I have a cluster of mental illnesses — Major Depression, Generalized Anxiety Disorder, Panic Disorder, and Social Anxiety. It’s a real shit-show of issues, if I’m honest, and others who’ve been there can attest to that fact. It’s a common cluster of illnesses, affecting somewhere between 30-40% of the American population.
When I was first diagnosed with anxiety a decade ago, I thought it was a fairly new condition for me. I thought it had only become active in my late 20s to early 30s. I thought that depression had been the only mental illness I’d lived with — until my early 30s when the anxiety rose up and almost consumed me whole.
Turns out depression was not the only demon in my life. It took several years after my diagnosis of anxiety to come to terms with the reality of the thing — I have always had anxiety, and I can now trace it all the way back through my young childhood, my teenage years, early adulthood, all the way to when it became so significant that it demanded treatment or I would literally have died because of it.
Of course, up until then, I had no idea about any of this, and neither did anyone around me. As a kid, whenever I acted out, there was no awareness from my parents, let alone myself, that this was anything but a temper tantrum or a rebellious outburst. But I look back now at so many of those incidents and can see the anxiety that lay buried underneath as the base of those reactions, the irrational fear and sense of overwhelm that fueled the explosive anger and temper that defined so many incidents of my childhood. I had a terrible temper, and I didn’t know why. I just thought it was some kind of family legacy because of my own father’s angry and tempestuous outbursts. And of course I was punished for those tantrums, with spankings until I was 12 or 13, then with groundings or extra chores or other punishments deemed appropriate by my parents. My behaviors were seen as rebellion, as sin, as something to be trained away.
Mind you, I’m not saying anxiety necessarily played a role every time. I was a kid. Emotional growth and development is part of the process of growing up. We aren’t born knowing how to handle extremes in emotion. It’s part of what growing up is about. But this was during the 80s and 90s. Mental illness wasn’t something people thought about, except as an abstract concept that happened sometimes to other people who were schizophrenic or had multiple personalities or what-have-you. Depression was a personal problem, a spiritual condition, that required God but certainly not a doctor or medication.
And anxiety? What was that? It was simply weakness of character, a “buck up and get over it, mister” sort of thing. Anxiety didn’t exist. It wasn’t recognized. There was simply no awareness of it. In our household, it was a “cast all your care upon Him for He cares for you” type of thing. There was no sympathy, no empathy, no attempt to understand. It was just something you prayed about and expected it to go away.
So of course I never learned healthy ways of dealing with anxiety because I had no clue it was an integral part of my psyche, of my being.
And my temper continued into my adulthood. It wasn’t an everyday thing. And I was never abusive. But at times things would happen outside my control, and I would fly off the handle, cussing and throwing whatever was close at hand, often breaking things because I had no idea how to control the intense emotions I was feeling. I just knew I was irrationally angry and out of control and, frankly, scared — of myself, to be sure, but also of other things I couldn’t define. I look back now and see the fear and panic underlying every one of those emotional explosions, irrational fear that I couldn’t do this thing or that I’d never be able to fix that thing or that my failure somehow lessened my value as a person. I didn’t know any of that then, didn’t understand that, wasn’t self-aware enough at that time to do anything about it.
It took a particularly bad event in 2018, an arrest, a week spent in jail, to make me finally realize that I wasn’t as stable as I thought, that there was something more going on with me that I didn’t understand, that I needed more help than I currently had, to finally reach out and start the process of getting that help. It took me some time to find the right psychiatrist to get the correct diagnosis and medications that actually helped reduce my anxiety, along with a therapist who could reflect genuine light into my mind and being, before I could start to get ahold of this particular demon that had plagued me my whole life.
And I won’t say I’m perfect now. I still have anxiety. I still have panic attacks. I still feel overwhelmed often. But I no longer get angry and explode when it happens. I have tools at my disposal now, some of them chemical and some of them behavioral, that help me get through those moments without deteriorating into a Hydean monster.
It’s been a process. It’s a continuing journey, one that will last me the rest of my life. Because I know I will never be 100% free of these demons. They will plague me until my dying day. But I know they don’t have to control me, define me. I can fight back, and that is exactly what I’ll continue to do.
I wish I’d had these tools sooner. I wish there had been more awareness earlier in my life. But psychology and mental health is a growing field, one that didn’t really exist then the way it does today. It’s a field that I’m passionate about and will continue to advocate for. Hopefully, the system will get better and better and help more people in the process. That’s something I will continue to hope for and try to do my part to make happen.
