An Index of Irrational Fears – Preface

One evening at a particularly intense therapy session, I had an epiphany — I cannot remember a time when I wasn’t afraid of something.

That’s not to say I spent my entire life up until now cowering in the corner of a warm, safe library or something, hiding from the outside world (although that was a good portion of it). In fact, if I’m honest, I take a lot of pride in how stupidly brave I am. Like, heights don’t phase me. Take me to any old theme park and I’ll be the first to get in line for whatever ride everyone else is trying to avoid. I’m still the designated spider slayer at my job, and I’m the idiot who got two feet away from an alligator on vacation in Florida. The point is, all the stuff normal people are supposed to be afraid of are not even concerns of mine.

But that’s not to say I’m fearless.

In fact, in my feeble attempt to peel back the layers of the suck-onion that is my never-ending war on my own stupid brain, I made a list of the horrifically nonsensical fears I’ve dealt with at one point or another. This is not an exhaustive list, even though it definitely freaking looks like it. These are the fears that, for one reason or another, stand out in my memory.

So why am I going through the trouble of writing all of this down? See, this is more than some cathartic exercise. Mental illness is this big, stupid elephant in the room almost everyone notices but never really takes the time to fully understand. The world’s idea of life with anxiety is drastically different from actual life with anxiety. In fact, when I came out of the presumably well-organized OCD closet after learning my official diagnosis, I got a slew of “Oh, I’m going to bring you over to clean my house sometime!” (Pro tip: Do not ever say this to someone with OCD. I pinky-promise it will not end well.) The truth is, nobody actually likes being OCD. It’s not something you’re proud of. It’s not some cute, hipster-girl-with-Zooey-Deschanel-hair quirk that automatically turns you into the stereotypical manic pixie dream girl.

It’s not. It’s a living hell. One where sometimes death itself seems like the only way out.

That’s why I wanted to get my experiences in writing and let the soft, tender underbelly of my mind be exposed to the world. Because if even one person out there realizes they’re not alone in this, everything I’ve gone through will be worth it. Because if I realized I wasn’t alone in this years ago, I would have opened up and sought help sooner. Because you can’t fight this battle alone. Because nothing in this world has the power to destroy a life quite like mental illness.

This is the story of the lifelong love-hate relationship between me and my head.

Someday I’ll Be Saturday Night

Ever notice how sometimes God just completely airdrops the exact thing you need in the exact moment you need it? If you’re anything like me, a lot of the time, it’s a song. There’s something oddly therapeutic about hearing your own feelings echoed in music. I could go on and write an entire blog post about how music is the universal language and all that sentimental crap (which is absolutely true I should add), but it’s weird how you can rehear a song from years ago and have it take on a completely new meaning.

For me, that song was “Someday I’ll Be Saturday Night.”

“Someday I’ll Be Saturday Night” isn’t one of Bon Jovi’s most iconic songs, but it’s still somewhat of a fan favorite. Despite the fact that I was almost obsessively fascinated with all things Bon Jovi when I was little, the song didn’t really resonate with me. Growing up, it was one of the songs on my beloved Crush tour concert videotape I didn’t mind letting play through while I ran to the bathroom.

That changed on the way home from work today. There were a few songs I desperately wanted to listen to that were stuck in my head, and sifting through the small mountain of CDs in my passenger and back seats didn’t unearth any of the albums they were on. So I chose the first mildly interesting one I found, which was a Bon Jovi greatest hits release I rage-bought when I couldn’t locate any of their albums I had as a kid (and yes, I had every single one).

