You're Not Special

by Meghan Rienks

  I’m never going to be “recovered” or “healed” from my depression, and that’s okay. No matter where I am or what I’m doing, my depression is always there. Sometimes she’s dormant, hiding away to let me bask in the sunshine; other times she rears her ugly head and engulfs me for months at a time. I can’t prepare for the bad times, or anticipate the good times. The only things I can rely on are my support system and my treatment plan. I don’t know if I’d still be here without therapy. I won’t ever be able to get rid of my depression, but as you put in the work, you learn how to cope with it in healthier ways. There’s a light at the end of the tunnel. There’s another tunnel after that, and that one has a light too.

  chapter 20 anxiety

  I think I’ve dealt with anxiety my whole life; I just didn’t always know what it was. I’ve touched on the fact that I was a really insecure kid who overcompensated by projecting an over-the-top image of confidence. Which I don’t necessarily see as a bad thing. I mean, it would have been ideal if I actually felt those feelings. I think the attempt was a step in the right direction. I’m bringing this fact back up because it has a lot to do with my history with anxiety.

  Growing up is hard. We sit through health classes that discuss hormones and the changes our bodies go through physically. In some cases they touch on the emotional changes that also occur, but a lot of the time they don’t. All I was told was that my teenage hormones were blowing all my feelings and reactions way out of proportion. I was reassured that I would grow out of it, and that was that. Now, there is much truth in this. Hormones can cause your body to do crazy things, like grow boobs, a mustache, or both. I am not discounting a scientific fact. The problem I have is that at that age we’re basically told to be patient and “ride it out” without any follow-up or actual conversation about what we’re feeling. If we run a fever, our parents are quick to schedule a check-in with our pediatrician just to be safe. When it comes to mental health, we lump the symptoms and side effects together with the emotional roller coaster of puberty and growing up instead of validating those feelings and taking time to figure out whether they’re caused by this change in hormones or if they are the result of a permanent condition.

  I grew up hearing that these invisible “hormones” were the root of all my problems, and I believed that. I blindly assumed that I was going through a phase and that these feelings did not deserve attention because they were temporary. Which, when you think about it, is kind of a shitty way to live: just letting yourself be okay with being unhappy. As if we’re paying our dues until we’re grown-ups, at which point we’ve finally earned happiness. I never found it comforting when people told me that life didn’t get good until college. They’d say it as if that was supposed to take the pressure off. I shouldn’t waste my energy, because this was just the dress rehearsal for my life. I listened to them because I didn’t know any better, and my feelings were given no credibility by the adults around me. Therefore, I didn’t give them credibility, either; I swept all those thoughts and feelings I had under the carpet, and I just ignored them. Some of them went away, and others stuck around. The ones that stayed, I normalized. I got used to them, and I thought either everybody else did, too, or I was completely crazy.

  I’m now only just starting to recognize aspects of my adolescence that might not have been as normal as I assumed; although normalcy is somewhat of a spectrum, you get what I mean. My whole life I was classified as an extrovert. I was outgoing, chatty, loud, and a total ham. I was in theater and I told anybody who would listen about my dreams of being an actress. I was so confused that, despite all that, I spent most of my day feeling inexplicably terrified. I was fine when I was with my friends, but if I had to do anything alone, I completely shut down. The thought of getting called on in class brought me to tears. If I knew it was coming, I would plan out exactly what I would say and repeat it in a loop over and over in my head, agonizing over how it would sound out loud. My palms were constantly sweaty, my stomach was permanently in knots, and my voice shook like a shake weight. I loved performing and acting in plays, but I was completely petrified the whole way through. I made excuse after excuse for why I couldn’t participate in PE. If my best friend was home sick from school, I’d fake illness. If my only friend in math class had to miss it for a doctor’s appointment, I’d ditch. It sounds so dramatic in writing, but I honestly don’t know how to convey the feeling of being so anxious, you’re actually afraid your heart might stop. I had no idea what anxiety was at the time. I associated a fear of public speaking with being shy. Because I wasn’t shy, that did not apply to me. There wasn’t one “fear” I was facing, and I’m not sure if you could even classify it as a fear at all. It’s not that I was afraid of something. I was paralyzed by everything.

