My Story With Anxiety And Advice For The Mental Heath Community: Dedicated To Mental Heath Awareness Month
It’s Mental Health Awareness Month which means all of us around the world that have mental Illness share stories and celebrate for the entire month. It’s centered around us.
Having a mental Illness is the worst thing. It can be exhausting, draining and sometimes tough to live with. We can’t control that we have mental illness, trust me, we wish we could, but we can’t. The only option there is for us if we can’t control or mange our illness alone, is therapy.
Yes, I have a mental Illness. It’s called anxiety. If you remember, a few months back when I first joined Coffee House Writers, I talked about it briefly in my first piece titled, I Am Jules: Get to Know Me. Today, I will go into a little more detail about it.
I had my first experience with anxiety when I was young. I was very clingy to my parents, I didn’t like to be hugged, and I would fuss and cry a lot when someone would babysit me. Thankfully, as I grew older the anxiety slowly went away and I few out of these habits. The anxiety left me alone the next few years.
Then I turned 14, and little did I know that summer the anxiety would hit me again, but this time in full force.
That summer, the anxiety just slowly started taking over me and my life. I couldn’t go a day without crying or freaking out about something. My parents couldn’t even go out and take out the trash, do the laundry in the basement or even just go out for an hour to do errands without me freaking out. They all times- this was the only way to subside the anxious feeling I would get when my mom or dad would say, “I’m goanna go take the garbage out or I’m going to get the laundry downstairs.” If they did say where they were five seconds after they would leave, I would cry and freak out.
But, the lightbulb when off my freshmen year of high school. I had thought I lost my prescription reading glasses because my para I worked with at the time wasn’t able to find them in my backpack. When she told me, they weren’t there after checking every pocket I started to cry and feel overwhelmed. My teacher saw me crying and let me leave class to go for a walk so I could calm down. It helped, but it still didn’t fix the fact that I had that meltdown. I could tell in my para’s face as we were walking the halls, she knew something was wrong.
During that same day, I had another meltdown. It really wasn’t like me to have two meltdowns in one day, usually I only had at least one or none a day.
The real realization came getting on the bus to go home that day. I silently cried to myself the whole way home. I cried quietly so my driver wouldn’t hear, but it seemed like for some reason, the realization of me having real anxiety was setting in.
When I got home, I remember getting off the bus, and hurrying into the house. When I opened the door, my mom was sitting at the dining room table waiting for me, instead of greeting her with a smile, I had tears in my eyes and my face was red. I got inside, slammed the door behind me, and screamed,
“MOM, HELP ME. I’M HAVING ANXIETY.”
At first, all this time I didn’t believe one bit I had anxiety, but now I did, and I knew I needed to find a therapist to help me get better. I finally realized I couldn’t handle or mange my mental illness alone. I needed help.
That next year on August 14, 2014 I checked myself into treatment at only 15 years old.
I knew it was going to be hard and a huge commitment, but this was my only option left to get better.
It has now been three almost four years since I checked myself in, and I’ve never felt better!
I can now stay home by myself, I’m working to become more independent, and I’m now in college halfway done with my first year in my college transition program. These are milestones that I thought I wasn’t going to reach.
I’ll admit though, there was one point in the process of finding a therapist- we kept getting rejected by every therapist my mom would call. They would always say, “we don’t take adolescent children”, or “we don’t take your daughters insurance.” I was losing hope. I expressed to my mom one day that I wanted to “rip my chest open ” to pull the anxiety out myself. I was done being rejected, I was done with the heartache, and I was done with the pain. I wanted it to be over and done with.
Therapy has been hard, but great. It has helped me grow up a lot. I have done a lot of hard things as well as learn lots of new things about myself.
To the mental health community: This month, today and every day, I want you to know your not alone in your battle against your mental illness. Don’t ever be ashamed about having it. It’s a constant fight every day and some days are better than others. But please remember you are so much more then your illness. You are so strong! Don’t ever let your mental illness define who you are! The only person that can define you is you. We will fight this battle together day in and day out and we will win! We will support encourage and love one another. We are warriors! We are Mental Health Strong, always and forever!
