It's been over three years since I've written anything in this blog. At the time, I was suffering from anxiety and panic, but I didn't know back then how to name those things or what they were. I didn't understand how to relate to my own fears. It was as if one day I woke up in a cloud and all these somatic sensations just fell on me. It was a mystery, bad luck. The animal part of me became religious in its own way, the cognitive part knew better.
I was in graduate school for a subject that wasn't right for me, that I wasn't obsessed with nearly enough to make it out alive of with a PhD. I was living with a manchild who dreamt of fame and adulation but who didn't know how to fry an egg. I also thought I was made of stone. When I was little, my grandpa used to tell me stories about the war. I was constantly looking over my own shoulder whenever I went outside; "There could be a drunk, or someone on drugs running a red light, so it's still important to be vigilant even when you have right of way", my grandpa would repeat as we crossed the street. And so, the difference between possibility and probability were lost on me. I got used to carrying around other people's anxieties like a container.
It sounds dramatic and silly (and it is both of those things), but in summer of 2009, I thought I was dying. I surrounded myself with Pepto Bismol and cough syrup as I went to my mother's house to die. My cat of sixteen years was also preparing to meet the reaper, and we both languished away in the July heat (though he had the advantage of fitting into a cupboard). My mother stood disapprovingly over me, accused me of treating symptoms with conventional medicine and offered Chinese herbs. My friend and academic mentor from my undergrad days suggested that he knew a social worker who had helped him greatly when someone he knew threw themself off a cliff. The psyche is mysterious that way--on the one hand, you understand that the problem is emotional, that you aren't sick with the common cold and that cough syrup is irrelevant but, on the other, you can't name it and it seems somatic. You have some kind of tenuous semi-understanding shrouded in gauze. And then again, maybe it's that you can't understand the things that you should instead be feeling.
It's interesting how a person's defenses are also their strengths. In the sweltering heat, as I made my way to see the social worker, I stopped by a concert dome to listen to jazz music. I couldn't enjoy it, my entire body was squirming in a desire to run away from everything I had loved before, and the best I could muster was some kind of conditional enjoyment, i.e. "If I didn't feel the way I do right now, I'm sure this is the kind of music I would really enjoy." But I stayed anyway out of stubbornness, to prove to myself that even if I feel awful, that I wouldn't functionally give up on life. And ironically, all of the war stories and warnings about drugged criminal zombies following children up the street were, in one sense, like getting a suffering vaccine in childhood. While it had its disadvantages, it also inured me to high levels of frustration and gave me a high tolerance for unpleasant situations.
My experience with the social worker, I see now, is what later pushed me to pursue mental health professionally. So many people have negative experiences with the mental health field, that my experience is by no means unique. What makes me feel worse about the whole thing is that this particular worker really did care and had the best of intentions, and you could see in her disposition that she loved her work. Unfortunately, I felt scared by where she was at, relative to where I was at regarding my sensations. And she missed that. She spoke matter-of-factly about anxiety and gave me a workbook that was a mixture of Pavlov and zen. I was ready to take anything and to drown in it like a mantra, but to my surprise, the book terrified me. The first thing the workbook said was that one should throw out the desire to get rid of the anxiety. This might not even be possible, it said. Instead, the workbook would teach you to live with your anxiety and stop fighting it. It's a noble aim, but at the time, it scared me. I lived in a world where it felt as though a part of me had died, like I'd lost something I was no longer entitled to. We never addressed that fear. She never knew where I was at, and she never investigated to find out my perspective toward my symptoms. "I forced myself to go to a fundraiser", I told her at our second meeting. It was unpleasant, I explained, and the entire time I lamented the loss of self, a feeling of deep loss that had haunted me for the past half year. "Yes", she nodded approvingly, "it's always better to be functional than not to be".
She worked in a specific way; she tried to train me to do the right thing. It didn't matter what my feelings were. When I told her that anxiety gives me dry mouth, she took out some candy and offered it to me. We stomped our feet and did breathing exercises to physically decrease the anxiety. But when I lied in bed at night over-focusing on my breathing convinced that I am dying, there was no motivation to do breathing exercises. In typical fashion, she also referred me to a psychiatrist "just in case". "I mean, if you think you're dying and losing your mind, it's important to go just in case", she said, scaring me further. Sometimes, she tried to be reassuring, which scared me even more. "It doesn't seem like you have a thought disorder", she told me. "What's that?", I asked; she explained that, some of the people she sees, think that people are after them and can provide elaborate reasons for it. I, on the other hand, realize that my anxiety is irrational and have a robust sense of reality. I immediately remembered Chekhov's "Ward no. 6" and the terrifying emptiness in the life of one of the characters who had mania of persecution, how badly he wanted to live, and I wanted to say that, despite not having a thought disorder, I really related to him in that moment.