  Mental health wasn’t something that was discussed in depth at school. We had those flyers posted on the walls telling us that if we knew someone was planning on harming themselves or somebody else, we should call 911. The only exposure I had to talking about mental health as more than “suicide prevention” was reruns of the original UK series Skins that I LimeWired to my family desktop. Even then my knowledge was limited at best. I had no concept of anxiety as a disorder, just as a word. I don’t necessarily believe in labels wholeheartedly. But in this situation, if I had stumbled upon a description of what it meant to have “anxiety,” I might have stopped thinking I was just broken. I might have started getting help.

  Without intending to, I found an outlet in writing. Every social interaction I was so terrified of in person was 10,000 times easier online. I could think about what I wanted to say, type it, and erase it a hundred times before anyone could even see it. I could write down everything I wanted to, and the words looked so much more beautiful on paper or on the screen than they did collecting dust inside my brain. I would write stories (fanfic) about mystical lands (Hogwarts) and the people of these worlds (the golden trio). I could finally just let go and be myself. I never saw this timid, shaking, stammering girl as a facet of my personality or even closely related. It felt like Invasion of the Body Snatchers. The real Meghan was the one who laughed so hard she snorted, lip-synched to Ashlee Simpson songs, and quoted The Producers. The version of myself I identified with the most was when I was surrounded by my few close friends. When I was out of that safe place, it felt as if somebody else had taken over my body entirely. I did everything I could to avoid leaving my comfort zone at any cost. This is also why I personally benefited so much from the technology boom at this time. I started keeping an online journal, and I’d write about anything and everything I was feeling. Just getting those words out started to make me feel a little lighter. I still dreaded the social demands of Monday mornings, but I at least had this nightly escape.

  My junior year, I found a new coping mechanism. His name was Captain Morgan.

  Being drunk made the jittery and uneasy parts of me disappear, leaving me with the boisterous and uninhibited person I pretended to be. Suddenly, I was in control. I was not a slave to these emotions I knew were useless. I could shut them up or drown them with liquor. When I was drunk, my comfort zone was no longer limited to a handful of people. I could talk to whoever and say whatever without a care in the world. Everything was easier. The social interactions I had so desperately dreaded became a breeze, and it was invigorating. In my mind I had unlocked the key to being the best version of myself. It just also happened to be the drunkest version of myself. I won’t go too much more into detail about my relationship with alcohol, as it has its own chapter. I bring it up again here because it does play an important role in my journey with anxiety. As I still remained ignorant about what I was struggling with mentally, instead of suffering in silence, I had found an intoxicating (literally) solution. Or so I thought.

  The social demands and obligations of high school were nothing compared to those of college. The comfort zone I rarely strayed from was now four hundred miles away. I had none of my best friends as buffers. I didn’t have my bed, my little
blue bedroom, or the backyard where I used to pretend I was making potions, imagining I was at Hogwarts, grinding up acorns with dirt and grass and calling it an “elixir.” I was as far out of my element as I could be, and I hated it. Before I knew it, it was September and I was in River-fucking-side, California. “Miserable” doesn’t even begin to describe how I felt. I was that girl moving into the dorms in full-blown hysterics. My parents patted me on the shoulder and told me it would all be fine. I curled up into the fetal position on the twin XL mattress in my dorm and cried. And then cried some more. At some point my sobs turned into shallow breaths, and I began hyperventilating until I passed out. I woke up with a searing migraine and what I assumed to be my new roommate looking at me, wondering what the fuck she had gotten herself into. Same, girl. Same. At this time I didn’t know what a panic attack was. I had cried myself to the point of passing out before, and I popped Excedrin for migraines like Hugh Hefner popped Viagra. While this “episode” may seem alarming, it wasn’t my first.

