What is it like to have an anxiety disorder? And what do I do about it?

So yesterday, I left you on a cliffhanger.  I told you I was going to tell you why my blog is called OCDon’t (and I will), but that’s gonna take a little leading up to.

If you’re anything like me, you may be thinking “Oh, my gosh!  I have OCD!  All this time I thought I was just weird, but now I have a full blown disorder!  Now I have to get therapy, and my friends will look at me weird, and I’m gonna have my own TV show where I solve crimes in my own quirky way, and-” stop.  I don’t know if you have OCD.  I’m not a doctor, and chances are, neither are you.  I remember, back in the beginning of college, reading my psychology textbook, and going “I have that, and I have that, and oh, my gosh, I have that!”  This is ridiculous.  It’s impossible for one person to have every disease and disorder known to man.  It just is.  At the end of the day, all I knew for sure was that I was a hypochondriac.  When I was a kid, I was so sure I was gonna get diabetes or cancer or something.  When I grew up, it was mental diseases I obsessed about (for the record, another possible manifestation of OCD is the obsession about disease, being afraid/certain that you’re gonna get one.  Go figure).  I knew that about myself.  So I didn’t tell anyone.  I knew I was being ridiculous, and I was afraid that no one would believe me (I didn’t even believe me).  And then, after I was introduced to the show Monk, I was absolutely certain that I was making it up, just to copy what I saw on TV.  Never mind that I’d been having obsessive compulsive behavior for years before Monk aired.

So, how do you know if you have OCD?  How do you know if you have any anxiety disorder?  I mean, everybody has some sense of order, right?  If the tiles a crooked, and it bugs you, does that mean you have OCD?  If you get scared, does that mean you have an anxiety disorder?  Hopefully, I can clear a few things up for you.  I don’t know what it’s like to be someone else.  I’m sorry, I just don’t.  So I could be way off on this.  But I’ll try to explain.

Let’s start with anxiety disorders.  I would like to draw your attention to the word disorder.  Everybody gets scared sometimes.  It’s a natural reaction to the world around you.  There would be something wrong with you if you never got scared ever.  What makes it a disorder, is that it inhibits (or even halts) your ability to function normally.  It’s one thing to be afraid of heights.  That makes sense.  It’s a defense mechanism, to keep you safe.  It’s a whole other thing to be afraid of shampoo.  To take you into the mind of someone with an anxiety disorder, we have to travel deep into your imagination.  Come with me, on this delightful journey, into my head.  (I hope you brought your towel).


Imagine, if you will, that you could see something no one else could.  Everybody else is walking along, completely oblivious to the world around them.  But you see it.  You see beneath the facade, into the fabric of reality.  And you know that things around you (not all things, but most) have the potential to change, from regular, ordinary, inanimate objects, into living, breathing, creatures.  Now, I say “not all”, because I, personally, have no qualms with pillows, TVs, ironing boards, or walls.  But I do have a problem with certain foods, children, strangers, printed patterns on clothing, getting my picture taken, and making phone calls.

Imagine, going about your day, surrounded by these objects.  You, and only you, know what they are capable of becoming.  You have to keep going, pretending like nothing’s there, because if you told them about it, everyone would think you were crazy.  You go to work, there’s the phone, sitting on your desk.  You know you have to call your boss, your clients, your coworkers, your spouse, but you also know that at any minute, it could change into one of those little monsters from the transformer’s movie and start shooting laser-beams at you and your coworkers.  So, you put it off.  You go to lunch, you order a salad, but, what’s this?  There are little bacon pieces in it.  You’re not vegetarian, you eat chicken and beef, but not pork.  And especially not bacon.  Chicken and beef don’t sprout wings and fangs and go for your jugular.  After work, you go home, your sister stops by with a dress she was done with and wants you to have it.  But it’s got prints all over it.  Any second, it could come alive and strangle you with its sleeves, crawling off your dead body in search of the next victim to terrorize with its menacing paisley design.

Get the picture?  Everywhere you go, there are choices to be made. Only instead of it being between two relatively harmless things, it’s between life and death.  Everyone around you is fine, it’s just you that has to make these kinds of decisions.  Someone knocks on the door--is it someone you know, or a fire-breathing monster on the other side of that door?  You have to drive to the store, but you’ll have to make a turn into heavy traffic--is there enough room?  Is everyone else going too fast?  Will you risk your life to go get milk and eggs, or wait twenty minutes for a reasonable break in traffic?  You go to make breakfast, but the pan you use to cook your eggs has bacon in it.  Bacon.  The rest of them are too big, it would be absurd to use one of them to cook just one egg, but the only one you can possibly use has been poisoned!  What do you do?  What do you do?

