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Why I Have Anxiety and Depression

Why I Have Anxiety and Depression?

A Memoir by Guest Writer, Callan Head
Indianapolis, IN

Was the anxiety and depression always there in me from the beginning? Was it something that I was born with and grew with in me like my organs and the rest of the parts of my body? Or was it planted and grown from the people in my life, my environment, like a seed, fertilized and watered? The things I was subjected to at a young age, growing up faster than any child should have to. There isn’t a time I can remember that there wasn’t fear pricking at my brain, making my heart race and my stomach turn. Would that have always been the case or was it just my experience? Do I fear these things because of the experience or is the way I reacted to the experience because of something already inside me?

I was very young, kindergarten maybe, the wife of my dad’s friend coming to our house frantic because someone was looking in their windows at her. Over twenty-five plus years later and I check to make sure my curtains are closed every night. Second grade, I was hit by a car. Afterwards if you even suggested crossing a street I was panicking, I STILL look down an empty street both ways before crossing with a racing heart. I distinctly recall vomiting in a man’s driveway after I had been told I may have to cross a highway that we had broken down on. I had a volatile family on both sides. If adults were arguing or voices started getting raised, I was puking.

Growing up in the mid-west, tornado warning, tornado watch, severe thunderstorm warning? I was puking and hiding in the bathroom. I had never even been in a tornado. A man my dad had ripped off, outside of my family’s house, screaming he was going to burn it down and me quietly crying in my room in the dark scared I’m going to die in a fire that night. I’m told I’m supposed to be asleep while the man yells outside. So again, I ask do I fear these things because of the experience or is the way I react to the experience because of something already lying dormant inside me?

I’m supposed to be sleeping. I’m supposed to be sleeping because I have to go to school the next day, and I did go. Through all of these things I had go to school, take tests, do homework, participate in life like everything was normal. I had to rise above and find a way through on my own. In elementary school. I wasn’t going to get help learning to cope from my teachers or the school, they had no idea what was going on in my life. I certainly wasn’t going to get it from my family. My parents were alcoholics and drug addicts. My grandparents, my father’s parents that is, did what they could but that was mainly keeping us fed and a roof over our heads when my parents failed to do so. They were very ‘old school’ so anxiety, depression, mental health in general wasn’t a topic of conversation. It wasn’t even a blip on the screen. We mainly only saw my mom’s parents for holidays. They seemed to want to keep their distance, not that I could blame them. Living with drug addiction is difficult and if you can just stay away from it why wouldn’t you?

I couldn’t of course. It was thrust upon me against my will and there was no way out of my real life. So, I turned inside. My imagination. I would dream up elaborate stories of people whose lives were nothing like mine or I’d make up people who were just like me, who dealt with the same obstacles I had in my way and overcame them. Looking back now I remember a great deal of the trauma and the fear it evokes even to this day, but I remember the stories more. Then I got older, became a teenager and went through the feelings of inadequacy all teenagers feel, perhaps a bit more profound given my circumstances at home. By then my mother was not in my life leaving me with a dad who was still an addict, a drunk, and had a raging temper. My grandparents still tried their best, but they were older and could only do so much and my grandma was in and out of the hospital during that time. My imagination and dream world faded, and depression and anxiety hooked their nasty claws deep into me.

At this point I had completely given up at school. I attended sometimes did homework none of the time. In my home drugs were not for mental health they were for recreation. So that’s what I did. I started sneaking my dad’s cigarettes and alcohol easily enough, then his weed, then his pills. He knew, he didn’t care unless I took drugs he had wanted to do. I was using all of these drugs to fill a void in me that felt like it would grow exponentially. They didn’t. The void was still there, worse even. By the time I was sixteen I was a high school dropout, bouncing from crappy job to crappy job, drinking, smoking, and doing drugs every day.

I still didn’t know how to cope with what I was dealing with and so I started to self-harm. When my dad found out I was met with ridicule. An ‘Oh so you want to kill yourself?’ attitude. I didn‘t know how to explain why I did it. Oh, so you want to kill yourself? No but also yes. I didn’t want to kill myself, but I wished that I was dead, and I didn’t know how to deal with those emotions, that kind of pain. I was still a child really, even if I had the stress and worries of an adult with a job and bills, I was just a kid still. So, I would substitute the emotional pain with the physical and then the fact that I was hurting could make sense to me. But at sixteen/seventeen I wasn’t intellectually or emotionally equipped to express that.

I floated through life like that for a long time not really caring because in my mind I didn’t see a future for myself. If you would have told twelve-year-old, sixteen-year-old, twenty-one-year-old, me that one day I’d be my age now, well I don’t know that they would have believed you. My depression was at the forefront during most of that time but my anxiety still lingered in other ways. Clinging to toxic and codependent relationships trying to validate my worth. Normal people had nightmares about axe wielding killers chasing them, my nightmares were waking up late for work and losing my job ensuring my homelessness. So, I would wake up and leave EXTRA early to be sure I was on time. I actually STILL do this. It wasn’t until I was in my mid-twenties that I actually started to address my mental health. I had known I had depression that was painfully obvious but even then, if you had asked me if I had anxiety, I’d have told you no. Looking back now I don’t know how I didn’t see it. Perhaps I was looking at the picture too close at the time.

Since the beginning of this journey for me I’ve been on and off a few different behavioral medications and mood stabilizers. Most helped, even if just a little, some didn’t, and then for a long time I didn’t take any. I was happy with where I was in my life. After everything I’d been through as a child and young adult, I felt like I had managed to do what the characters in my stories from my childhood had done. I’d gotten out, gotten through. I had finished beauty school and had a career that I loved. I wasn’t self-medicating with drugs and alcohol, I finally felt secure and on a path that there was a future for and I was content, happy even. I would love for that to be the end and be able to say happily ever after but if anyone reading this deals with depression and anxiety then you know there’s no cure all. There’s always a chance of relapse and it’s more likely than not.

I went through a lot of things over the course of a few years. My dad dying of an overdose, a breakup with a long-term partner, coming out, a move, then another move, LOTS of uncertainty that had me spiraling into my depression and anxiety and I knew I needed to do something immediately or it was going to get bad quickly. That’s when I started talking to a therapist and we started trying some different meds. I’m not going to lie and say it was great right off the bat. It takes time to warm up to talking to someone about your deepest secrets and fears and you have to cycle through meds to figure out what works for you. After two years I talk to my therapist (who I LOVE) every two weeks and my psychologist (who’s also a wonderful person) every month. I’m on a trio of medications for depression, anxiety, and

adhd that seem to be working for me right now and I’ve taken to writing stories again. Although now, instead of trying to insert myself into my stories to escape my present life I write to let out the pain from my past.

So, was this always with me, would I have always come out to be this person with these fears that linger into adulthood no matter the path? Maybe, maybe not, I’ll never really know. One thing I can be certain of is that it was part of who I was then, it is part of who I am now, and it always will be but that’s okay because it’s not ALL that I am. So, bask in the high points, cherish them, make lots of memories during them because a low point will come again. It may be easier than the last, maybe harder but there’s always a way back up, back out. Never forget. Never give up.

Editor

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