  On paper, college should have caused me a hundred times more anxiety than high school did, but it didn’t. While it checked off every box on my no-go and will-send-me-into-Colin-Creevey-like-petrification list, it also allowed me a lifestyle in which I could silence that stress. And by “lifestyle,” I mean going out five to seven days a week, living solely on dining hall tater tots, Diet Coke, questionable pho, and blue raspberry Svedka. Or the whipped cream flavor. Who am I kidding? I’d drink anything I was handed.

  I wasn’t growing out of my anxiety at all. If anything, it was getting worse; I was just now in an environment that favored my coping mechanism. The effects it had on me were not unique; I think a lot of people feel the same way, even if it’s not to the same degree. I was essentially self-medicating for an underlying issue I didn’t know I had, and that can be a very slippery slope.

  Everything came crashing down sophomore year. The satellite safety zone I had found with two of my sorority sisters imploded. I started having regular panic attacks, anywhere between one and six a day. It was crippling. Those irrational fears I had of not being liked were no longer irrational and no longer fears. They were real and they were happening. I tried as hard as I could to push through those feelings, but it was so overwhelming. I felt completely broken and I didn’t know what to do. I tried to just continue on as if nothing had happened, but it was like rubbing my stomach and patting my head at the same time. I felt so disconnected from myself but somehow, at the same time, beyond hyperaware of my every atom and molecule. I felt completely and utterly out of control and so painfully alone. I slept in my closet for two months—though I don’t know if I really slept at all.

  After Thanksgiving break, I moved into my own one-bedroom apartment in Riverside. When my parents visited, they pointed out the changes in me. I was fidgety, my eyes darted all over the place, I wasn’t sleeping, I was making list after list, and I was neurotic to the point of obsessive. I would later find out through therapy that I was displaying obsessive-compulsive tendencies. It was a desperate attempt on my part to feel a sense of control when I had none. I had no clue what was going on with me. I just thought I was as broken as I felt.

  In everyone’s mind, my problems could be traced back to the bullying and those girls from Riverside. Once I was removed from that situation, everything after that should have been better. Part of me naively believed that as well. I thought the whole out-of-sight-and-out-of-mind thing would come into effect, but it did nothing of the sort. I can only relate it to a mistreated dog that gets rescued and adopted. In theory, once it’s out of the house where it was abused and mistreated, the dog would just respond to the new, better, happier, more loving place. But instead the dog retains the same tendencies and demeanor from the unhealthy environment. Time can heal wounds, but there are some things that really stick with you. Those alarming red flags in regard to my mental state and general well-being went unnoticed by my friends in LA because those indications were all they knew of me. There was no previous Meghan to compare them to. Then my best friend Sydney moved in with me for a summer, and she witnessed a particularly bad panic attack.

  It was a seemingly typical evening. Sydney and I were catching up on chores and doing laundry. After putting my clothes in the dryer, I fell asleep on the couch watching Sex and the City reruns. The next thing I knew, I was being shaken out of a deep sleep. I opened my eyes to find Sydney kneeling beside me and the apartment filled with smoke.

