I have a deadline, that has no end. There is always a deadline and once you meet it another one crops up like a stubborn chin hair, never failing, always in the same way. I knew that there would be deadlines, a project, contract, love, baking, lease, movies, life they all needed to end. Though there is a certainty with life that once it’s over, there is no chance of a new product launch coming your way unless the Hindus nailed it with reincarnation. Then again, what I am uncertain of I won’t comment on.
There is much I won’t comment on or even spell out unless I am a 100% sure that I am right or at the very least, close to being right. The rightness of it is of course a construct of my interpretations and experiences but that rarely deters me. My politics, sexuality, work ethic, and family life are all defined in my head. Do not under any circumstance think that they stay defined, they don’t, and that is when anxiety sets in. Some might call it perfectionism or an eye for detail, but what they do not know is that, unless it moves the way I want to move or I have some control in the direction of its movement, I am crippled. Mentally everything stops and I will sit with every minuscule decision piling sky high and threatening to drop on me.
In very plain and simple words, I have an anxiety disorder. Yes, it is a disorder, because everyone has anxieties and anxiety, and suffer from irrational fears that hold them back from doing things that they would normally have no trouble doing. It keeps you in check sometimes.
Around 2014 November, I went to the doctor and he told me I was exhibiting mild symptoms of an anxiety disorder. I was given some good advice and methods to cope with a review scheduled in three months. In retrospect, I think I downplayed my feelings so that there would be nothing wrong with me. Over the years, I always downplayed it. Every time someone passed a comment that was mildly teasing, my whole body would tense up and I would replay the incident like a tape over and over in my head till my mind convinced me that the person was a bad human being. I would mostly distance myself from the person, and of course, I was left with less than 3 people I spoke to once law school was over. Some people took advantage of this, I gave them the perfect weapon to typecast me as anti-social when in reality I was a very happy (sort of) warm and welcoming human being. It pains me that I did very little to fight back for my identity, however, there was a bigger internal battle I was losing.
The unspoken side of an anxiety disorder is the loss of relationships, it becomes hard to trust and even harder to stay true when you are fighting to reach an unachievable ideal. The fear of abandonment can get so overwhelming that you rather sabotage a perfectly fine equation to something that resembles the end of a bad horror movie. The kind of movie where the monster gets killed and the protagonist drives away, never questioning why the monster was there, and the likelihood that it could show up again.
Another fun fact is anger. It’s like that slow-burning anger that starts at the pit of your stomach and warms your rib cage, by the time it reaches your mouth you are consumed and full of venom. It was and is mostly the embarrassment of being wrong, the fact that a situation is well beyond my control. To the asshole who tagged me as short-tempered, I raise my glass of cold water because that is all you deserve but mostly because I need to calm down now and am at the risk of making this a smear campaign against some shit people. See! I can’t help it even though I am writing and still in full control of this narrative. I will leave it there to give this piece of “writing” some authenticity.
There is nothing noteworthy here that you can take away. Except that it is not pretty. Sometimes it’s ugly crying your head off at 2 AM for no fathomable reason. It’s walking into your house to check if the stove is off three times to make sure your home does not blow up. Sometimes it’s asking someone if they love you for the 5th time in one hour because the 5th time there will be a blanket of comfort that envelopes you. There are times when I know that something has to be done but wait till the minute before it becomes impossible to do so that I do not have to face the fact that it might not be exactly how it is in my head. Does this make sense? If you are reading this, I hope you understand that this is not an excuse but an apology. An apology to myself for pretending to satisfy your need and fantasy. A sincere apology for faking it hoping to make it. I apologize for every time I canceled a call or missed a message because I could not for the life of me think of a good way to continue after hello. I am sorry you believed I was a bitch, while in reality I was just misunderstood by the impossible standards of what is considered sociable.
How am I dealing with all this? Well for one, I went for therapy without telling anyone for a year. When the shit finally hit the ceiling two months back, I came back home and I went to my family psychiatrist (yes family, a story for another time haha), I opened up to my family about it and let myself be vulnerable. When I want to cry I listen to some Adele and cry at night, I call my mother and cry, I bask in the comfort of my privilege, I cut off from an army of people I love, I take a tiny tablet called clonazepam religiously every night before bed, I made friends with strangers who know nothing about me and learned to love them. For one month I ate, walked, worked, and slept like my life depended on it. I started writing about it because the less I need to conceal, the more I can share. I want you to keep something in mind while you read this, there are a few people probably rolling their eyes at me now, talking about how utterly horrible I am over dinner and drinks, which is a source of great anxiety for me. But guess what? I don’t care for the first time. And that is a baby step as far as progress is concerned. Baby steps baby.