The song came on and this weird, overwhelming sense of peace came over me. I couldn’t explain it. Something in the lyrics pierced my soul like a needle right in the spot I needed. The verses are from the point of view three characters in the throes of hardship. The first, from what I can comprehend, is an unemployed homeless man, while the second is a teenage girl whose living situation forced her to turn to prostitution. It was the third narrator whose story especially resonated with me:

Now I can’t say my name or tell you where I am

Wanna blow myself away, don’t know if I can

I wish that I could be in some other time and place

With someone else’s soul, someone else’s face

Do you know how strangely comforting it is to know that you’re not alone in your struggles, to know that at one point, a rock star — your childhood hero — felt down enough to write those words? I guess it hit me hard that even Jon Bon Jovi has been there — and made it through. After this thought bounced around in my brain for a second, the bridge hit:

Someday I’ll be Saturday night

I’ll be back on my feet, I’ll be doing alright

It may not be tomorrow, baby, that’s okay

I ain’t going down, I’m gonna find a way

With those lines, what used to be just a feel-good anthemic Bon Jovi song (which is pretty much their schtick, come to think of it) became my own personal battle cry. My depression and anxiety will not take me down without a fight, and if — or rather, when — I make it through, I know God will use me to help others through as well.

Maybe I feel more like a Monday today, but someday I’ll be Saturday night, too.

90s Jon with a dog

Here, have a picture of ’90s-era Jon with a doggo. You’re welcome.

PANDAS VS. MY ENTIRE EXISTENCE

I recently saw this meme while scrolling through my Facebook feed:

Serotonin, ~~like whatever drug they put in the mystery meat in Lunchables,~~ is a substance that, in layman’s terms, makes one happy. It’s a naturally produced neurotransmitter (fancy schmancy brain chemical thing) that’s responsible for regulating mood.

And if you don’t have enough of it, it will frick you the frick up.

I’m talking clinical depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder, all that fun stuff.

It recently hit me that I don’t think I’ve ever not been mentally ill. I wish I could remember those halcyon days of running wild and carefree with my biggest worries being missing Dragonball Z at 6:30 or whether or not my Charizard was strong enough to beat the Elite Four. But even my fondest childhood memories have a shadow of constant sadness and anxiousness looming over them.

And it’s all because of PANDAS.

(No, not that guy.)

PANDAS is a misleadingly adorable term for a really sucky problem. It’s the abbreviation for a scientific term I’m not going to bother writing out, mostly because it would take like five hours to type it. (If you’re curious, you can read more about it here.)

When I initially described my symptoms to my current psychiatrist, including how long I’ve dealt with them, the first thing she asked was the seemingly irrelevant question of if I’d ever had strep throat as a kid. I didn’t have strep throat; I freaking was strep throat. I have more memories of being sick with it than not, to the point that I couldn’t eat like a regular human and spent a solid portion of my childhood looking like the lost daughter of Skeletor.

Little did I know that my near-constant bout of strep was an underlying factor in the specific type of crazy I’ve wrestled with my entire life.

I’m not far enough into my psychology degree to be qualified to tell you exactly how it works, but somehow, having a strep infection when you’re very young can jack up some stuff in your brain and cause lovely things like OCD symptoms in children. And yep, it can be permanent.

After hearing about PANDAS from my doctor, everything started to make a lot more sense. Suddenly, my obsessive, intense fears and odd behaviors, which I clearly recall going back as far as age two, had a name. (Speaking of which, one of these days I’ll write about some of those weird early anxieties — there’s a couple of doozies. Like the headless guy I was convinced lived in my grandma’s furnace. That’s a fun one.)

I’m writing this as much for you, whoever is reading this, as I am for me. If you’re like me and can’t remember a time when you weren’t scared or sad, if you have that gray cloud of mental illness hanging over what should have been happy childhood memories, you’re not alone.

The Walking (Quarter) Dead

I haven’t been very active on here the past few days. Between work and my class and a handful of shows last weekend, writing time has been minimal, and of course my anxiety isn’t helping much. But thanks for sticking around, kind person who is reading this blog post!

Do you ever feel like the number of things you want to accomplish in life far outweigh the number of days you have to achieve them? Because I’ve been slowly realizing that’s one of the driving forces behind my feelings of discontent lately.

(This one’s not going to get too whiny, I promise.)

I recently came to the realization that I’ll probably never reach the level of success in music I used to dream about. In all honesty, I don’t think the Bon Jovi-like brand of jetset-around-the-world-and-be-on-the-cover-of-People-magazine rock stardom I fantasized about as a child exists anymore (barring Taylor Swift-tier artists), and even then, I would not be comfortable with that much attention. I’ve learned that my niche is behind the scenes, writing the songs or playing the instruments or even just mixing the sound.

