Anxiety Has Always Been a Given

On my decision to finally start medication.

For me, anxiety has always been a given. It’s as much a part of my genetic makeup as my freckles or my height – something unchangeable, immovable. Something I’ve had to just learn to accept.

Growing up, there weren’t a lot of words to describe it. My parents rebranded my crippling anxiety as being a “worry wart”, and not because they were belittling my feelings. I genuinely believe mental health just wasn’t discussed in detail – instead, it was folded away in drawers, waiting for the next time it would rear its ugly head.

At the end of eight grade I missed two entire months of my first period class. Every single morning, without fail, I would throw up on my walk to school. I’d heave my breakfast into the neighbors bushes and sheepishly make my way back home.

My Spanish teacher kindly let me take the final anyway, taking pity on this pale, gangly girl who couldn’t keep her peanut butter toast down. I still failed.

But that’s just how it was – Isabel is anxious. Isabel has panic attacks. Isabel sometimes throws up her breakfast. Never was there a conversation about therapy or medications, just a gentle understanding that this is who I was.

It got worse in college.

For the first time, I decided to take matters into my own hands. I wandered into the student center and asked if I could speak to a therapist. They paired me with a man who proceeded to talk at me for an hour, giving me a checklist of things I needed to do and reasons why I was the way that I was. It was entirely unhelpful, and all I was left with was the feeling that I was unfixable.

It wasn’t all bad, though – when you aren’t given help, you learn to cope on your own. Through my 20’s I learned to manage my anxiety, knowing when a panic attack was coming on or figuring out that ice on my wrists helped calm me down. It wasn’t great but it was good enough, and I lived a perfectly normal and happy life.

Starting medication never felt like an option for me. It sounds funny to me now, but the thought of taking a pill for my anxiety made me anxious. What if it changed my personality? What if I got too reliant on it? What if it makes my anxiety worse? What if I feel even more nauseous?

And then, this past winter, I had two panic attacks nearly back to back.

The first was when I was visiting my boyfriend’s family in Cincinnati, and we were driving to his aunt’s house for a game day. In the car ride there I started to cry, and it just swelled and swelled. It’s hard to explain a panic attack to someone who’s never had one, but I just remember wailing to my boyfriend, trying to catch my breath: ‘I just feel so weird.’

It feels like you’re dying. Like you’ll never feel normal again.

And then comes the dip on the rollercoaster, when your adrenaline finally fizzles. The lurch of your stomach, and the next hour you spend with your head in the toilet.

The second one was perhaps the scariest – for the first time ever, I woke up to a panic attack. In the middle of the night, I opened my eyes and wasn’t able to breathe. The ceiling was spinning and I yelled for my boyfriend to get an ice pack. He sat with me through it, sleepily rubbing my back as I gasped in big gulps of air.

I made an appointment with a doctor the next morning.

Getting a prescription for Lexapro was shockingly easy. I always expected there to be more of a process for the whole thing, but my doctor listened to me, did an EKG, and wrote me a prescription the very same day. I picked up an orange bottle filled with 5mg pills an hour later.

I’m not going to lie to you – the first two weeks were rough. The nausea I felt mirrored my adolescence, and I spent most mornings on the bathroom floor or on the couch with a bucket in my hands. I also wasn’t able to sleep, insomnia creeping in every single night no matter how tired I was. It took everything in me to press forward, to trust that there was light at the end of the tunnel.

And then, one day, I realized I felt… normal. I didn’t feel different or changed, I just felt still. My brain felt quiet. It felt a lot like peace.

I still get spurts of normal anxiety – the rush to meet a deadline, nerves before a big meeting – but I’m truly amazed at how effective it’s been. I feel so grateful that I finally took this leap, but I’d be lying if I said I wish I hadn’t started earlier.

Yes, I was technically fine. I could have lived with it – I did live with it for many, many years. But letting that wall down, the one I had built so high to protect myself, has felt like stepping into the ocean for the first time.

I am floating, and I am clear. I am finally who I’ve always wanted to be.