A Friday night after a long week, I was at our variety show banquet which I'd been looking forward to since the show had closed nearly two weeks earlier. That year, after spending a winter isolating myself from people in general, I had finally found friends in this group, many of whom had been around for all three years that I'd been in the show, but it took until this year for them to turn from acquaintances and castmates into friends (going from 2 to 22 Facebook official friendships). When the show closed after its one-weekend run, my social interaction level fell off a cliff, and I was on the struggle bus trying to deal. Banquet night was supposed to be a time to reconnect with many of them. But then I got there early and didn't want to grab a table all by myself, then as people I knew trickled in, all of their tables seemed suddenly full, and I didn't know where there was room for me but was too afraid to ask for fear of imposing or being rejected, and on top of it all, after showing up in a nicer but casual outfit involving denim capris the year before and feeling severely underdressed compared to everyone else, I showed up in a casual dress and leggings to discover that this year most people were in jeans and felt incredibly overdressed, and just as I had started feeling like I fit in, I suddenly felt like I ceased to belong. (And in that crazy-long, run-on sentence, welcome to my brain on a panic attack).
In the bigger picture, that panic attack was really the result of a spiral that had started the previous Monday with a day that had been, by all rational standards, a pretty fantastic day outside of being plagued by physical anxiety symptoms for literally no darn reason. When physical anxiety symptoms stick around for too long, anxiety brain likes to find reasons for its existence. By the end of the day on Monday, then, the questions started swimming in my head: What had I done during the day's professional development sessions to make a fool of myself in front of my colleagues (especially as I try to get rehired in the district, hopefully for something much closer to full time than I am now)? Had I said too many negative or idiotic things out at dinner with recent acquaintances-turned-friends that would make them reconsider wanting to spend time with me again? Was there something I'd done wrong at the volunteer event I'd worked at that evening that would somehow destroy any of the work that we'd gotten done? The questions running through my head started coloring all my memories from the day with doubt and insecurity.
I'd tried to spend that day ignoring all of my physical anxiety symptoms, tried to enjoy all the great moments that had happened, tried to convince myself that I was fine even though I didn't feel that way. I'd spent my whole day attempting to cling to the positive - but I wasn't doing it for myself. I was doing it because it's what I felt was expected of me. More than I was trying to help myself be okay, I was trying to convince everyone around me that I was okay.
After many years of hard work, I've finally managed to convince myself that I'm still valuable and lovable even as a person who struggles with an anxiety disorder (which, when it gets bad, also leads to stretches of depression) - but somewhere along the line I also developed the belief that I'm only worthy of that value and love if I'm successfully managing my anxiety disorder. If I'm falling apart? If I can't manage to pull my life together no matter how hard I try? If no matter what I do, the anxiety gets worse to a point where I give up trying to get better? I'm worthless. I'm unlovable. I should expect to be abandoned and shunned.
Because I'm pretty open about my anxiety (except at work), I like to think that I've put away most of my masks of perfection. But when it gets bad, I start to put new masks on - not ones of perfection, but ones of successfully managing my mental health disorders. I'd been doing it all winter. I put on the mask of stress management in the face of ever-increasing stressors and anxiety-triggers at home and at work when I felt overwhelmed to a point of drowning. I put on the mask of cautious optimism in the face of yet another year of job insecurity when internally I was convinced that I was a failure of a teacher who wouldn't ever get hired again. I put on the mask of attempting to be a functional human being when really I was cutting out all non-essential pieces of my hygiene routine, eating junk or nothing at all, and not getting my dog outside beyond the small front lawn to do his business. I put on the mask of a faith still standing when panic attacks had kept me out of church for months and ignoring God's existence half the time because it was too painful to acknowledge Him in my life when it still brought me no hope, no comfort.
That fantastic-but-anxious Monday that had started my week? I'd had a chance during an afternoon professional development session to reconnect with an instructor I had for the one graduate-level course I took a couple of years ago who's very aware of my anxiety struggles. Before her presentation, she asked how I was doing, and I talked about liking my job and wanting to start working toward my Master's Degree in her specialty area as soon as life's timing allows. After her presentation, she more pointedly asked how I was doing with my health and if I was taking care of myself; I admitted some of the struggles but tried to put a positive spin on it. I didn't to disappoint her by sharing just how bad this winter was and how much I've really struggled to take care of myself through it all and how after a couple of weeks of successfully managing my anxiety, at that moment in time I was at a jumping-out-of-my-skin level of anxiety. Later that evening out at dinner with friends from the show, one of them turned to me to ask a little about my anxiety struggles, and after I shared a little bit, she followed up with the question "But you're turning a corner now, right?" I attempted to answer with something positive because I was afraid to disappoint her and the rest of the group by sharing that I was having a crappy anxiety day. The full truth was that I'd felt really great during show week and the week that followed, but at that moment, that evening, anxiety brain was fighting to take over. While rational brain was saying "I'm so happy to be here with this group of people," anxiety brain was screaming "I hope I don't do anything stupid that will make these people never want to hang out with me again." So I put on the "I have an anxiety disorder but I can totally handle managing it" mask.
"Being aware of your crap and actually overcoming your crap are two very different things." ~ Christina Yang, Grey's Anatomy (Season 4, Episode 6)I spent most of Monday telling myself I was thinking positively and optimistically about the anxiety struggles of the day. That night when I got home, felt like isolating myself, and started crying the moment I made it to my room, I realized that all my positivity was driven less by a desire to be healthy and more by a desire to not let other people down. Anxiety had run my day, and I had let it.
I spent the rest of the week trying to strike a balance between being real about how I was struggling and trying to find the bright side. Because maybe finding a bright side would eventually be more about trying to be healthy instead of trying to live up to other people's expectations for me. But I wasn't going to let anxiety run my life either, and that meant forcing myself to start taking off the masks and risk letting people see all of me in the rough moments and days the same way I did on the good ones.
The Facebook responses from my new show friends through the week were positive and supportive, but dealing with the face-to-face possibilities at Friday's banquet helped to push me over the edge, and I had a panic attack at a time that I really didn't want to have one. The good news is, this story has an actual bright side. Once I'd made it past the big panic attack and at least made my way out of the bathroom stall to where the sinks were, one of those new friends happened to walk into the bathroom, expressed a calm, helpful, non-suffocating amount of concern, and when I shared that one of the things that had set me off (and was keeping me in the bathroom) was the fear of finding a place to sit at one of the tables, she offered to help me out with that. A couple of minutes later, I talked myself into finally leaving my bathroom hiding spot and wound up at a spot next to her at a table full of people that I generally have a pretty strong comfort level with, and the night got better. The night was still a rollercoaster of emotions with no rhyme or reason, where I'd slip between feeling great and having fun to holding back tears in an instant for no real reason. But the night felt good overall by the end. I didn't leave. I didn't have another panic attack. I didn't burst into tears in front of people. And, after my anxiety dipping to panic attack levels, I was supported and not abandoned.
So I'll add the memory of this night to the others I've built over the past few weeks. One more reason to take off the masks. One more reason to believe more in myself and less in what anxiety brain tells me. One more weapon in the battle to believe that the bright sides of the bad days are real and lasting and worth holding on to.
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