My Story: Anonymous Member 1

Although I have only been around for 21 years, I have come to realize that there is no such thing as a “normal” person who is free from their personal demons. No matter who you are or how old you are, you have been in an everlasting battle with some demon, and for me, this demon has manifested itself in an anxiety disorder and panic disorder. My first memory of anxiety was the blurry outline of a yellow school bus ready to take me to my first day of kindergarten. I remember clinging to my mom’s leg and begging her not to make me get on that bus. Moments before what I would call my first panic attack, I had just taken the cheesy “first day of school” pictures and was in a great mood. This all changed when that bus approached, and I realized I was going to be separated from my mother. I felt paralyzed and even at a young age, all I could think about was I was going to die if I got on the bus.

The interesting thing about my anxiety disorder is that I have what doctors call anticipatory anxiety. For me, I freak out when I worry about things happening in the future, such as getting on a bus that is going to take me away from my mom. As I climbed up the bus stairs with my mom still in sight, I had a fantasy that I could turn around and jump back into her arms. In reality, my mom had tough love and told me, “Everybody has to go to school at some point. I’ll see you when you get home in 4 hours.” This was a recurring event every morning for the first week of school. After a few days of hearing about my panic episodes, my dad asked me why I cried about getting on the bus.

“I think the bus is going to drive into the reservoir near the school,” I said.
As I got older, my anxiety manifested more strongly and in many parts of my life. Eventually, my anxiety had a death grip on me; it did not just affect me in school, it pertained to my friendships, my athletics, and really my whole life. It felt like my demon controlled everything I did and did not do. I could not even escape it when I went to bed as it kept me up for hours imagining all the horrible things that were going to happen to me tomorrow. It still keeps me up for many hours each night even though I am on prescription sleep medication.

From kindergarten to my junior year of high school, my anxiety stayed relatively the same, and it was not until my senior year of high school that it began to grow stronger and manifest itself in different more destructive ways. They say that your senior year of high school is meant to be relaxing and relatively uneventful. You are not supposed to worry about your grades or really anything other than college applications. To avoid even this stress, I wrote all of my applications over the summer and was ready for a relaxing senior year. My fall semester was relatively relaxing as I was able to focus on my work and even fall asleep quickly. But as early and regular acceptance letters began to flood my email, I began to feel my anxiety rising to a level that even I had never experienced before. For the first time in my life, I had sweaty palms and I began to crack my knuckles incessantly as a way to relieve my anxiety. As I became more aware of these gross, damp paws, I began to feel ashamed. I didn’t want to shake hands or even go to a dance, thinking my date would look at me as a nasty, sweaty pig. I opted out of pretty much every dance in high school, including my senior prom, as I thought ‘who would want to go to a dance with me. No one likes me or finds me attractive.

I asked myself, what was causing this increase in anxiety? It was not so much the decision of which college to attend. No, it was the realization that at the end of the summer, I would be leaving home for good. I would need to be away from my parents and their support. I would be forced to make new friends, and for the first time in my life, I would be utterly alone. “What if my panic attacks started up again?” I said to myself. “How am I supposed to get through college without mom? Only she can help me avoid those horrid panic attacks with her soothing voice.” She would talk to me slowly about the situation I was anxious about. “Have you ever failed an assignment? Have you ever failed to turn something in? Your expectations of yourself are way too high.” In this way, she talked me back into reality.

Oh, joy, it is the end of summer and now the real fun begins!

Unsurprisingly, my anxiety came to a frightening climax during my first semester here at Notre Dame. It did not happen immediately, though, as the first few weeks of school were a kind of honeymoon period; there was not that much work or stress. I felt like I was in some sort of daze where stress could not get to me nor could anxiety. While the anxiety was not manifesting itself yet, it was boiling, brewing, and was growing. It was like the lava building up in a volcano ready to explode, and that’s exactly what it did when my first college exams were coming up. I started to become confused about the material covered in class and mixed information of one class with another class. At this moment it became apparent that I could not return home and that for the first time in my life, I was independent and alone. In the stress of studying for my college exams, I had my first panic attack since middle school. My heart pounded; my mouth became dry; my thoughts raced around the idea of cutting my losses, going home, and getting a job at a fast-food restaurant. “I could work at Subway,” I thought. “I like Subway,” I called my parents saying I could not do this and that I needed to return home. They told me to not overreact and that I should wait out the rest of the year.

After this first panic attack, it started to happen almost every other day. Even the smallest things set me off, like not getting to bed on time, not understanding an aspect of my homework, and even glancing at a deadline or a test date. I started to isolate myself and refused to take part in any social activities because I was afraid of having a panic attack in the middle of a party. A pattern began to emerge in which I would have a panic attack, immediately call my parents who would help calm me down, get back to work, and then the cycle would start over. The unsettling thing is that I started to find comfort in this destructive cycle. It became part of my day to the point that if I had yet to have a panic attack that day, I would unconsciously find something to make one happen. I felt like there was no help for me and that surrendering to it was my best and only option.

Anxiety had taken so much away from me at this point and led to the good ol’ fashioned suicidal thoughts of ‘this is not going to get better so why not end it?’. I slipped in and out of fantasizing about death to thoughts of hope and any pride I could muster up at this point. My anxiety enjoyed creating these thoughts and led me into a depressed spiral full of these thoughts throughout freshman year. The only place I felt safe from myself and what I called my ‘escape’ was sleep where my dreams would bring me comfort and would fill me with happy thoughts.

