When My Experience With Anxiety Changes Day to Day
I’ve been asked so many times, by therapists, parents, friends, and others to explain my anxiety as well as other mental illnesses so they can better understand what I’m going through. I always get frustrated and irritated, stumbling over words that never seem to fit. The problem for me is that my anxiety, as well as my other mental illnesses, are not static. The feelings and presentations of the illnesses seem to change. Not just change in response to different seasons of life, but even just day to day.
My experience of anxiety is fluid, changing and morphing based off an unknown variety of factors both in and out of my control. Describing something so mercurial and inconstant as my anxiety seems so difficult and pointless that I often just refuse entirely. Refusing isn’t helpful and only perpetuates the habit of silence surrounding my experience I am trying so desperately to break.
Tonight it feels like ants crawling over my entire body. Little light, crawling sensations making me check every inch of my body because I am convinced there has to be something there. I feel itchy and tingly, and I can’t sit still. Sitting seems like an insurmountable task. I can’t stop itching the back of my neck. I feel increasingly desperate for a shower to scrub this feeling off me.
I search desperately to find a position in which my arms can sit and feel comfortable. Arms crossed right over left — nope. Left over right? Nope. Left hand over stomach at approximately 90 degrees, right arm diagonally down towards my hip – no, try again. I go through the same 15 or so different variations to similar success. I repeat the process for what feels like hours.
Tonight my brain isn’t moving at the speed of light; well, not constantly. Hyperactivity in terms of thought creation and processing isn’t always the case with my anxiety. Tonight it’s a cycle of five or so minutes that feel like 10 million thoughts a minute, and then at least one minute of just… blankness. I’ll be in the middle of trying desperately to function and complete a task. I stop mid-sentence, unsure of where it was going. I forget the word for satellite or roundabout or fork; my own name looks wrong scrawled on the sticky note in front of me. Then it’s back to scrambling through endless incomplete thoughts and tangents — too quick to finish or process any individual one thing.
I am shaky, and I am sure something is wrong with my heartbeat. I’ve had at least four ECGs a year because of check-ups or weird reactions to medications. I’ve had an “outlier” ECG that said I had an irregular heartbeat. Further tests found nothing, so it was dismissed. But tonight? Right now that’s doctors dismissing it when I could really have it. I’ve had three hip surgeries and been diagnosed with FAI (femoral acetabular impingement), five total labral tears and chronic pain — but that was after four years of doctors and specialists telling me I was fine and telling me to stop lying for attention. So what if this is something, too? What if they just didn’t do the right tests or don’t know all the symptoms for a disease?
It’s escalated to a full panic attack.
I’m in my closet, crying, hyperventilating, choking on air as I’m desperate to breathe — convinced my heart keeps stopping.
Tomorrow the anxiety may look different, but it will still be with me.
I may always have anxiety, but that doesn’t mean it will always control me.
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Kylee lives in Seattle and is a true Pacific Northwest girl at heart; she is a digital marketing specialist at a marketing agency and in her free time enjoys hiking, running and exploring the plentiful local coffee shops around the city. She challenges herself to remain incredibly active despite her diagnosis of chronic pain and Femoral Acetabular Impingement. Her writing also encompasses her mental health struggles with an eating disorder, anxiety, and depression.
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