The journey of the anxious mind - 01

This text is just the first of many that I will end up writing here about my life journey with a diagnosis that is often neglected or misused. Chronic anxiety. I can say that until maybe I was twenty-eight years old, I was not very clear to me that "anxiety" was my diagnosis, in the sense of real illness. I understood the concept of "being anxious" as simply a process of euphoria (sometimes for good reasons, sometimes for bad reasons) where anxiety was felt. But, honestly, until I went to a psychiatrist, with things already quite off-axis, I hadn't heard anyone tell me that I had chronic anxiety.
And discovering that was undoubtedly a very, very important process. Not that discovering anxiety as an "almost curable" disease is pleasant or positive, but knowing that it is there is much better than spending years and years of your life, suffering without even understanding your suffering and the worst,without having the help needed to help ease the process.

I found this bear along the way on a trail that ran along the river, in a post-flood season. I didn't even touch it, I just wanted to capture the moment as I saw it, thinking about how many stories that bear had and, where was now the child who probably loved him very much at some point.

I don’t blame my parents for not understanding anxiety as a pathological process that needed outside help, the 80s and 90s were completely different in terms of mental health, whether in terms of popular knowledge about the "normality" of this type of problem, that is, in terms of professionals who were accessible at the time to be able to help a child going through something he doesn't even know how to explain. But still, it is quite bitter to think how much I experienced in a state of suffering that, perhaps, could have been avoided with the right instructions. I can see myself as small, my daughter's age, anxious to face a world, an extremely new and complex world, full of interactions that were nowhere near my desire for life. Being exposed to all these layers of new obligations, interactions and acts had its clear trigger to transform me into who I am (in a bad way) when I started to study. There is no doubt, the episode of my first day of school deserves an article just for him, and I will not stick to that detail. What I can say is that, in the view of a child with anxiety, everything is much, much more intense and serious, it is as if he lived the experiences with a filter of distress and fear, with the sentences written in bold, with threats in a constant attack position. And unlike now, where I get to know what is a real threat and a crisis of distress from my "flight or fight" state, when I was little, there was no such distinction.

I felt hostage to the world, and it was even difficult to explain to my mother after all what, at school, was so destructive for me. So much so that I don't have many memories of any conversations about it. What are left are the feelings and memories of me with stomach pain, cramps,
craving and diarrhea every time I needed to go to school to present a job in front of others, or when there was a school performance with dancing and all those disturbing woes that compel children to do indifferent to their will, as if the law were governed by and outgoing and self-assured.
I remember how badly I was in school situations, by everyone, every year. And things only started to change when I was practically in my last years of high school, when I was a teenager I literally didn't care about anything, and I had a total grudge and disgust for the whole system so sad and badly resolved that it was the public school in my city. Of course, adolescence is a very stupid time, however, I can see clearly how much I channeled all my suffering and anguish through adolescent fury and my desire to isolate myself from that adult and completely nauseating human world that I saw under the eyes of an adult child.

Photo of my feet staring at the not-so-deep waters of the waterfall of a neighboring city that we usually go to cool off, jumping off a high rock to swim is a classic "normal" anxiety moment that anyone will experience if they want to face this experience, now , imagine what it feels like to "not be sure whether to skip or not" ALL the time, EVERYWHERE.

Over the years I learned to wear masks, several of them. This process became a very efficient protocol, when I needed to do things in public, when I needed to work, meet people, I dressed formally as a normal person who can act and look normal, the afflicted creature with a knot in the throat and stomach kept brooding inside that armor / dress. But it didn't take much for the occasional anxiety to surface, especially when I was with myself, free. And yet it is. In personal silence, everything goes into a state of distress and torpor if I am not harmonized with myself and my world. The big difference was really getting to know psychiatry, giving a chance to "traditional pharmacy medicine" that until recently I spit and hated. Studying, understanding and testing medications to alleviate my psychological problems was by far the most important step I took in my life, and, of course, that was also an ordeal, in a way. Why, everyone who takes medicine knows, finding the right medication for you sometimes takes a long, long time, in exhausting attempts and sometimes even worse than being without medication. So much so that only now, at the age of thirty-three, did I finally find my medicine. But that is also history for another post.

Thanks for reading a little bit of this journey from an anxious mind, if you identify with the topic,
I await your comment and possibly your reblog. I also thank you for your votes now.

Thomas Blum