partner has been very accepting of this as well.

Other “Medications”

I tried several other non-prescription drugs that supposedly helps anxiety. CBD, Ashwagandha, and Bacopa. They had no discernible effect on me one way or the other. I still take Bacopa as that seems to be the one with the most experimental backing of its effectiveness.

Mindfulness

One of the ways therapy has improved my life is a heightened awareness of myself. When I was in the depths of anxiety I spent significant amounts of energy avoiding my own negative thoughts leading to all the various kinds of negative coping detailed above. Simply waking up to this fact was huge for me. Making the connection between all of my negative behavior and my anxiety was an important first step in dealing with it.

Mindfulness was a natural next step. Mindfulness teaches awareness of the present moment by paying attention to what your body and mind are doing right now. Getting better at this kind of introspection appealed to me so I dove in. Mindfulness as a practice stem from several Buddhist traditions and a lot of it is couched in spirituality. I was honestly quite skeptical when I first starting reading about it and almost dismissed it before looking deeper. However, I stuck with it. Research indicates that regularly practicing mindfulness alleviates exactly the kind of symptoms that I was struggling with: Persistent and unproductive worry and rumination.

After a few false starts, I started using the Calm app on my phone for guided meditations. Specifically their 7-day intro course + a 21 day deeper intro course. Initially, I had a very hard time sitting still, my legs would twitch or my arms would move almost under their own will. Introductory mindfulness meditation revolves around either simple breathing meditation: Sitting still, concentrating on your breath. The other kind of meditation taught to beginners is body scanning. A body scan involves concentrating your attention on individual parts of the body in turn and how that part of the body feels right now. In both cases the emphasis is on noticing when your mind starts to wander, noting where it went and then returning to your original object of focus. Body scanning, in particular, was helpful right away for me: Deliberately paying attention to all bodily sensations pleasant and otherwise helped me work towards reducing the anxiety I had about my health.

Meditating really resonated with me and after my initial struggles with it, I started to reap some benefits. After my short 10-minute meditations I would feel significantly calmer and a sense of relaxation I had previously only felt when sufficiently intoxicated. I have also noticed that meditation also aids my ability to focus. A big part of insight meditation is catching yourself when your thoughts start to wander away. Getting better at this and being able to focus for longer periods is definitely a skill that has come in handy in my day-to-day life.

What appeals to me most about mindfulness is the meta-cognition aspects of it. “Awareness of awareness” so to speak. Better understanding how your mind works and being able to observe it “in situ” is a useful tool and something I hope to get better at. If you, like me, are prone to be carried away and tend to react reflexively in certain situations(or not act at all), awareness of this fact and the thought patterns that arise in these situations is the first step in dealing with it better.

I now actively use meditation as a tool. If I feel anxiety rising or if I feel myself getting lost in negative thinking I am usually able to catch myself before it escalates. I am able to stop and think objectively instead. In the past, I would not consciously have noticed that anxiety was rising so I let it affect my behavior instead.

I feel I have only just scratched the surface of these kinds of mental disciplines and something I fully intend to pursue further.

Stop Multitasking

Tangential to mindfulness I have drastically cut down on the amount of time I spend multi-tasking. For me, multitasking usually means doing some activity while also being on my phone or laptop. I have spent endless hours not-really-watching tv while browsing the same websites over and over. I would even be on my phone when in social situations. The research is pretty clear here: You can’t multitask. Not only do you do a poor job of each included activity, it also actively harms the brain. Furthermore getting into Flow, the state where all energy is devoted to one task and all else falls away is very much incompatible with multitasking.

These days I spend a lot more time reading books than watching TV. When I do watch TV I usually watch lectures or MOOCs to learn about new topics. I’ve also gotten hobby projects started (such as this article), which I never would have been able to do before.

Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction

After having meditated on my own for a while I signed up for the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction 8 week class at my local medical center. This 8-week class teaches several different mindfulness practices including mindful yoga, body scanning, and actual formal meditation.

One simple thing that really helped me was one of the first topics of the class name the idea of “stopping”. This simple exercise had us, the participants, stop during the day and take 3 deep breaths while paying attention to how I feel in that particular moment. Another simple way of training the “awareness of awareness” aspect in the moment. Day-to-day life as software engineer presents many a source of frustration and this exercise has helped me get better at not “letting it get to me” and also being able to leave work at work.

For me, the MBSR class has been helpful in both getting access to an experienced meditator and also in the support group aspect. Seeing that other people struggle with the same problems as you is always helpful. Having encountered multiple MBSR instructors I will say that they vary a lot, many with a decidedly more spiritual take on it than my instructor. I am also not sure what, if any, accreditation is involved. I recommend going to the (usually free) intro night to get a feel for the instructor before committing to anything.

Getting Organized

I impulse purchased a self-help book called “The More You Do, the Better you Feel”. While the book itself was not particularly engaging the title really resonated with me. All else being equal when I come home from work feeling good, its because I feel productive, like I’ve gotten stuff done. I imagine to many people this is obvious, but to me, it was quite a revelation. As I mentioned when my anxiety was worst I was stuck in a spiral of feeling unproductive and miserable. So I set about getting organized.

So What Does That Mean?