  She ran toward the bathroom, which seemed to be where the smoke was the thickest. She shouted that the door was slightly warm to the touch but nowhere near hot as she gingerly opened it. Upon doing so, a wave of smoke poured out, and flames could be seen from what used to be the washer-dryer unit. Up until that point the smoke alarm had been dead silent, but now, with the door open, it rang through the apartment complex. This all happened in a matter of seconds. Suddenly, Sydney was back by my side, grabbing our coats and our phones, ushering me outside as she dialed 911. I don’t know if I was still asleep or in shock, but my memories of this skip around. We sat on the pavement as the fire department rushed in to put out the flames. I don’t know how long we sat there in silence, Sydney’s arms wrapped around me, stroking my hair as I stared blankly ahead. She put her arm around my waist to help me stand up as the fire chief approached us. She held my hand as he explained that our apartment complex had installed our laundry unit without following proper protocol. In doing so, there was debris trapped in the ventilation system, which had caused the fire. Sydney nodded, asked all the right questions, and answered all the fire chief’s questions, all without ever letting go of my hand. He said they had removed the unit for disposal in the morning but they’d need another forty-five minutes to ventilate our apartment before we could go back inside. She thanked him and we returned to our previous spot on the curb. At the time I felt eerily numb, which I now understand to be shock. Forty-five minutes later the fire department packed up and left. With Sydney’s arm wrapped around my waist to steady me, we began to make our way to the apartment. As we rounded the corner, we saw what used to be our washer-dryer unit. Or at least what was left of it. It was covered in soot and ash, melted, deformed, and emitting a foul smell reminiscent of burning hair, but one hundred times worse. I didn’t even bother to peer inside. It would only make matters worse to see what this fiery beast had done to my bedding, underwear, and sweatshirts. I wasn’t sure what I was expecting to see once we got inside the apartment, but whatever I had thought, the reality was so much worse. The walls were stained with smoke, some were streaked with soot, the carpets were about ten shades darker than they had been that morning, and the number of footprints left by the firemen’s boots looked less like a crime scene and more like a line dance. The door to the laundry unit had been turned to ash, the linoleum floor had melted and warped, and the walls were burned from the baseboard to the ceiling. It was so bad in some places that it created holes in the drywall. The once-white ceiling was now the color of burnt marshmallows. Despite the machine they had used to circulate fresh air, it still smelled and tasted like we were inside a doused campfire. We wove our way through the rest of the apartment. We were met with the same discoloration of the carpet and the walls, as well as a thick coating of ash on every surface and object in sight. We cracked the door open to the bedroom. I stood there staring at the bare bed and the stained walls, and it all hit me. Tears flooded from my eyes as I collapsed onto the naked mattress and curled into a ball as my body was racked by hysterical sobs. Sydney silently lay down next to me and softly traced my spine with her fingers. When my cries turned into convulsions and my breath began to escape me, she flipped off the light switches. She softly coached my breathing and reassured me that everything was going to be okay. I don’t know how long it lasted. When my heartbeat started to return to normal, she held a glass of water to my lips. She made me take tiny sips until my breathing evened out. I must have fallen asleep soon after that, because the next thing I remember, it was morning. Over co
ffee and Barefoot Contessa, Sydney asked me how often I was getting panic attacks. I didn’t know what to say. I wasn’t even really sure what a panic attack was. I had heard the term before but only in the abstract way people dance around discussing mental disorders. I had assumed I would know if I had a panic attack. I thought it would be like getting a bloody nose: something I didn’t consciously go out of my way to get, but an obvious fact when it occurred. When I answered her question, I mustered the biggest smile and chalked it up to a long and stressful night.

  Sydney definitely didn’t believe me, but she didn’t push the matter. Instead she leaned over to give me a hug. After a few minutes I told her she’d be late for work if she didn’t let go, but she just held on tighter.

  It wasn’t until I started seeing a professional to help with my longtime battle with ADHD that the conversation about my anxiety even came up. Together we’ve been able to identify it as a partial source of my anxiety. I learned that while my general and social anxiety did not stem from any one specific thing or event, my frustration with myself and concern with others’ perception of me were partially tied to the fact that I was so deeply insecure about my intellect. I had always felt like the funny friend, as in the whole “Dance, monkey, dance” thing. From the time I was eleven or twelve I was already labeled a ditzy blonde and an airhead, and I really believed that. I struggled so hard in school to follow what was happening. Even in casual conversations, I would try as hard as I could to stay focused and listen, but it was physically impossible. It made me come across like a self-absorbed and disinterested bitch. I knew that. I struggled to hold up my half of a conversation or, even worse, explain something. I could hear how circular my sentences were and how many times I said “like” to buy myself more time to get my mind back on track. A large part of my fear surrounding social interactions was due to this insecurity; I just didn’t know it was a result of my ADHD.