The psychiatrist drew a picture of serotonin receptors sending messages to one another. "This is how [name of drug] works", he explained. I wanted to tell him that what he drew looks like a penis, but decided not to. He had a different way of looking at symptoms than the social worker; while the social worker wasn't interested in explaining symptoms, only in changing behaviors, the psychiatrist said, "When you go outside, there are stimuli there that are overwhelming your brain." It sounded like something outside of my control, and it made me feel powerless. Maybe I did have a strange disease, after all. Somehow, there, in his proud little doodle, was the embodiment of all my fears. I used the prescription he gave me as a bookmark in the anxiety workbook the worker had given me earlier that I had stashed away in a deep drawer, and never called either of them again. I remember he had called me while I was on the checkout line at a food store, and remember resolving that I will do this on my own, without their help, and I swore in that moment as I clutched the basket, that I refuse to give up on life.
A few years later, after I indeed did learn to live with anxiety (though not by the means the worker and psychiatrist were suggesting) and the anxiety became a flutter in the background of my life, and after I entered the mental health field to make sure no individual is ever misunderstood again, one of my clients during my first internship asked me how it is that she--or anyone--could break the cycle that ensues when something outside the person gets inside, so to speak. In her own words, she was asking how now, at seventy years old, she could give to herself what she felt her parents had never given her. She said it felt like a vicious loop--much in the same way as not being able to generate physical energy for sustenance without external fuel, so too, with emotional sustenance. I didn't know what to answer her. I still don't know the full answer. And as I continue speaking to real people, I hope to find out. One thing I am clear about so far, though, is that there is no one approach that works single-handedly for all people, and when practitioners align themselves with a theoretical camp this way, they are guaranteeing that they will misunderstand many of the people they are trying to help.
I'm not going to delete the below posts that I wrote while struggling with anxiety and feeling of panic. Although I find it hard to understand the writing now (it feels like another person wrote it), I don't want to forget what it felt like. People deal with their symptoms in their own way and, at the time, I dealt with mine by intellectualizing/rationalizing. One thing I didn't know back then is that what seemed like an existential puzzle about time, suffering and life, couldn't be cracked through cognitive channels. It is rare to solve problems in the same channel as the one in which they are framed.
In later posts, I hope to outline how my anxiety became a flutter in the background of my life--in case someone reading this relates to it in some way. I used to peruse online forums to see if someone felt the same things, and it was helpful to me.
I was in graduate school for a subject that wasn't right for me, that I wasn't obsessed with nearly enough to make it out alive of with a PhD. I was living with a manchild who dreamt of fame and adulation but who didn't know how to fry an egg. I also thought I was made of stone. When I was little, my grandpa used to tell me stories about the war. I was constantly looking over my own shoulder whenever I went outside; "There could be a drunk, or someone on drugs running a red light, so it's still important to be vigilant even when you have right of way", my grandpa would repeat as we crossed the street. And so, the difference between possibility and probability were lost on me. I got used to carrying around other people's anxieties like a container.
It sounds dramatic and silly (and it is both of those things), but in summer of 2009, I thought I was dying. I surrounded myself with Pepto Bismol and cough syrup as I went to my mother's house to die. My cat of sixteen years was also preparing to meet the reaper, and we both languished away in the July heat (though he had the advantage of fitting into a cupboard). My mother stood disapprovingly over me, accused me of treating symptoms with conventional medicine and offered Chinese herbs. My friend and academic mentor from my undergrad days suggested that he knew a social worker who had helped him greatly when someone he knew threw themself off a cliff. The psyche is mysterious that way--on the one hand, you understand that the problem is emotional, that you aren't sick with the common cold and that cough syrup is irrelevant but, on the other, you can't name it and it seems somatic. You have some kind of tenuous semi-understanding shrouded in gauze. And then again, maybe it's that you can't understand the things that you should instead be feeling.
It's interesting how a person's defenses are also their strengths. In the sweltering heat, as I made my way to see the social worker, I stopped by a concert dome to listen to jazz music. I couldn't enjoy it, my entire body was squirming in a desire to run away from everything I had loved before, and the best I could muster was some kind of conditional enjoyment, i.e. "If I didn't feel the way I do right now, I'm sure this is the kind of music I would really enjoy." But I stayed anyway out of stubbornness, to prove to myself that even if I feel awful, that I wouldn't functionally give up on life. And ironically, all of the war stories and warnings about drugged criminal zombies following children up the street were, in one sense, like getting a suffering vaccine in childhood. While it had its disadvantages, it also inured me to high levels of frustration and gave me a high tolerance for unpleasant situations.
