The whole “former gifted kid burnout” is real. But I don’t regret it.

Have you ever read confessions of “former gifted kids?” When I write it like that, all it evokes in me is the concept of “former child stars.” The screaming headlines read: “WHERE ARE THEY NOW?” You can’t help but click on them, anticipation welling up in your gut, and you are not entirely sure if you hope to see the star succeeding and failing. You’ll get that hit of dopamine either way. I think there’s a certain element where this applies to “former gifted kids,” whether you knew them or not. A little bit of, “Everyone thought they were special but they’re just like everyone else” plus a little bit of, “Wow, they’re so successful and I knew them way back when - so cool!”

And for those of us who are former gifted kids, it feels more like a sigh of relief when we see another former gifted kid says the exact same anxiety-ridden hot-take you carried inside you as well.

The quote-unquote “gifted program” took on different forms in different schools, so I can only speak to what it looked like where I grew up. The whole designation of gifted was based on the standardized tests we took yearly growing up (which, yes, lots of issues with that, since there are so many different kinds of intelligence). The scores you earned on each sub-section could be designated as high enough to be considered gifted. From my recollection, I was designated as gifted in reading as a first grader. In second grade, I tested gifted in all subjects and was invited to join the gifted and talented program, which was called “Discovery” in my school district. From there, I passed into “accelerated” classes, tested two grade levels ahead in math, and ultimately took “honors” and “AP” courses in high school. When I went to college, I ended up being a member of the Honors College and graduating Summa Cum Laude and at the top of my class in the Business College.

Not that all of that means much as an adult. Once you’ve dealt with the student debt that scholarships didn’t cover and you got the job college prepared you for, it’s not like being a “former gifted kid” gives you any edge in the quote-unquote “real world.” What it does give you…well…that’s a bit more complicated.

In writing this post, I did a quick little Google search about the concept of former gifted kids and it’s WILD. I became familiar with the concept thanks to sarcastic Tweets mostly, which I related to fiercely. The concept that former gifted kids grow into adults with anxiety and perfectionism and procrastination thanks to the fact that we fear being anything less than perfect has certainly been relatable for me. Someone shone a light on you and now you have to perform.

Going even a little bit beyond just a surface understanding of the concept, however, reveals more disquieting takes that are worth a thought. There’s the recognition that kids were sorted into “gifted” and “non-gifted” within an imperfect system. Schooling, like politics, has some bugs, to say the absolute LEAST. And then you sort out kids into a system that makes some kids believe they’re better than others and other kids think they’re not smart. Which is a MESS.

I’m a decent test taker because I see patterns quickly and I’m good at memorization for the short term. Don’t ask me about the long-term because none of the things I actually learned (like 90% of calculus) stick with me. I’m excellent with trivia because weird facts stick in my brain without my notice but don’t ask me about code development, even though I graduated with flawless straight-As from my college major of Computer Information Systems, because it vacated my head the moment I passed the class. Designated as gifted with the grades to match, sure, but hardly ever—if ever—the smartest in the room.

Plus, I got the whole former gifted kid trademarked ANXIETY and fear of being anything less than perfect and unadulterated shame if I ever make a mistake. Not to mention the whole transition from “gifted kid” to “competent normal adult” was such a nauseating roller coaster. I needed to be knocked down from that false height to realize that I was enough without all the accolades.

No, this is not meant to be a humble brag. But if you need a break to punch something, I’ll join you at the heavy bag.

Sometimes, I wonder if I had to learn how to be a human in a way other people didn’t. I can only tell you about what’s in my own head, so maybe I’m just full of myself. But it’s only been since graduating college that I was given the empty hours in which I could just

exist.

Here’s the thing when people think you’re smart: you are also scared to let them down. So you take on three AP classes and a bunch of extracurriculars and a leadership position and sleep for a grand total of 6 hours a night at 17 and your sense of self disintegrates between your fingers. Your nights are scheduled based on how full that stupid planner is. It was so unsettling to get a full-time job and realize I didn’t have homework anymore. What am I supposed to do with all this free time?

Who am I when no one is watching because for once, finally, nobody is watching?

It’s especially complicated in a world that’s more connected than ever, with social media on which you’re supposed to post your biggest accomplishments, like we’re all still in high school begging to be seen and terrified to be looked at. You're trying to leave behind the sense that you’re always on stage while still always being on a stage.

