Anxiety is a bitch. A cold-hearted bitch who doesnt care what time of day or night it is, the whispers go on. That little voice in the back of your head, the cold butterflies in your stomach, the nagging fear that no matter what you do, or where you are, it will all go wrong. Its the gerbil on the wheel, the broken record, constantly repeating its take-down message, wearing a groove on the inside of your skull.
Depression is a motherfucker. Depression comes on like a pile of bricks, a smothering blanket. It covers you over and tries to block out all light. Sometimes it succeeds. Sometimes it succeeds for days, weeks....years....
I seem to suffer from both anxiety and depression. I say "seem" because I have never been officially diagnosed but I sure display the outward, and inward, symptoms of both. Suffering is also relative, some days I am...mostly....fine, when there is that spring in my step, I smile at strangers on the street, I am optimistic about my future. Sadly those days are the small exception. Mostly what happens is that I have a constant on-going unfocused anxiety, which manifests itself as "butterflies in the stomach". We all know that feeling. Now imagine its your constant companion. Even on my good days this feeling is with me, right there in the pit of my stomach and will not leave. There have also been too many days that its a struggle to get out of bed, that to get up and face the day with all its attendant possible situations that could potentially visit pain and heartbreak are too much to bear; this is what depression tells me. And then there are the days where I cry, that it all catches up with me, all the anxiety and depression and negative messages I have been carrying around since child-hood, it all comes crashing down on me and I just weep. Lately there has been a lot of crying as it looks like I have accidentally hurt someone very close to me, unintentionally, because of my negligence and lack of paying attention to simple social cues. These situations bring back all the self-loathing labels that my childhood peers so successfully drummed into my head, "I am so stupid. How can I be such an idiot?? I constantly do this. Why dont I learn to stop?!?"
Where does this all begin? What is the initial incident that started this hard road? Who knows and I am not sure I really care. No I take that back, I do care, very much, but I am not here to point fingers and pass blame; maybe I was just born with the bitch and motherfucker on my back, grown right into my spine in the womb. Some of the facts as I understand them are that I was a very happy and laughing kid, but when I started going to school some odd combination of personality and stupid fortune combined to make me the target of my peers taunts and teasing. This truly started in the 3rd grade when I was the new kid in the class and continued up to the 11th grade in High School. It was a situation where I was afraid, constantly, of going to school, that I would be teased until I cried, or beat up, or both. This was my daily life for years, a true crucible for anxiety. The depression component....I have no idea where it started, maybe its the simple culmination of all the negative messages I received growing up gelled into one package of self loathing and non-existent self-esteem.
It oftentimes felt as if I was trapped in a horror film of not my own making, that somehow I was being slapped around by life for something that was not my fault and out of my control to stop. I would spend days agonizing over why my life was in this state, asking the universe at large for answers and not receiving any. There were a few adults who sympathized and offered a bit of guidance, but for the most part I was left to my own devices, feeling abandoned, to fumble through. Growing into a teenager did little to alleviate the situation as all the previous years of negative messaging along with feelings of abandonment and loneliness coupled with the raging hormonal stew that goes along with typical teenagehood manifested itself in me as a boy who was utterly awkward in every environment he found himself in. Thus I spent alot of those years self-medicating with marijuana and alcohol, desperately hoping that I would be accepted as cool by my peers; the drugs seemed to offer a solace and escape that everyday reality was witholding from me.
Somehow I managed to hold it all together to graduate from High School, served 4 years in the military and then went on to receive a BA from a university. Along the way I also started realizing that my attempts at forging relationships with the opposite sex were almost always not working. It seemed that the frequent complaint that was being voiced at me was that I was too intense, too much to take, too grasping. Maybe this was because of the way emotions were expressed at me, oftentimes, from others, in such a negative fashion that I grew up believing that if I expressed love in a intense way it would be reciprocated. This situation caused me endless amounts of pain as all I truly wanted was to be in a healthy loving relationship; it felt like it was the only thing that mattered and being rejected again and again took me right back to grade school where I was, all over again, the little lost boy, trapped in a hell he had no way of controlling or stopping.
And now, 30 years and two divorces later I still feel like I am trapped in a hell I cannot control nor stop. To be honest its not nearly as bad as it was in grade school, one reason being that if anyone treats me the way I was treated back then I would probably stomp the shit out of them. I also walked away from all of that past with a gigantic ball of anger wrapped up around my insides, as I learned that to best defend myself from anyone who might cause me pain was to maintain an almost constant emotional defensive posture, thus I could be prickly and aggressive when meeting new people, a situation almost guaranteed to drive people away thus increasing my isolation and loneliness. I've learned to put aside most of that anger and I believe, and hope, that I have been mostly successful, but old habits truly die hard.
What also dies hard are the internalized and ugly messages that were pounded into me by my school peers and others: you are not worthy of love, you are stupid and a idiot. In my head these last few days these messages have coalesced into a tidal wave of despair that washes over me and buffets my very soul, turning me into a small and miserable person.
However in all honesty its tough, but not hopeless. I have a family that loves me deeply and unquestioning. I have a circle of friends who care about me, roots for my successes and commiserates with me over my failures. After years of therapy I have come to realize that very little of this was my fault, to lay the blame where its due, take responsibility for my own feelings and finally put down my anger, that constant dark shadow. I now take meds for the anxiety, which helps stop the constant chatter and worry in my head; I had previously resisted taking any medications as I wanted to truly experience the depths and heights of my feelings so I could understand them, but after years of that kind of work I came to be exhausted, worn out by the constant anxious knot in my stomach.
And so my life goes on. The struggle of everyday existence, all the hopes and fears available to human existence. What I have come to realize is that the one of the best things I can do with my life is to create memories, so I try to collect unique experiences: hiking across the volcanoes of Hawaii, dancing along the Seine in the shadow of Notre Dame, sleeping on the deck of a ship traversing the South Seas, smoking opium in Singapore, exposing myself to as much art as one person can stand, snow camping in the frozen Minnesota woods, bicycle camping across the state of Minnesota, hiking the Cascades on both sides of the border, kayaking in the San Juan islands, and so many others too numerous to mention. What I also realize is that the worst thing that the bitch and motherfucker can do to me is make me think that I am completely alone, that I am cutoff from simple human relationships, and make it difficult for me to reach out to others. I think that we humans are social animals, we love being around each other and its part of our natural state, so its completely unnatural for me to spend days alone, locked away in my house, in my head, running thru the movies of my memories replaying again and again those scenes of failure. The bitch and the motherfucker are never going to truly leave me, they will continue to be my life-long companions, til death when we part.
