Inside the mind of clinical anxiety & depression
A year ago, in December of 2020, I wrote a blog post titled, “It’s Okay to Take a Break.” I wrote candidly (and for the first time) about my mental health experience, having navigated it on my own for 10+ years and finally getting diagnosed in July of 2020 after hitting a rock bottom. Whether I wanted to or not, I had to take a break. I went on medical leave, stopped work, & eventually quit so I could move back home to family and take a much needed longer break, fully focusing on my recovery.
I spent a lot of time reflecting on what taking a break meant to me—especially as someone who was raised to believe that breaks were earned with copious sweat and elbow grease, never simply required. My terms were changing because they had to, and so I welcomed this unexpected break with open arms.
Taking a break didn’t really go as planned…
However, one year later, I now realize that I didn’t actually know how to take a break. And it’s not as easy as it seems—at least not for a perfectionist, over-achieving, “workaholic” like myself. Taking a break isn’t exactly written in my exceedingly efficient, career-driven DNA.
So, now what? Here I am, trying to embrace a huge, life-changing break so I can heal and become a better, much healthier and sustainable version of myself. Yet, completely and utterly rejecting it at the same time.
In this post, I’ve decided to share an excerpt from my journal as I tried to navigate these past conflicting months. No one can say it better than someone right in that moment, and so, I open up a piece of my anxious & depressive mind to you.
Will it make sense? I don’t really know. Probably not. Don’t keep your hopes up. But, maybe it shines some understanding on those also suffering from these mental disorders. Perhaps, it helps you feel seen in your own silent battle. All I know is that, whether you’re struggling with mental health or not, taking a break is actually really hard.
Excerpt from January 16, 2021
I struggle with taking a break. I am struggling.
I’m supposed to be on this amazing, liberating, and transforming gap year I never had, but right now, I feel like I’m just wasting every day away. The reality is, recovering from mental health illness is heavy. Some days I feel like it totally controls me. I can’t do most of these amazing things everyone is imagining I’m off doing. Someday soon I hope to do them, but for right now, I need to take a break and just heal.
Here’s my reality of living with and recovering from clinical anxiety and depression:
My depression completely overwhelms me mentally and physically. On the worst days, I can’t get out of bed without help. I can’t shower, or get dressed, or eat without someone walking me through each step. Each day is spent just getting through it. There isn’t enough energy to think or do anything, so I sit and just wait for the time to pass, all the while doing my best to distract my mind from the dark places it can go. This typically means I watch some horrible TV to turn off my brain (recently I was on a Love Island UK kick, but now I’ve moved on to the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills). But, sometimes even that is too much and I can’t focus. Each day, I just wait for it to end so I can rest. And then I do it all again tomorrow.
It’s demoralizing, excruciating, and it feels totally lifeless.
Even the things that bring me joy can’t help me.
Those who know me know my love of the beach. Growing up as a swimmer from a very young age, the water has always been my happy place, and nothing makes me feel more alive than the sea. Well, in my big move, I’m fortunate to live by the sea now, and this beautiful amazing shot of happiness I expected to have when I saw it for the first time since going through my mental crash and burn in July just wasn’t there.
Instead, when I got to the beach, I broke down and cried. I couldn’t feel anything. It was like all joy had left my body. I stared at the beautiful blue water that would fill my heart with so much warmth and love, and nothing. Just emptiness. After months on end of feeling empty, of doing everything I could to heal, my hope I had reserved for seeing the beach I so loved didn’t come true for me.
It was then that I realized my recovery would take a really long time.
I was putting so much pressure and expectation on myself to recover quicker and faster. I was straining to feel normal again. But I wasn’t taking into account that it had taken me 10 years of neglecting my health to get to this place. It was going to take me more than 5 months to get me out. And so I cried. Because in that moment, my hopes of feeling something felt years away.
It broke my heart. Frustration poured out of me that day.
My anxiety makes me feel unsafe…
…like I’m always walking on uneven ground that can fall away at moments notice. I must always be aware and alert and prepared so I can make it to the other side. While my depression slows down my thinking to where any thought is too difficult, my anxiety strains to think through a thousand things at once, reaching conclusions at lightning speeds that I can’t fully follow. My body is already reacting before I can catch up.
My anxious brain tells me I must always do something because I’m falling behind, even though I’m not.
I have to make more money to be safe, even though I have enough. I need to achieve more, and do better, and push harder, even though no one is asking anything of me. It manifests through my perfectionism, my productive mentality, and my achievement-based self-worth.
If I don’t produce, if I don’t move forward, then I drown and die—turning me into a shark who must always keep swimming to simply stay alive.
My anxiety feels like life or death (even if I don’t consciously recognize it)
This may sound ridiculous, and to an extent, it is. But something about clinical anxiety that I didn’t realize before my psychiatrist explained it to me is that every thought, worry, and concern that crosses my brain gets immediately and thoroughly extrapolated in a scenario in which the only end result is one of life or death.
Worried about what I need to do today? The end of the chain of possible events is a life or death situation.
And that’s why everything is so acute and so severe and so serious to me. And that’s why I experience the panic attacks, anxiety attacks, irritation, and frustration that I do. My anxiety is trying to save me the thousands of landmines that my brain is convinced is there but it can’t see.
One tiny misstep is unacceptable.
And so I stood on that beach, straining to keep walking, to feel, to enjoy, to experience progress, to know that I’m improving so I can do things.
My heart was beating fast because being able to do things means that I can start achieving again and continuously moving forward again. My mind was trying to race in a thousand directions inspecting every inch of how I felt. And yet I felt nothing. I felt empty and muddled. The thousand thoughts running through my mind were slowed and stuck as if in mud. My brain clouded and started to feel heavy and painful. I couldn’t hear the waves, I didn’t even see the water beside me. Everything started to shut down with the dichotomy happening in my brain and all I could do was focus on my feet.
It’s a horrible feeling being aware of your mind shutting down like that.
You know its happening, but there is nothing you can do to stop it.
Well, the one thing you can do is rest. But, I can’t seem to do that. Any time my depression looses its grip and I feel a little bit better, my anxiety takes that energy and tries to stretch it as far as it can go.
“Do this.” “Work on that.” “You’re behind here.” “You forgot that.”
I have nothing to do, and no one to answer to, and yet I somehow have a to-do list that is 20 items long. Why?
I can’t take a break, I don’t know how.
Being a shark is no longer serving me (though I’m not sure it ever did). And so, its time to transform.
I write this to let you know that I don’t have everything all figured out. I’m not thriving, I’m healing. It’s hard, ugly, heartbreaking, and raw. Most of the time I feel it makes no sense, and yet I constantly strain for answers.
How do I strike the balance between just giving up and keep working on myself?
So.
Breaks are important, and necessary, and if we don’t take them, sometimes they will come to us by force. All all of that is true. But, that doesn’t make it easy.
With Love,
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