But here’s the wildest thing of all:

I don’t regret it. I don’t regret joining the gifted program, going through the increasingly challenging honors classes, not even for a second.

Does it sound backwards? I’ve spent almost 1,000 words here just talking about how broken the concept of being “designated gifted” is. And it absolutely is. The system through which we determine which kid is gifted is broken. The weight we settle on that little kid’s shoulders is too much. But like in most things, the concept isn’t black and white, good and evil. There are bad parts. But there are good parts. And those good parts play just as much a role in defining who I am.

I did like being the “smart” kid. I did like feeling special. But that’s so surface-level and self-obsessed, that it’s hardly the most important thing. I liked the opportunity to get college credit prior to college and earn scholarships to battle student debt before it started. But even that doesn’t get to the core of why I liked being considered gifted.

Let’s go back to how the gifted program worked at my elementary school. Discovery, as it was called, was basically a replacement for standard language arts classes. In my school, our homeroom teachers taught language arts and math. We would go to another teacher for science and social studies. Plus we had a bunch of other teachers we would visit once a week for other classes, like art and music. So Discovery only covered a very small portion of the day and functioned as an advanced language arts class. And the thing that I most loved that we were expected to do was ISPs.

ISPs, or Independent Study Projects, were projects I participated in from second grade through fifth grade. Each year, we would choose a particular topic and then examine that topic through Bloom’s Taxonomy which included multiple levels of thinking, including:

• Knowledge

• Comprehension

• Application

• Analysis

• Synthesis

• Evaluation

This meant that for whatever topic we chose, we had to complete six individual projects that addressed these levels of thinking. While you might start with a short list of facts or an essay about the topic, you then broke down the topic into its composite parts and put it back together until you applied that knowledge to create something new.

I ADORED these projects.

Over the years, I studied oceans, gerbils, earthquakes, and the country of Mexico. I went to the public library and came home with a massive armful of books that I would comb through for interesting facts and ideas for projects. In second grade, my synthesis was a play about the oceans. In fifth grade, I created a board game about Mexico. Our teacher provided us feedback as we worked on the different levels of thinking and we had to address their critiques. It was challenging. It was extremely time-consuming. It was rewarding.

And to some extent, I credit these projects for a portion of how I think today.

I was so fortunate that the gifted program in my school wasn’t just about reading harder books (though we did that too) or giving us harder tests. Instead, our gifted program taught us how to think for ourselves. How to take a topic and break it down so we could put it back together with better understanding. We weren’t to recite facts—which our standardized tests had already done the job of proving we could do—but to assess facts and understand their implications.

When gifted class became “advanced” instead, I noticed the difference, especially in high school. That’s when it became just a matter of reading different books. Or in the case of math, I took the normal Trigonometry class except it was full of juniors and I was a freshman. But sometimes, I would see a flash of what the ISPs taught me back in Discovery. The advanced math class I was in back in sixth grade was always the test group for new review games our teacher came up with. In AP English, about a solid eighty percent of our class was sitting in a circle and discussing the philosophical implications of whatever book we had just finished. This was the part of being smart I loved.

Because the secret is: most “gifted kids” realize the title of “gifted” is a farce. We’re good test-takers. I remember songs because I’m good at patterns and I wrote good essays because I memorized exactly what I needed to write in the fifteen minutes prior to the test. We look good on paper and get certificates for straight As but we don’t care. And yet, it sticks with us, because it’s what our teachers expect from us. And like all kids, we just want to be told we did a good job. Which gives some of us some broken coping mechanisms that we’ll need to deal with in therapy someday. The burnout catches up to us.

But then there’s the good part of being gifted, which I think may have been created with good intentions. I was fortunate enough to be placed into an environment which taught me to think for myself, ask good questions, find trustworthy sources, and consider what these facts might imply to the greater picture of life. Which are all incredibly helpful tools that I actually use, as opposed to whatever I did on a Calculus test that has little application.

All of this to say, I suppose, that while former gifted kid burnout is real and awful, I also am grateful that I don’t regret the events that led to this burnout. And I think that’s an important way to think about the past. A bit of “I carry this wound but I am grateful that it brought me to here.” I am grateful that I had good days that the bad days don’t outweigh.

Don’t live for the weight of the expectations of others. Live instead for whatever brings brighter light to your eyes.