My experience with the social worker, I see now, is what later pushed me to pursue mental health professionally. So many people have negative experiences with the mental health field, that my experience is by no means unique. What makes me feel worse about the whole thing is that this particular worker really did care and had the best of intentions, and you could see in her disposition that she loved her work. Unfortunately, I felt scared by where she was at, relative to where I was at regarding my sensations. And she missed that. She spoke matter-of-factly about anxiety and gave me a workbook that was a mixture of Pavlov and zen. I was ready to take anything and to drown in it like a mantra, but to my surprise, the book terrified me. The first thing the workbook said was that one should throw out the desire to get rid of the anxiety. This might not even be possible, it said. Instead, the workbook would teach you to live with your anxiety and stop fighting it. It's a noble aim, but at the time, it scared me. I lived in a world where it felt as though a part of me had died, like I'd lost something I was no longer entitled to. We never addressed that fear. She never knew where I was at, and she never investigated to find out my perspective toward my symptoms. "I forced myself to go to a fundraiser", I told her at our second meeting. It was unpleasant, I explained, and the entire time I lamented the loss of self, a feeling of deep loss that had haunted me for the past half year. "Yes", she nodded approvingly, "it's always better to be functional than not to be".
She worked in a specific way; she tried to train me to do the right thing. It didn't matter what my feelings were. When I told her that anxiety gives me dry mouth, she took out some candy and offered it to me. We stomped our feet and did breathing exercises to physically decrease the anxiety. But when I lied in bed at night over-focusing on my breathing convinced that I am dying, there was no motivation to do breathing exercises. In typical fashion, she also referred me to a psychiatrist "just in case". "I mean, if you think you're dying and losing your mind, it's important to go just in case", she said, scaring me further. Sometimes, she tried to be reassuring, which scared me even more. "It doesn't seem like you have a thought disorder", she told me. "What's that?", I asked; she explained that, some of the people she sees, think that people are after them and can provide elaborate reasons for it. I, on the other hand, realize that my anxiety is irrational and have a robust sense of reality. I immediately remembered Chekhov's "Ward no. 6" and the terrifying emptiness in the life of one of the characters who had mania of persecution, how badly he wanted to live, and I wanted to say that, despite not having a thought disorder, I really related to him in that moment.
The psychiatrist drew a picture of serotonin receptors sending messages to one another. "This is how [name of drug] works", he explained. I wanted to tell him that what he drew looks like a penis, but decided not to. He had a different way of looking at symptoms than the social worker; while the social worker wasn't interested in explaining symptoms, only in changing behaviors, the psychiatrist said, "When you go outside, there are stimuli there that are overwhelming your brain." It sounded like something outside of my control, and it made me feel powerless. Maybe I did have a strange disease, after all. Somehow, there, in his proud little doodle, was the embodiment of all my fears. I used the prescription he gave me as a bookmark in the anxiety workbook the worker had given me earlier that I had stashed away in a deep drawer, and never called either of them again. I remember he had called me while I was on the checkout line at a food store, and remember resolving that I will do this on my own, without their help, and I swore in that moment as I clutched the basket, that I refuse to give up on life.
A few years later, after I indeed did learn to live with anxiety (though not by the means the worker and psychiatrist were suggesting) and the anxiety became a flutter in the background of my life, and after I entered the mental health field to make sure no individual is ever misunderstood again, one of my clients during my first internship asked me how it is that she--or anyone--could break the cycle that ensues when something outside the person gets inside, so to speak. In her own words, she was asking how now, at seventy years old, she could give to herself what she felt her parents had never given her. She said it felt like a vicious loop--much in the same way as not being able to generate physical energy for sustenance without external fuel, so too, with emotional sustenance. I didn't know what to answer her. I still don't know the full answer. And as I continue speaking to real people, I hope to find out. One thing I am clear about so far, though, is that there is no one approach that works single-handedly for all people, and when practitioners align themselves with a theoretical camp this way, they are guaranteeing that they will misunderstand many of the people they are trying to help.
I'm not going to delete the below posts that I wrote while struggling with anxiety and feeling of panic. Although I find it hard to understand the writing now (it feels like another person wrote it), I don't want to forget what it felt like. People deal with their symptoms in their own way and, at the time, I dealt with mine by intellectualizing/rationalizing. One thing I didn't know back then is that what seemed like an existential puzzle about time, suffering and life, couldn't be cracked through cognitive channels. It is rare to solve problems in the same channel as the one in which they are framed.
In later posts, I hope to outline how my anxiety became a flutter in the background of my life--in case someone reading this relates to it in some way. I used to peruse online forums to see if someone felt the same things, and it was helpful to me.