I am amazed that I was able to keep my roommates from finding out about this for so long. But my roommates spent most of their time in the common room and left me alone when my door was closed. This pattern of isolation led to a real lack of support and made me normalize my anxiety. This all changed, though, the Sunday before finals week. I was studying for a math test and my inability to think while I did practice problems led to yet another panic attack. This time was different though. My roommates were studying in their room next door.

I was alone in my room, exhausted, staring at a page of math problems. I knew I had four finals over the course of four days, and the information I needed for each of them was flowing in and out of my head. None of it was consolidating by subject matter; it was just racing around in circles. In the textbook in front of me, the characters looked like a bunch of symbols I could not put together, like a foreign language I had never seen before. Trying to solve each problem, I continually could not finish or got the answers completely wrong. I realized I was trying to solve a Calculus problem using a formula from GenChem.

Knowing my test was the next day, I started to feel my heart beat faster. It occurred to me that maybe I was going to fail my math test. In the hard wooden dorm chair, I was never so aware of my posture, feeling my heart beating against the shirt on my chest. Realizing this, I noticed other symptoms of anxiety, and when I noticed them, they began to cascade like dominos. My legs pumped like jackhammers. My mouth became extremely dry. I kept trying to solve problems, and my inability to do so kept freaking me out more and more. I started to breathe rapidly, eventually hyperventilating. My vision faded and became dim. I was dizzy as I thought, “I used to be happy as a kid. What happened to joyful me?” It felt like Joyful me had completely abandoned me. It was at this point I felt tears streaming down my face. I started to tremble as I picked up the phone to call my mom.
“Hello?” she said.
I breathed heavily into the phone.
“What’s wrong?”
“It’s happening again, Mom, I’m having a panic attack again.”
She sighed. “Son, it’s time for you to lace up your big boy boots and realize that you can’t continue like this for four years.”
“Thanks, mom,” I said sarcastically as I hung up in an angry fit. This anger furthered my descent into this black and dangerous hole, and my panic consumed me even more. My legs started to tremble. I felt all the strength go out of me and I collapsed onto my clothes chest. Was I a lost cause? Even my mother did not have faith in me. As I sat crumpled on the bedroom floor and contemplated my life, I was totally alone. Fifteen minutes passed.

I remembered I was in a building full of people. Without really knowing what I was doing or why I stood up and opened my bedroom door. It was like instincts kicked in; I felt an automatic urge to open the door and walk into my roommates’ space and become vulnerable. It was late, so all of the lights were on. It was just like any ordinary Sunday night. On the TV in the background, Chris Collinsworth was quietly commenting, “Wow, that’s a football player right there.” Usually, around this time, we would be coming back from dinner at SDH. I walked into the room a sweaty, pale, shaking mess. My legs were caving in on me a bit and my eyes were swollen and red from all the crying.
One of my roommates, we will call him John, was on the phone with his mom. He looked at me and his jaw dropped. Panicked, he said, “I’ll call right back, Mom. I’ll call right back”

Jonah, we will say, my other roommate, who is always very calm and even-keeled, looked at me with a straight face, lifted his chin up a bit in a friendly gesture, and asked, “What’s up, dude?”
I started talking and I could not stop. Everything came out - the frequency of the attacks, the shaking, the sweating, the hyperventilating, and of course the crying.

“I’m so tired of this. My anxiety has such a grip on me, it’s wearing me out. I’m exhausted all the time.”
“Oh, is that why you go to bed so early?” John asked.
“Yeah, I feel like I am going to have this my whole life. I don’t know how I’m going to make it. I can’t do this for three or four years. Maybe it’s just my destiny to be a college drop-out.”

Jonah came up and hugged me, and then John. While I was still crying heavily and felt weak, most of my panic symptoms had subsided. My heart had slowed down, and my trembling had come to an end.
They started talking. John told me his brother also had panic attacks and went to counseling for it. “This is a treatable illness,” he said. “It’s not terminal. It can be treated. My brother wasn’t totally cured, but with treatment, you can get to a point where it’s tolerable.”
Jonah asked, “Have you been to St. Liam’s?”

The next day I called the University Counseling Center and asked if there were any appointments available before I went home for winter break. While I was reluctant about therapy at first, John and Jonah had convinced me that this was the only way I was going to get better. I was able to get in three days later, on the Wednesday after this panic attack and conversation. Just hearing from the receptionist that there was a time available for me, I felt a weight lift from my shoulders. But I was still nervous. My imagination presented me with the image of the UCC as an insane asylum. Then I walked into the waiting room.
There were at least five other students in there. There were men and women. They were on their phones, texting, or on Instagram. They were normal people.

Following freshman year during the summer, I began intensive CBT therapy as well as neurofeedback where, for the first time, I would control my anxiety and have it not control me. I did therapy 2 times a week and did neurofeedback 5 times a week and was often drained from such an intense schedule. This was the only way I could get better though. After such an intense summer, I came back a new me. I came back with anxiety, but now I had the tools to control it most of the time. Since freshman year, I have not had a panic attack and I have never had the same levels of anxiety as I did freshman year. While I still have social anxiety and it often leads to isolation, I have gone to most of my dorm’s dances and have been a much more social person compared to freshman year. I even went abroad, which would have never occurred if my anxiety still consumed me. While my anxiety leads me to dark thoughts at least once a week, I know they are passing feelings and that the thoughts are nothing more than my anxiety trying to get back the power it once had over me. Anxiety is nothing more than a feeling and just like any other feeling, I can define it as what I want. Instead of calling it anxiety, I often think of it as extra pent-up energy that I can use to seize the day!

I survived and I am here to tell it!