In defense of fan fiction

All right friends, I am here and ready to start some DISCOURSE about fan fiction. Or at least add to it. (Also, notice I didn’t say fighting. I may box but arguing makes me so sad and I don’t want to cry in the club right now.) The topic of fan fiction comes up from time to time in the world at large, I think less so now. I feel like I grew up right in the midst of its controversy, though, which left me with some THOUGHTS that now, as an adult with some sort of platform, I actually have the space to share. So let’s just say I’ve had some time to…consider this a bit.

Right, so some quick qualifications. As far as original fiction goes, I have:

• Written 2 novels to the point of querying literary agents

• Written 1 novel for a thesis defense

• Written at least 1 draft of at least 5 other novels

• Written at least 50,000 words of 4 other unfinished novels

• And a bunch of other stuff. Shorter excerpts of novels, poetry, short stories, so on and so forth.

Now let’s compare that to fan fiction:

• Written 2 full novels over 100,000 words.

• Written 1 novel of almost 50,000 words.

• Written 2 short stories between 5,000 and 20,000 words

• Written a handful of shorter short stories under 2,000 words.

• Am currently working on a novel that I expect to come in near 100,000 words (currently in maybe the 50,000 word range?)

• Plus a bunch of other stuff. Unfinished novels, short stories that will never see the light of day, yada yada, so on and so forth.

So we can see that I have some breadth on both sides of the writing fence. Let’s get that out of the way right now. Because one of the first arguments I hear about writing fan fiction is always: “Why are you wasting time working on someone else’s work when you could be learning to write your own?”

Shut that argument down right now. Writers who love writing can be prolific. I’ve written more original fiction than some writers ultimately do in a lifetime and I did it while writing fan fiction. Really, that argument is so silly and written by someone who maybe doesn’t know joy.

I’m just guessing.

Now that we’ve got that mess out of the way, qualifications and the silliest argument I’ve ever heard, let’s get to the meat of this post.

I started writing fan fiction back when I was eleven years old. I am still writing fan fiction. In fact, I started a fan fiction trilogy back when I was twelve and the story I am working on now is the third book of that trilogy. No joke. That little girl I was back then would be proud to know that I kept going with this one.

Funny enough, when I started writing fan fiction, I had literally no idea I was writing fan fiction. I had no idea that such a concept even existed. At the time, the stories I told were just for me, just something I wrote in my head. But eventually, there were too many stories to keep track of so I started writing them down on paper. It wasn’t for another year before a friend informed me that other people did this thing too. Other people played make believe with the characters they loved and then shared those stories with other people!

I think it was the strongest feeling of belonging I ever felt.

It was like the world blossomed open. This world that I loved was loved by so many other people so much so that they also played make-believe in it. They also wrote their own stories. It was a life raft in the big bad world of adolescence, especially when the actual franchise wasn’t putting out the kind of stories that made me fall in love with the world in the first place. Instead, I could read someone else’s interpretation of the world and it felt like home. It made me pay attention to the idiosyncrasies of the world and its characters and fall more in love with it everyday.

And finding these idiosyncrasies made me want to write them, to dig into them more, and so I crafted my own stories, though for the longest time, I just held them to myself. Maybe let a couple friends read them. A little bit because I was shy, a lot a bit because fan fiction was still an unknown territory, especially in the Internet world of 2006-2007. I was under thirteen too, for a while, so the rules were messier. But I loved fan fiction and I wrote it and doing so made me love writing more and more.

I don’t really remember when it became shameful to love fan fiction. I don’t remember if it was the Internet that taught me this or classmates or some combination of the world. I think I was shamed for being a fan in my fandom long before I was shamed for loving fan fiction. At twelve and thirteen, I think this was my first real experience with the feeling of shame for enjoying something. Of feeling like something was wrong with me. It created such a strange conflict in my head because I couldn’t understand why what I was doing was a bad thing. I loved telling stories, I loved loving these fictional characters as if they were my friends, I loved learning about growing up through it all, but I was told that I was bad.

It’s muddled now, since it’s all those years ago, but over time, I learned the assumptions people made about people like me. Fan fiction is super sexual, fan fiction isn’t real writing, fan fiction is just self-inserts by lonely people, fan fiction won’t teach you anything about writing, fan fiction is bad and you should feel bad.

