My Journey With Anxiety

This feels like a Jay-Z, “allow me to reintroduce myself” kind of moment. I realized that while I have built a career around talking about mental health, I don’t regularly check-in about how my own journey with anxiety is going.

If you’re new around here, I have been going to therapy since the end of 2013 and it was there that I realized that a lot of the “feelings” I had (and have had since I was a child) were actually anxiety. While my depression has only been triggered during bigger, more transitional periods in my life, my anxiety is in my day-to-day life in a more intimate way.

But, even so, it has changed. When I first started getting help for it, “it” was a lot. It was an elephant on my chest, alphabet soup in my brain, and an inescapable need to do things quickly because I couldn’t see myself having a long life. My time in therapy helped dismantle all those monsters one by one. It didn’t eradicate them, but therapy did help make them bite size enough for me to handle them without feeling overwhelmed. I later learned that even though those monsters were real, huge, and scary, they were only projects of things that were more subtle, deeply rooted, and in some cases so small or seemingly uneventful that I wouldn’t have pinpointed them without help.

For instance, my biggest “breakthrough” in therapy actually only just happened about a month ago, even though I’ve been in therapy for almost a decade. In an episode of my podcast, Happy To Be Here, Carly Riordan and I talk about this in depth — how even when you’re consciously working on your mental health, it’s like pealing an onion that has more layers than you could have imagined.

Most recently I realized that the work I’d been doing in therapy wasn’t fully manifesting in my real life. I wasn’t as emotionally close to those I love, as I could be. I was self-protecting because I still hadn’t fully found peace with (or let go of) some of the survival mechanisms that helped me as a child but that no longer served me as an adult. I’ve felt broken open in the last month or so, if I’m honest. It’s been good though because it’s forced me to sit still, look at myself and others in the eyes, and notice how I was either abandoning myself or isolating myself for the sake of keeping the peace. (Something I learned to do as a kid.)

I think that’s what my journey with anxiety has taught me the most — that we all have journeys we’re living through and maybe working to undo.

I didn’t aim to be a wellness advocate when I first started my career, the internet just felt like the only place to say words like “Anxiety” and “Mental Health” out loud. Now though, I see how power and understanding can be born from simply sharing my story or hearing others share theirs.

I don’t think everyone’s journey with their mental health is rooted in my same formula for care (therapy, self-care habits, learning through books), but I do think it requires a lot more effort than we were ever taught in school. The same way that we keep our heart healthy by moving our bodies for a minimum of 30 minutes each day, we should consider what “moving” our minds for 30 minutes each day can lead to.

My journey with anxiety hasn’t been linear, but it has progressed in positive directions (even when I felt like I was taking steps back).

Here’s what it more or less looks like now:

I know it can read as “damn, she’s still struggling, what’s the point of therapy if she isn’t ‘cured’?!” And while it’s not my business to convince anyone of the benefits of looking anxiety in the eye and finding ways to cope with what’s in front of you, I can tell you that being cured stopped being my goal really early on in my treatment. I think I will always be more anxious than your average bear (as one of my good friends tells me) and I can accept that while also knowing that the degree of anxiety doesn’t have to always burn white hot. My mental health routine has lessened the intensity of my anxiety, has almost fully eradicated my anxiety attacks, and all because I’m able to spot red flags before they get to extremes thanks to having a therapist who opens my eyes and mental health routines that I now know I can depend on whenever the days pop up.

I’m hardheaded, stubborn, and prone to believing that I need to do everything alone, so it has taken me maybe longer than it would take an average bear, but I’m proud I’ve been motivated to see at all.