Content Disclosure: discussion of mental illness; detailed depictions of anxiety, depression, panic attacks, and disordered eating; internalized ableism and fatphobia; mentions of suicidal thoughts and self-harm

I’ve been mentally ill my entire life, and I don’t think I realized until the last few years how severe an impact it’s had on everything about and around me. I often wonder what my life would be like now if I had ever sought help for my mental health issues instead of trying to do it myself, because when I think back I see all the moments I could have asked for help, or when someone could have seen a problem and tried harder to help me. I see all the opportunities I missed to fix myself.

I always had anxiety as a kid, but I never had the words for it. And I don’t have a lot of memories from those years but I do know that I spent my childhood having extreme meltdowns over the things that upset me and being violently angry at everyone and everything around me. My mother once told me that she had considered anger management therapy for me as a child, but had decided against it because she “didn’t want to do that to me” when I was so young. I know that my behavior started to improve when I was eight, because that’s when I started learning karate and my instructors put a lot of emphasis on discipline, self-control, and not hurting people. Once I was old enough to figure out the correlation between my anxiety and my inability to control my anger, I started to wonder whether someone would have caught the problem if my parents had sent me to anger management therapy, and if I would have learned to handle my anxiety. I now know that a lot of my anger that doesn’t seem to have a reasonable cause is a defense mechanism, because it’s trying to protect me from the things I’m afraid of or that I feel threatened by, which is everything, so I know to take a step back when I’m angry at all of that scary everything and control how I behave towards others. But I still don’t have real coping mechanisms, because I never did get real help, so I end up bottling up most of my anger and eventually exploding when it inevitably bubbles over the top, or I’ll just shut people out when my anxiety decides they’re a threat. I’ve had to deliver many apologies for lashing out at someone or ghosting someone when their actions did not warrant such an extreme reaction, and sometimes people don’t forgive me. And I wonder which relationships I would have been able to salvage if I had ever learned to manage my anxiety.

I became extremely depressed when I was eleven, after my best friend moved to Ohio and so I didn’t have any friends left. And while I’m certain I had a chemical imbalance long before that, my inability to handle what was, at the time, a life-altering tragic event, exacerbated what probably already existed. I stopped socializing with anybody, I never left my room except to go to school, I was sad all the time and I think I cried almost every night, I started sleeping either too much or not at all, and I started having suicidal thoughts. Thankfully, I never made any plans or attempts, but I spent all of middle school consumed by sadness and numbness and self-hatred and I never told anyone. And, of course, it was middle school so I was also being picked on by most of my peers, which was further evidence that I was worthless. When my parents said they were worried that I didn’t spend any time with my friends, and said they were worried I was depressed, and said that our family has a history of mental illness so I might get it too, I denied it and they didn’t push the issue. Once I started making more friends, and started to find things that could make me happy, I stopped wanting to die and started hating myself just a little less, which was a relief. And now I have friends, and I have a lot of things that make me happy, and my self-confidence is something that others will sometimes marvel at, and I do love myself and I’m not even sure how I got there but it’s a pretty good feeling, but there are also a lot of days where I can’t get out of bed and it doesn’t take a whole lot for all of that confidence to come crashing down if I think I haven’t done something perfectly or when my anxiety convinces me everyone hates me (depression and anxiety work well together like that) and some days I don’t feel anything at all and everything I do is always exhausting. And I wonder whether if I had gotten help, maybe I at least wouldn’t be so goddamn tired all the time and then the rest of it would be easier to handle.

I started restricting food as soon as I knew I was supposed to, probably when I was twelve or thirteen but I honestly couldn’t say because it was so pervasive for so long that I can’t even remember a time before. I was always going to have a skinny body, because that’s the way my genetics are, but all I knew at the time was that fat was the worst thing I could be and that any part of my body that jiggled or stuck out was wrong. So my butt and thighs became things that needed to be smaller, always smaller because they’re not supposed to jiggle like that, my stomach became an object of contempt because it wasn’t entirely flat that lower part isn’t supposed to stick out like that, and my hunger was something to be proud of because it was a sign that I was strong enough to not need food and if I gave in to that hunger there was something wrong with me. When my mom said she was worried I was starving myself, I denied it. I had a book called Wintergirls by Laurie Halse Anderson that showed how dangerous eating disorders are, how they can kill you and ruin your life. I used it to learn how to count all the calories I had eaten in a day. I was supposed to pack my own lunch for school, and by the time I was sixteen I had stopped packing anything at all. I didn’t know that bodies need fat to stay warm and to protect your organs and muscles, that bodies are supposed to put on more fat during puberty to stay healthy, that muscles jiggle when they’re not tensed, and that the lower part of my tummy would always stick out because that’s where my organs were. I just knew that I had to stay skinny. I didn’t have a regular period until I was eighteen (six years after I got my first one), and I thought that was something to be proud of because I knew it was because I wasn’t eating. I couldn’t make the connection that my body not having enough resources to do everything it was supposed to do was dangerous. But I eventually did tell some of my friends in high school that I was restricting food, and I started bringing small lunches to school again when I was seventeen, and I’ve been recovering for the last four years, and I did it by myself because I never saw any professionals. It wasn’t until college that I really stopped wanting to make myself smaller, and I started giving my body what it needed to support me, and the first time my period came on the same day two months in a row and was more than just spotting was October 26th 2018 and I was absolutely shocked because I didn’t know my body could even do that. And I love eating now, and I’m able to see it as something enjoyable and something that can make me strong and give me the ability to do the things I love to do, but it’s still something I need to stay really on top of to make sure I am actually eating enough because I never properly learned how to feed myself so I still slip into restrictive habits even without the restrictive ideation and a few months ago when I got my measurements taken for a fitting I learned that I had lost an inch off my waist and then a week later I got a period like the ones I was having when I was in high school and I knew I had slipped again without realizing and I wondered again if it would be easier if I had ever been to real eating disorder treatment.