And when you’re in the midst of seventh-grade (ah…the worst year of most people’s lives…), that hurts. That’s the time when you’re trying to figure out who you are. Transitioning from child full of joy and thrill in exploring the world and awkwardly moving into this adult-thing-creature? Kids start to look for people to other. They picked me.

I worked really hard not to give up writing this thing I loved. I was in the midst of writing the first book of that trilogy I mentioned earlier and it was the longest, hardest thing I’d written up to that point and I didn’t want to give it up. So I kept writing, but…I kept it quiet. I hid my fan fiction. It began to feel like it was a shameful secret. When I started posting fan fiction online early on in high school, only my very closest friends knew.

Don’t worry; the bullies found other ways to pick on me.

I ended up sort of living this double life. In the light of day, I was working hard in school, part of a bunch of theatrical productions, awkward and tired and trying so freaking hard to be invisible. But when no one was watching, I worked on a murder-mystery fan fiction and an action-adventure fan fiction that had some complicated time travel ideas I needed to figure out at some point.

It wasn’t until college that I started trying talking about fan fiction again. By that point, ideas of fan fiction seemed to have solidified so that ALL fan fiction was perceived to be…well…smut. Which meant that I had to explain the kind of fan fiction I liked to read, liked to write, so that the people I talked to would understand what I was saying: No, like action-adventure. Just like…the characters going on new adventures. Maybe some fluff occasionally, but mostly fight scenes ha-ha.

I started getting the sense that my reasons for liking fan fiction wasn’t why most people liked fan fiction. I still don’t think it is. But it’s true about me and it was important that people knew this part of me. Because my fan fiction was so important to me at this point. I finished up the second book in my trilogy and started my third. All while writing a BUNCH of original novels. The stories fed each other and both fed me and made me who I am. In fan fiction, I liked exploring the world and the characters and learning who they were as I dug through the layers the actual writers gave them. It made me think about how not one-dimensional people are.

Which brings me to today. I am 28-years-old and I am proud to say that I have almost 300,000 words of fan fiction available on the Internet for anyone to read. My biggest story has over 41,000 hits (and the second place has over 36,000), which is just WILD to me. People all over the world are reading my work! I wonder if it’s a safe haven for them like it was for me when I was younger. When none of the books being published for my age were my reading level and the books that were my reading level weren’t for my age and I needed something fun to read. The other day when I checked my stats broken out by country, my second-highest readership was in Trinidad and Tobago. I mean, THAT IS SO COOL! The spot’s been usurped since then, but now in front of them are places like Italy and Peru. Literally, all over the world people are choosing to click on something I wrote using characters they love so that they can exist in that world for just a little longer.

That means something.

Okay, so this got a little autobiographical and I haven’t really gotten into the nitty-gritty of defending fan fiction. But I think it’s important that you know why it’s important to me that I defend fan fiction. Over the years, I’ve heard a lot of arguments against fan fiction from strangers and well-meaning authors. And some of those arguments actually have some solid points, I won’t lie. But they also miss a LOT. So let’s get started here with the things I’ve heard over the years.

Fan fiction is highly sexual. - Yup. Some of it. SOME of it. So are some books. If I remember correctly, romance is the best-selling genre among all books. So it’s not surprising that people come to fan fiction for that. I don’t. Not interested in it. Stop making blanket statements. And besides, if you’re not reading fan fiction for that purpose, it’s pretty easy to avoid. The site I’ve always used has a rating system. Easy-peasy.

Fan fiction is just self-inserts for lonely people. - Some, sure. People write fan characters that are just fictionalized versions of themselves. I write fan characters too! They’re not intended to be fictionalized versions of me, but it happens when you’re writing—even in original fiction. Some people even just write themselves into the world. Again: who cares? Some people play 200 hours worth of Animal Crossing (whistles innocently as if this isn’t also me). Some people build puzzles in their spare time. Some people just watch hours of Netflix. Let people have fun.

Fan fiction isn’t real writing. - Sigh. This one is going to take a bit. I have to break down A LOT here.

