You get up and go downstairs to the kitchen for a glass of cold water except you miscalculate
the amount of steps there are, your foot falls in the air and for a split second the floor seems to
move away from you. You're left suspended in limbo with a frenzied heart until you regain your balance once again. For some people, this moment never leaves them.
It stays festering in their chest cavity for years.
This common feeling that is most associated with jump scares and reclining too far in your chair is anxiety. My first experience with the frazzled-hair phenomenon happened when I was ten years old and I was in the backseat of my father's Toyota excited that we were going downtown to eat pancakes. Suddenly, my hands started shaking. My eyes started to shift, blurry from all sides. My heart began doing that thing I so often thought someone with a heart attack would experience. Clammy forehead and shallow lungs. I was nothing but feeling and nerves, nothing but the way my body felt like an entire entity detached from the mind that seemed to have such difficulty controlling it. And then I thought, perhaps this was death. Maybe this was the end of the line for me. Ten years isn't so bad, that's more than a bird's lifespan and the middle age for a dog. But despite this reassurance, I didn't want to die. The very idea of my body going cold, my thoughts going idle left me opening the door and falling to the floor, crawling, crying that this was not how it was supposed to go. My parents immediately rushed me to the hospital but by the time we got there, my heart had settled down and everything felt like a really bad nightmare or a nasty food reaction of some kind. The doctor didn't know how to explain it and after running a couple tests to rule out asthma he sent us on our way without even a pamphlet on seeing a mental health professional or any clue as to what that episode could have been about.
This would not be the last time that it ever occurred either. In fact, after I realized that I could feel that way, I began fearing that fear and it started occurring more frequently. Every night the same thing would happen over and over again. My chest would tighten and disturbing images would run through my mind until I relapsed into that same episode once more. At first, it would only happen at night but then it started happening everywhere: in the grocery store, at my Aunt's house, during school, while I was eating dinner. My parents weren't believers of psychologists and in fact during all those years they always summed it up to me being a sensitive child instead of finding the actual root of the problem that perhaps I did have a mental disorder that needed to be addressed. That maybe I needed to seek help from someone that knew about these things and that didn't make me crazy. But coming from a Hispanic family, it was usually frowned upon and even disbelieved that anyone needed therapy. It was only something that rich upper middle class white people did because they had the money, the time, and the naivete that talking about your problems would work when the clear solution was to simply ignore or will them away by some sheer force. I believed it was mainly a cultural thing along with blatant ignorance but most importantly it was the misconstrued fear of feeling like they had failed at being parents so instead of tackling that issue it was much easier to let it go, slide it under the rug, to chuck it up to a pipe leakage or a thing that I would eventually grow out of.
And that's the problem that I see with a lot of people that have severe mental disorders later on in life is that they never got the deserved attention for a lot of their problems when they were manageable so instead they're exacerbated until it's too difficult to deal with.
A lot of families think that they're doing a service for not taking their kids to therapy because of all the psychotropic drugs that psychiatrists tend to dish out, which leads to a codependency and permanent brain changes that sometimes weren't desired. However, it only makes things worse.
Instead of being evaluated, given a clear diagnosis, tools and techniques on how to combat whatever you're struggling with you're simply left in the dark. Furthermore, you're left alone which leads you to develop unhealthy coping mechanisms that can sometimes be impossible to break later on in life when it could have been avoided in the first place.
That's the thing, whenever we think of mental disorders we immediately conjure up all kinds of false ideas that you're insane, someone unhinged and erratic. We don't think of it like any other disability, much less treat it like one. Our initial reaction is that they're exaggerating, or it's just an attention seeking tactic.
Personally, it didn't become better for me, it became much more worse and there was this internal pain for not being able to feel normal because that was the thing, I knew it wasn't normal.
I felt ostracized both from my peers, my family, and myself. In addition, it led to the creation of other mental disorders I didn't know I was susceptible to. It wasn't until I had a complete nervous breakdown and talked about ending my life that my parents deemed it necessary to talk to someone.
It was difficult seeing their saddened expression and it was even harder talking about issues that I had suppressed and even denied to myself for years. And before it got better it got a lot worse.
But the first step of seeking help and talking was exhilarating. It was liberating in a way.
My first session, I recall not being able to articulate anything that I had felt. I had kept so many things bottled up that being asked to speak freely about them now was almost counter-intuitive. My words fell, stuttered and stumbled. Eventually around the 5th session, I bought in a poem that i recited and then my entire facade washed away. I was crying and I didn't know exactly about what.
For so long all I wanted was for someone to understand, to tell me what I was doing wrong so I could do it right. Eventually, I started talking more and the more I spoke the easier it got.
My therapist was very understanding, she listened but she also asked questions, especially the important ones.
I was put on medication, starting in small doses to see how I would react to them. That, coupled with the therapy sessions I finally started feeling some semblance of normalcy. From the sessions, my therapist concluded that as a child I suffered from a panic disorder but as I grew older it manifested itself into OCD along with Bipolar disorder. To finally have my feelings attributed to something that I could wrap my mind around is something I can't describe. It was like almost knowing the answer to the riddle but never quite getting it past the tip of your tongue.
In short, I wanted to talk about this because I think there's a stigma to mental illness most of the time that a lot of people don't seem to address. We're intimidated by the idea that there can be something wrong with our brains and it doesn't necessarily have to be just an uncontrollable person in the streets talking to themselves. It can happen to anyone and that just because you have a certain disorder doesn't mean that you can't be helped or fixed. It might not ever go away, but it doesn't have to be a crippling, palatalization of your life. You can get better.
I think it' very important to be aware of these things and not try to hide or be of the mindset "that it'll never happen to me or anyone around me so why should I care". Stop the obtuse thinking. It's necessary to be knowledgeable on the subject and to provide access to people that may struggle with a disorder and get them the help that they need. Starting specifically at a young age to prevent pain or further damage.
As always, thank you for reading
Sincerely,
your sincere narrator
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