I started having panic attacks when I was fifteen. Or, at least, that’s when I remember the first one happening because I knew what they were by that time because I had seen my friends having them. I was at camp, and we had played dodgeball, and at some point during the game I couldn’t breathe and I knew it wasn’t because I was out of breath from exercising because I hated dodgeball so I didn’t put enough physical effort in to become properly out of breath, and everything was too loud and too close but I held it together and after dodgeball we went back to the dorms and I had the panic attack alone in my room. And after that I started having panic attacks all the time, and sophomore year of high school I was having them nearly every day, and I missed my fifth period class a bunch of times because if they happened during lunch someone would take me to the counseling office at school and when my guidance counselor asked me if she should contact my parents and I said no so she didn’t because I didn’t pose a danger to myself or others so my parents never knew it was even happening and they still don’t. And I still can’t wear hair ties or scrunchies or anything around my wrists because one time in high school I started having one during class and I tried to contain it by snapping my hair tie against my skin and ended up bruising the inside of my wrist so now having things around my wrists at all is a sensory trigger. And now they’re fewer and farther between, because I’m generally more stable and because I have a better handle on things that might trigger me, but they still knock me on my ass when I do get them. A few months ago I got high with some friends, and spent the next three hours laying in one of said friends’ beds oscillating between waves of panic and dissociation. So I no longer attempt to smoke weed at all because I won’t risk triggering myself like that. And I still have the unfortunate habit of trying to contain attacks when I need to be doing something else, which really only makes it worse, and there have been times recently where I’ve gone to class in the middle of one, which was obviously not a successful endeavor. And I wonder if I had told someone when I was fifteen, if I had let my school guidance counselor tell my parents what was happening, if I would have then learned how to cope with my panic attacks, how to cope with what triggers them, and how to calm myself down when they do happen.

I stopped being able to make my through readings and assignments for classes at some point over the last year. Or maybe I always had difficulty doing the work that requires me to sit down and focus on one thing that I can’t touch for an extended period of time, and when my schoolwork got more difficult and more complex and more because higher level classes have more assignments, I realized I couldn’t do it all. And I don’t understand why it’s happening, because I love my schoolwork. I love reading and I love learning and I’m really good at processing the information and making something new out of it so I can’t figure out why I’m not able to do it anymore but any time I try to sit down and work I end up fidgety or spaced out or staring at a wall thinking about things that happened years ago or cleaning my kitchen because we simply cannot have crumbs on the counter, and any time I even try to think about what I need to do I shut down and need to take a nap because I know that each assignment will take three or five or ten hours and I simply don’t have time or energy for that and it’s too frustrating to even try because I know I’ll fail either way. And I have guesses about why it’s so difficult, but I guess I’ll never know for sure because I never learned how to ask for help and at this point I’m too proud to admit I need it because I should be able to tough it out and work through it alone like I did with everything else. And because I think it’s too late anyway, because I’m graduating in five months and I got by with good grades through high school and through my first three years of college and if I could do it then I should be able to do it now. But I wonder what creative and academic and intelligence potential I’m not meeting because just passing my classes always took all of my energy, and I don’t have that kind of energy anymore because it got to be more than I could handle. It breaks my heart to think of how much more I could have done over the last four years, and how much more I could be doing now, if only I had asked for help. If I had asked for help then, I could be helping the people who need it now, but all of my energy is going into scraping by and staying awake and I don’t have enough left for anything else. It feels like every time I start to get a handle on my issues, every time I start to recover or every time I feel like I’m improving, a new problem comes along and knocks me right back where I started.

Learning about disability this semester, learning about what counts as disability, and learning that my laundry list of mental health issues counts as disability, was a lot to process. I’ve always known that there was something wrong with me, but I’ve always been too proud to let anyone help me, because I’ve always thought I should be able to do it on my own. Now I wonder if there was ever anything wrong with me in the first place. It’s not fair that not being able to do certain things, or that having “inappropriate” reactions to other things, is something that could ever be wrong with me. I should have been able to say that I couldn’t do something, or that I was feeling some way about something, and not have that be bad.  Because even with all the times my parents expressed their concern about my behavior, there were also all the times they got angry with me for not doing the things I was supposed to do or for forgetting the things that I should have remembered, and I understood that my problems were something I shouldn’t have had. There’s a lot of capitalism and white supremacy and ableism that go into how we’re indoctrinated into thinking we should be able to do or to act or to think, and I feel like my understanding of those structures came too late in life to make a difference for myself. And I know that’s objectively untrue, because I’m twenty-one and I have a lot of life left to help myself, but the feeling that I’ve made it this far and should be able to keep going is hard to shake. I guess applying the knowledge to myself is the next step, because at some point I’m going to have to learn that I deserve help and I don’t have to do everything on my own, if I ever want to reach the point where I have enough energy to really help anyone else.