High Anxiety

When I set out to start writing this blog, I wanted to talk about my experience as a flight attendant.  I wanted to recant hilarious memories of questionable passenger behavior; the type that is hardly dangerous, but good for a belly laugh.  As I write this entry from seat 10A on a flight to Newark, my attention is divided between a passenger struggling to open the overhead bin a few rows ahead and the person directly in front of me ogling at the complicated mechanism that is the window shade.   It’s fascinating, isn’t it, that the window shade only moves in two directions (that’s up and down for those of you who are mechanically disadvantaged).  I’ve not flown much in the past few months (only a few flights) because I’ve been wrapped up in some other projects within the airline, so I don’t have many stories to share.  And then, when I witness the miracle of the man figuring out that the window shade will actually go all the way down, I realize the ultimate paradox of my job: I've missed it so much and yet not at all.

In lieu of telling tales about others, I shared a few slam poems I’d written and I wrote candidly about my experience with antidepressant withdrawal.  I thought nothing of it so I was quite surprised when e-mails and private messages started arriving to my Inbox that said it was “brave” and “ballsy” to openly discuss behavioral health conditions like depression and anxiety on the Internet.  Surely, one wouldn’t do that – such a topic is far too taboo to be discussed like it’s the common cold.

I wrote how beautiful it was to feel real, raw emotion and how that would, in some way, be my ticket to happiness in a life free from pills.  In a recent, unexpected twist of fate, I relapsed into my condition after less than a year without medication and quickly relearned that just because what you’re feeling is real, doesn’t mean it’s tolerable. I had forgotten how powerfully somatic anxiety and depression can be and the reminder came like a train blasting full steam ahead through the glass walls I’d built around myself to stay safe.

When an invisible devil has his hands gripped around your neck; when your body jolts awake at 2:00am in a cold sweat and feel like you can’t breathe; when the entire world constantly looks like it’s tilting to one side… you realize quickly that something is wrong.  When you wake up and instantly dread the day; when insomnia robs you of your dreams; when it feels like electricity is pulsing through your veins instead of blood; when an unending sea of nostalgic memories about what your life was like before your brain broke floods your conscious mind… you have no choice but to get over the stigma society has created for your condition and get help.  There is no other alternative if you believe that life is worth fighting for.  And life is always worth fighting for.

This is not a call for help or a cry for attention – it’s just an introduction to what will become a very honest x-ray look into what has become my emotional baggage.  I lucked out and got depression and anxiety in my genes, but at least my baggage is a match set.  If there is one thing I know for certain, it’s that living with a depressed and anxious mind can be the loneliest experience a person may ever know.  If this helps just one person to know they aren’t alone, then writing this down will have been worth every second spent.  And if this helps nobody, at least it will have been cathartic for me to take the words out of my head and plant them in permanent marker to a world that knows this condition is real, but just doesn’t want to talk about it.

Sorry, world, but I'm going to talk about it.