For me getting organized has meant several things: Getting my various physical spaces organized, getting a task tracking system set up and developing a healthier sleeping habit.

My apartment (and before that, my dorm room) has always been a mess. Whenever I had visitors over it usually involved setting aside at least a couple of hours dedicated to cleaning. In the end, it wasn’t even cleaning, more hiding the mess adequately so that I didn’t feel too ashamed about it. I lived in that apartment for 4 years and by the end, it was not pretty. Carpet stains, ugly bathroom fixtures, piles of dust and so on. I recently moved into a new apartment and decided that this one would be different. I clean the apartment every Sunday morning (usually takes an hour) and I take care to not just leave stuff everywhere. If something is just out in the open (and not somehow decorative) I figure out where it “belongs” and put it there. Previously I would just have a bunch of clutter around me all the time, giving a sense of messiness.

A year or so ago I would have labeled such orderly habits as uptight and thought I did just fine without. Some people might very well be perfectly happy and content in clutter, but for me getting rid of it and keeping my physical spaces tight and clean has been positive. Not having your personal space, where you spend a significant amount of time, be a source of stress and anxiety but instead a place you feel good about has done wonders for me.

Getting Things Done

As part of my mission to become more productive, I decided to try and implement the old classic Getting Things Done.

For those not familiar with it, Getting Things Done is a methodology espoused by David Allen that focuses on setting up a a system of external lists in which you put everything on your mind into. If you trust the system you are then free to focus on a single thing while trusting that all the other things you need to deal with is stored and accessible somewhere.

Bootstrapping GTD is done by an exhaustive scan of both your brain and physical spaces. The book instructs you to walk around both your workspace and your home and take everything that is in a state you are not satisfied with and put it into an inbox either physically putting it there or symbolically with a post-it. I did this while between jobs and it took me roughly 3 hours and generated almost a 100 notes in my new inbox that I had bought a Staples the day before. After that comes the brain scan: The book contains multiple pages of prompts that you read through and see if they trigger something in your life you want to do something about.

Simply doing this process felt good and productive. The next step is then to put everything into your new system. For every item in the inbox I determine if accomplishing this can be done with just one action and if so what is that action. Once determined I put the action on my next-action list. If the item requires multiple actions to complete it becomes a project (essentially a sequence of actions) for which a next action must always be present.

Some of the practical examples that came out of this process for me: I sorted 5 years worth of various unsorted papers into a filing system, I organized all the random items that used to clutter my apartment into drawers and labeled each with the contents, I organized the wire mess under my desk and much more.

I now have a list of next actions that I can consult whenever I need something to do. I am now slowly getting into the habit of consulting this list whenever I have some spare time. Knocking a few things off it is quite satisfying. There is a bit more to GTD, especially the weekly review is important, but I won’t get into that here.

Practicing GTD has allowed me to focus much better on single tasks at a time, combating my tendency to waste time multitasking. Practicing mindfulness has made me better at detecting when something unresolved is on my mind. When such a thing comes up, I now stick it in my system, trusting I will deal with it later.

Getting organized has helped me cut down on my procrastination as well. Especially procrastination of simple things, usually day-to-day life chores like laundry, cleaning and dealing with financial or administrative issues. Again, removing these as a source of stress and anxiety gives more room to focus on more challenging and important matters.

The big challenge of something like GTD is of course sticking with it. Especially sticking with it once things start to get busy and stressful. Time will tell if I can do it. Here I hope the mindfulness training will help as well. Not being afraid of my own thoughts and not spending significant amounts of energy distracting myself as a coping mechanism will hopefully allow me to recognize if I’m slipping.

Now

I have been on the recovery path a little over a year. I have returned to the job I left for no good reason and I am so far quite content there. I practice meditation before going to bed and as one for the first things I do in the morning. I see my therapist once a week. My life is much more structured than it used to be: I put all my activities on my calendar. I clean my apartment and do my laundry on regular schedules during the week. I go to bed and rise on a regular schedule and generally try to be in the office before 8am so I can leave before 5pm without feeling guilty.

I still have this looming sense of “waiting for the other shoe to drop”. The part of me that is convinced that this is just a temporary respite and I will eventually return to old habits, destroying all the progress I have made. This is partly based on past behavior: I have many failed attempts at life improvements behind me. My hope is that this time will be different since I have attacked the root of the problem: My anxiety and all its follow-on effects such as procrastination.

Do I still feel anxiety? Yes, all the time. It seems its part of who I am. However what therapy and mindfulness helped me do is to separate the anxiety (and other strong feelings for that matter) from my sense of self. To be able to realize and say to myself “I am feeling anxiety right now, let me look at why” and then dealing with it instead of mindlessly coping or acting out is a true blessing.

Acknowledgements

A lot of thanks goes to the people around me. For openly hearing me out and accepting me when I finally managed to open up. Some don’t even know it yet, but their openness about their struggles with mental health was a true motivator for me to inch towards lowering the barricades I had built up.

I am also grateful that my old job took me back, no questions asked.

A special thanks go to my girlfriend who embody a lot the qualities I hope to have.

I do believe that the biggest credit goes to myself. I am proud of the improvements I have made in my life this past year and I hope to continue down this path.