The day before I created this blog, I was trying to put to words what anxiety felt like.  I knew that anxiety meant fear.  And I never really thought of myself being literally afraid of everything.  Because that didn’t make sense.  I knew bacon couldn’t kill me (well, okay, one piece wouldn’t, anyway).  I knew answering the phone wasn’t the end of the world: people do it all day.  In fact, some people get paid to do it.  It’s their actual job to talk on the phone.  I know that it’s ridiculous to turn down a paisley dress or shirt: it looks good on other people, why not me?  I never, ever defined what I had as actual fear, except when the anxiety got much higher, and I was confronted with things that it actually made sense to be afraid of, such as heights or shady-looking strangers, or public speaking.  The rest of the time, I didn’t think I was afraid.  When I grew anxious about something, I rarely stop to think “what is it about this person, place, or thing that makes me want to run in the opposite direction?”  But the thing is, that’s the way fear works.  When you find a rattlesnake, rearing up and hissing at you, do you think “hey, those things are dangerous, it looks like it might bite me and cause me significant pain, and/or death.  Perhaps I should back away in the near future, thereby insuring my survival.”  No!  You don’t!  If you think at all, it’s either gonna be “RUN AWAY!” or “KILL IT!!! KILL IT WITH FIRE!!!” and then you do that thing.  The other option is to think neither, or both, and be unable to decide which, and then your brain gets stuck on “I’M GONNA DIE I’M GONNA DIE I’M GONNA DIE”, and then you freeze up, and die.  Or maybe the snake gets bored and slithers away.  But my point is, it’s either fight, flight, or freeze.  That’s all we got.  It’s the natural reaction to danger.  When you’re afraid, you don’t stop to question whether or not this thing is actually a threat.  You deal with it however you can, and find out later.

When you have anxiety disorder, your brain gets stuck with the fight or flight mechanism stuck on.  Your brain says you’re in danger, but you can’t see a real threat, so you make one up.  If I’m making breakfast, and it goes off, I don’t stop and say “well, I’m feeling threatened, but I don’t see anything dangerous, so I must be fine.”  No.  I look at whatever made me anxious, be it bacon in my egg pan, the empty egg carton, the sink full of dirty dishes, or my mom coming in and asking me about my plans for the day, and my mind just says “don’t”.

Someone asks me to go to a party?  Don’t.

There’s mushrooms in that--Don’t.

That’s plaid--Don’t.

Leave the house alone?  Don’t.

Take that class?  Don’t.

Kiss that guy?  Don’t.

Don’t buy that shirt.

Don’t talk to her.

Don’t touch that.

Don’t eat that.

Don’t do that.

Don’t.

Don’t.

DON’T.

That night, I was sitting there, all alone.  I wanted to go to sleep, but thoughts were rushing through my head, and I realized that all this time, I wasn't following my gut, or my personal preference, or subconscious thought.  All my life, I've been afraid.  That’s all it was, was plain old fear.  I didn't know it, but it was anxiety that was telling me “no”.  That’s when this image came into my head, and I just had to draw it.  It was the perfect representation of what it’s like to have an anxiety disorder.

If you have it, maybe your brain is built that way, or maybe something went wrong in the past.  Maybe it was little things at first, prompts that you chose to obey instead of ignore, that got bigger and bigger, until it was too much.  But however you got here, you’re not alone.  You’re not the only one who’s tired of hearing “DON’T”.

I have one more story, then I’ll leave you for today.  This one was told to me by my uncle, about a year ago, and it’s stuck with me, and I want to share it with you.  My uncle, who is in the field of mental health, has spent a lot of time in South America.  Down there, in the jungle, there are a lot of dangerous animals.  For example, the black panther.  My uncle asked his guide an obvious question: what do you do if you come across a black panther?  The guide had an interesting, if not terrifying response.  You don’t run, you don’t hide, you don’t try to fight it.  You look him in the eye, and stare him down.  If that thought isn’t enough to make you want to pee your pants, I don’t know what will.  

Panthers are big.  They’re jungle cats, wild and ferocious.  They could rip you to pieces before you had time to say “Wait, Bagheera, it’s me, Mowgli!”  Why in the world would you want to stand there, giving him the stink eye?  This is because the black panther, beautiful, powerful, and dangerous as it is, is not all that smart.  He knows that he’s the biggest, baddest dude in town, and he knows everybody else knows it, too.  So anybody dumb enough to look him in the eye, let alone just stand there, has to pretty big and bad himself.  Like in prison.

So, let’s go back to my uncle in the jungle.  We’re wandering around, and it’s all well and good.  Eventually, we come across a panther.  Yeah, we know, look him in the eye, and he’ll leave you alone.  Easy, peasy, lemon squeezy.  But what if you don’t have any light? There were some places that the trees were so thick, no light reached the jungle floor.  Sometimes, my uncle’s group would go on expeditions , carving their way through the pitch black jungle with just a flashlight and some bug spray.  Unfortunately, batteries only last so long, and sometimes they die, leaving the men in complete darkness.  So, when a panther gets a whiff of you, and starts following you through the trees, and it's too dark to see him... what do you do?

You face the roar.

We all meet panthers every day, of all shapes and sizes.  Sometimes it looks like a person, sometimes it’s just a piece of bacon, or a T-shirt.  Every time I meet that panther, I have a choice.  I can face it, or feed it.  Obviously, I don’t want to get eaten, so, when a little panther wanders into my living room, I get up, go to the fridge, and give it some leftover pizza, because I just don’t have the energy to deal with it today.  It goes away, leaves me alone for a bit.  But it’ll come back: they always do.  And when it does, it’s a little bit bigger.  So now I’m worried, now I have to feed it, or it’ll eat me instead, so I give him that turkey I was saving for dinner, and it goes away.  Every time I feed it, it gets bigger.  Every time it comes back, it gets harder to face it, until one day, it’s bigger than me.  One day, I won’t have enough food in the fridge to feed it anymore, and he’ll start eating me.

I have to face it now.  Today.  Stop feeding my panthers.  Every time I turn him away hungry, he gets smaller.  Every time he comes back, it’ll be easier to face him, until one day, he’s just a tiny little toy cat, that I can lock up and put away, never to be seen again.

Face the roar.

Penny