My Anxiety Story

When I look back on 2011, it feels like I had a pretty awesome year.  I remember special moments with my baby girl (who was born at the end of 2010), brilliant family holidays, having an opportunity to do lots of writing for the first time since I finished uni, spending time with good friends…all the basis for a lot of happy, fulfilling times.  However, the fact that I am able to feel like this is a bit of a miracle really, because 2011 was also possibly the hardest year of my life; a year that involved dozens of mini-breakdowns, a shedload of tears, weekly counselling sessions, and six months worth of anti-depressants.

Yes, in 2011, I was pretty damn ill. I still am, in fact, though I’m definitely over the worst. Basically though, this time twelve months ago, I hated myself.  My husband hates it when I put it like that, but it’s true: I hated myself.  Now, It wasn’t a new thing for me to struggle with issues of self-esteem.  I vividly remember discussing my overwhelming fear of ‘boring my classmates’ with a friend when I was just eleven years old.  I’ve never believed myself to be interesting, funny, intelligent, or anything that might make people want to spend time with me, and there’s only a handful of people who I’m comfortable enough around to not have to replay every conversation we have in fear that I said something stupid or annoying.  I didn’t believe any praise sent my way, and I felt uncomfortable when people did tell me something good, as if I was to blame for somehow fooling them into believing I was fun or clever.  This was just a fact of my life though.  Yes, it was annoying, and often upsetting, but this was who I was.

In addition, side by side with these issues of self-confidence, I also have an obsessive personality.  A lot of the time, this is harmless.  I’ll fall hopelessly in love with a book, reading it five times in a week, or something stupid like that.  Weird, yes, but definitely harmless.  However, eventually, these two aspects of my personality would have to collide, and this began when I was a teenager.  My brain would obsess over the smallest things, until little threads of worry became huge knots.  Chief amongst these worries was my fear of being abandoned by those closest to me.  I mean, why would anyone want to be friends with me, or be my boyfriend?  I was a boring freak.  As I’m sure you can imagine, I was a whole barrel of laughs to be around sometimes.  Looking back now, it’s amazing that I thought this was in any way normal.

This went on for years and years, though thankfully I would always be able to fight off the obsessions for a few months at a time, making it possible for me to live a fairly normal life.  Of course, this couldn’t last, and the constant fighting with myself and the mental abuse I was suffering courtesy of my own brain had to reach breaking point eventually.  I don’t pretend to know exactly how it happened, but soon I managed to convince myself that I was actually a bad person.  It was all I could think about.  That I was selfish, spoilt, greedy, childish, bitchy, stupid and horrible, and completely undeserving of anything good in my life.  I didn’t deserve my husband and I definitely did not deserve my little girl when she arrived into my life all teeny and lovely.  How could I possibly raise a child to be a good, loving, happy person when I was second only to Hitler in the evil stakes?

To anyone reading this who doesn’t suffer from anxiety (obsessive or otherwise), or low self-esteem, I’m sure this probably sounds completely crazy.  It will also seem inconceivable that it still took months of convincing to believe I was unwell.  I was lucky to have had a very supportive husband, and friends, who saw that there was an issue, stepped in and encouraged me to seek the help I needed.  It took months and months of struggling for me to see that these thoughts weren’t really real, and were simply the result of intense anxiety that had overwhelmed me for years of my life.  Like I said earlier, I’m still unwell.  I no longer believe that I’m a bad person, though I still struggle to find anything interesting or likeable about myself.  That’s unsurprising, really, after so many years of putting myself down, and it’s something I’m going to have to work on for a long time.  However, the fact that I can recognise this now, and recognise the fact that I’m perhaps not such an awful person, is a giant step in the right direction.

My suffering is really nothing compared to many people.  I took medication for a few months, and hopefully that’ll be the last of it; plenty of others have struggled for a lot longer.  However, I still consider it a big achievement that I could go through all of this, and still take positives from the past year.  I’ve come such a long way, and the worst days, times when I felt like I couldn’t get out of bed because the day ahead felt like too much to face, feel more like a bad dream than anything else.  Anxiety is a bitch, but it’s a bitch that can be beaten…and if I can beat that, I’ll beat everything else, too, in the end.  2011 marked the first victory; hopefully the new year will see me issue a few more beatdowns.