You see, for the longest time, I felt this race against time to establish myself before I aged out of the “young and attractive” window and was no longer viable as a new artist. I remember when Carly Rae Jepsen came out with “Call Me Maybe” my freshman year of college and how everyone my age was freaking out when they found out how old she actually was — 26. I was only 18 at that time, and I already felt the pressure. It’s a relief, not having to stress about any of that stuff anymore.

But I still feel like the clock is ticking on my music career. And my writing career. And my entire freaking life.

I spent the entire evening binge-watching The Walking Dead. The thing is, usually, I try to avoid binge-watching anything, because of my fear of wasting precious time I could be using to do something productive. Lately, I’ve lost a lot of motivation to do much of anything of value, which in turn drags me down even further. It’s a vicious cycle, an ouroboros of suck.

It’s probably not healthy to push yourself to do “productive” things 24/7, but it’s a compulsion I can’t quite rid myself of. I can’t shake this nagging feeling that I’m careening toward an inevitable death daily and how one day I’m going to be this bitter old lady resentful of how few of the things I set out to do actually got done. The average person lives to be approximately 75-80, maybe 100 at best. When I look at it that way, I’m already a quarter dead.

And in all honesty, this isn’t a bad outlook to have in moderation. Life is a gift and we shouldn’t waste it on frivolous crap. But we also shouldn’t beat ourselves up for taking a breath every now and then and actually enjoying it.

So go ahead, take a break and watch The Walking Dead. Or play Mario Kart. Or just take a walk outside. Life’s too short to waste it all worrying.

I Guess This is a Blog

So, welcome I guess?

I wasn’t going to ever start a blog, despite writing being one of maybe two things I’m actually kind of good at. The idea of putting my thoughts about things on the internet scares the ever-loving crap out of me. The internet scares the crap out of me. People on the internet scare the crap out of me. If I’m honest, everything scares the crap out of me. Yay, anxiety.

My change of heart happened a few days ago. I was recently diagnosed with depression. Like, actual clinical depression. I’m no stranger to mental illness. I’ve battled OCD symptoms my entire life, generalized anxiety disorder and PTSD were mentioned at one point, and even ADHD and Aspergers were thrown out at one point by past therapists to explain why I’m incapable of functioning like a normal human.

But hearing depression as an explanation for a lot of my issues kind of made sense. I distinctly remember being in fourth grade and thinking to myself, “I’m gonna die one day. Everyone I love is going to die one day. Life is meaningless. Nothing matters and I’m sad for absolutely no discernible reason.” That’s not the kind of thoughts you’re supposed to have in freaking fourth grade. My point is, this isn’t something new. I just have a cool little label to slap on it now.

Recently, it’s been attacking my head worse than ever. I had this horrible, nagging thought that maybe, just maybe, my entire existence is a mistake. Like, I’m here because of some fluke accident and I wasn’t supposed to be here. I kept looking back at my past and thinking about how much better off everyone would be if I wasn’t born, how many people I’ve hurt in just 24 short years. I’m an a-hole. I don’t deserve the things I have. Fortunately, it never escalated into “I wish I were dead,” and I hope to God it never does. It’s always more of a nagging, restless “I need to run away from this town and not tell anyone where I’m going and change my name and not exist here anymore” feeling.

Then, something happened that made me reconsider everything.

It was a Saturday night, last Saturday night to be exact. I was playing bass for my church’s evening services, and at one point, I was just killing time trying to forget about how much I hated my life at the moment, despite having no logical reason to hate it. Then, I got a notification from one of my former youth group leaders on Facebook. I’ll never forget how I felt. She told me she was proud of me for using my words to make people think, and then went on to add that I was a role model for her daughters.

Me. The mistake. The one who hurt more people than I’d like to think about.

Is it possible for God to use someone like me to make the world a better place?

And that’s why I’m writing this. Because all I have is my words and I’m not going to let my anxiety and depression keep me from using them. As my mom would say, in the immortal words of Sean Connery in Celebrity Jeopardy, “the pen is mightier,” or something like that.

And if the things I write have the ability to change just one life out of millions, it will all be worth it.