The Story Of My Lifelong Struggle With Anxiety And Panic Disorders

So were finally here. I’ll admit I avoided posting this story for a long time, mostly out of embarrassment of having these conditions, especially since I do my best to hide them from even my best friends on a day to day basis. However, the last few hours I spent on the edge of going into a full blown panic attack and trying to calm myself down, so I figured maybe it might be therapeutic to write this article. My anxiety and panic disorder, may completely different than what you have experienced with your own anxiety/ panic because it is mostly a broad term used to describe many possible problems. I'm generally just going to talk about my history battling the disorder and basically how I am affected by it on a daily basis.

I was always a nervous child, looking back I remember vividly, having experiences where I would completely freeze up and start to feel like the world was ending, but at that time I didn’t realize that they were most likely panic attacks. I wasn’t a shy child, in face I was pretty outgoing and always cracking jokes or messing with teachers, but deep inside my subconscious I was collecting all the experiences that made me uncomfortable or nervous and storing them there. Its hard to explain the difference of being slightly nervous and having situational anxiety and a panic attack. Being nervous is normal, but being nervous to the point where I cant stay in a classroom because I start sweating profusely, my heart beat starts going crazy and I feel like the world is going to end is not.

The real problems with my anxiety and panic disorder didn’t come until my sophomore year in high school. I was stressed for a test one day and the teacher already made me a bit nervous and halfway through the test I started having a panic attack and the teacher wouldn't let me leave until I finished the test. I had no idea what had just hit me, but all I knew is I never wanted that to happen again. Sadly for me things only got worse. The next day I walked into the classroom and I couldn’t even be there without thinking about having another one of those attacks, which inevitably worked me up into another one. Suddenly I couldn’t be in any of my classes without this happening and I had to go to the bathroom every 20 minutes just to calm myself down. The thing is I wasn’t stressed really, the only reason I was getting panic attacks was because I was afraid of having another panic attack. It was a cycle that therapy was never able to help me with, because I genuinely had no idea why this was happening.

Eventually leaving the classroom too much and a large drop in my grades made it clear I had to do something. I went to a psychiatrist who prescribed me medication and gave me Xanax to help when I had panic attacks. The medication eventually worked, but it still didn’t stop panic attacks completely so I took Xanax twice during the school day every day. I don’t know if any of you have ever taken Xanax but it drops your cognitive ability and knocks a good 10 or so points off your IQ, so school started to become much harder for me. I had always been the type of student who could learn in class and didn’t have to study for the tests, with okay results, but now that just didn’t cut it.

My entire high school career was a mess, for four years I was never able to get a handle on my anxiety and it finally took until probably my senior year until my medication was at a point where I could reasonably function on a daily basis. My grades became near perfect my senior year, and a luckily I was able to get into a great school mostly because of other entrepreneurial things I was doing at the time. High school was a lonely time for me, I never really fit into many social groups and because I was afraid to go too far from home if I had a panic attack, I never really put myself out there when people would throw parties or hang out. I tried to focus on myself during this time, but ended up spending most of my time with people I met over the internet, while playing games like World Of Warcraft. I never really had interaction with girls and spent too much time living in my own room.

College was an open change, when I went for my freshman year it was great, I was meeting all new people, my meds were on track and even being away from home I felt on track. Even though I had many moments of panic, I was mostly able to get past them because I felt like I was part of a group for once. This didn’t last long though , because my sophomore year I started become increasingly weary of what I put in my body to the point where I had a panic attacks for three days straight and just stayed in my room after trying an Adderral to help me study for finals. I was just able to pass my finals but all my progress had felt like it had been reset. For months after that moment I had trouble putting food in my body, couldn’t take any medicine, would drink anything with red dye or caffeine. If I did any of those I would have a panic attack until I used enough Xanax to calm me down, which usually just knocked me out and I even got nervous using that.

I ended up taking a semester off and felt like a failure. I looked all around me and didn’t see anyone else having the same problems as me and often I just became depressed to the point where I didn’t want to do anything. I remember laying in bed and just a random bad thought would trigger me into a panic attack and I would feel like I was going to die. This was probably the worst time of my life. It took months before I was even able to deal with sitting in a classroom and after a semester I returned back to my friends. When I did I was happy again, but I had changed. I now had all these trigger that I never had before and avoided them at all costs. It was still hard for me to sit in certain classes which made me avoid going to class on certain stressful days. Almost a year later during my Junior year, I again had to take a semester off because it was discovered I would need heart surgery immediately. I realized at this point that I wouldn’t be graduating with my friends and I started to get depressed and lonely. After my friends graduated I felt like no one was there to support me. Well with my final two classes coming up on halfway through, its almost time to finally graduate, but anxiety hasn’t left me, but with the right medication, has made my life easier.

I take four pills at night for anxiety and two Xanax during the day to get me through the day without panic attacks. I still have many triggers that I avoid, like traveling long distances, using any type of medicine, consuming any caffeine( I haven’t even had chocolate in 3 years because of the low caffeine content), being in classrooms, buses, airplanes, or just thing I cant openly leave or don’t have control of. I live a life that some people would find maddening and for me it often is. There are days like today where I wish I could just be normal, I wish I could just have normal people problems and not this crazy mind I was given. My hope is one day I can get off this medication and live a regular life, but after 8 years of medication it is going to be an extremely hard transition that I have tried to do multiple times and failed. I wonder how I am going to function as a member of society with this disorder and often think I wont. I wrote this article as a form of therapy to remind myself that I have made it this far and although things aren’t ideal, I haven’t given up yet. I hope anyone else who is struggling out there can find some use of my story and realize you are not a weird alone individual. People look at me and often think I have things together, but in reality my world is held together by a string that can snap at any moment. You're not alone in this.

-Calaber24p