Fan fiction is not the same as writing an original work. No disagreement there. I’ve done both and they are very different. In some ways, fan fiction is easier to write and in other ways, it’s harder. But either way, IT’S REAL WRITING. A lot of what I’ve written in fan fiction informs how I write my original work. Let’s talk about some of the things that fan fiction helps writers learn:

Character consistency - This one is a doozy. When you are writing fan fiction, you are writing characters that don’t belong to you. They already exist. Well, most of the time. You could write your own characters and just drop them into the same world too. But I’ve been one to write pre-existing characters. Which means I have to pay attention to how they act in canon. How they react to hardship, how they deal with tough decisions, how easily they laugh. Early writers find making distinct characters hard. In fact, early writers often make all their characters sound the same. Fan fiction teaches you how to break that habit. Speaking of which…

Dialogue - I’m a bit lucky in the fact that the fan fiction I write is for a world that wasn’t formulated in a book but instead in a more interactive medium (video games, though it’s expanded into other mediums as well). Which means much of that world is defined by its dialogue. This one relates to character consistency as well. In writing fan fiction, I learned how different characters sound from one another and how one person might say something one way but another character would choose different words for the same feeling. I actually think my dialogue is one of the strongest parts of my writing and I thank fan fiction for it.

Discipline - Maybe this one sounds a little weird. But when writers start out, I think one of the hardest hurdles to overcome is the thought that: oh no, I actually have to write this whole thing. Fan fiction is an easier way to ease into such a concept. If anything, fan fiction taught me I can write long works. It keeps me calm when I get overwhelmed. After all, I’ve done it before.

Just…writing - Have you ever heard that “practice makes perfect?” I mean, ignore the fact that such a concept doesn’t always work out. But the way I see it, you get better at doing something the more you do it. Fan fiction was a way to keep me writing fiction. It gave me a place to experiment with techniques. I remember, when I was much younger, I couldn’t figure out if you were supposed to keep contractions out of your work, except in dialogue. A safe place to experiment with that was fan fiction (and, as I learned, contractions are fine; just don’t over-use them).

Now, let’s talk about a couple things that fan fiction may help you with a little but may be what makes people say that fan fiction isn’t “real writing:”

World-building - To be fair, when you are writing fan fiction, you are using a pre-existing world. It’s a bit like drawing with a stencil. You don’t have to spend time agonizing over place names and governing systems when it’s already existing for you to play in! You do have the opportunity to expand the world, however. And this does give you a bit of a different exercise because you have to expand the world in a way that makes sense for the world you’re playing in. If there’s no space travel common in canon, you’re going to be hard-pressed to get your characters on a space adventure. You can do it! But either you do some mental gymnastics (which you can) or you’ve got to spend some time world building a solution, which is really good writing practice.

Character creation - You have pre-built characters to play with, unless you’re populating the world with all your own characters, so you don’t have to spend as much time figuring out who all these people are. Not only that, but you don’t have to spend time making your audience care about them. It is nice that you can dabble in this a little bit with fan fiction, by creating fan characters, which allow you to introduce new characters to care about in small doses if you want. But populating a brand new world with brand new people is a different ballgame entirely.

I imagine most people reading this blog post don’t read fan fiction (at least not much) and don’t write fan fiction. If this somehow gets wide distribution: hi there! Welcome to the inside of my brain! It’s filled with anxiety and coffee! (And I wonder why I have anxiety…) But assuming that most people reading this haven’t given much thought to fan fiction at all and are very confused about why I’ve written so much about it, let me leave you with this:

Let people have their joy.

That’s it.

Let people have their joy.

At some point along the way, I somehow ended up inundated with this idea that I needed to be productive. All! The! Time! If you are not doing something you can sell, you are wasting your life! Ah…the American Dream…

I’m working on unweaving such a toxic idea from my brain. And one of the ways I do that is by writing fan fiction. Guess what? None of this is ever going to make money. It literally can’t! I put disclaimers on all my fan fiction that I post online that my work is fan-made and none of the characters belong to me. So why do I do this thing? Because I want to. Because it brings me joy. Because not every little piece of my life is in the pursuit of the creation of consumable content that helps me build a platform (the beautiful irony of explaining this in a blog post). I also play video games that are about task management and not at all about the story. You know what value that offers? Joy! Just personal joy. It just makes me happy. And that’s enough.

And also, don’t make assumptions about the thing that brings a person joy. Don’t be a part of the faceless mass that lists off all the stereotypical reasons why a person’s pursuit is stupid. Listen to the person themself. Ask questions. And watch their eyes light up with the kind of life you’ve never seen. It’s a much better world to create.

It's about time for a superhero origin story: anxiety edition

Maybe you can tell I have anxiety because it's written all over me and everything I do. It comes up a LOT, and I don’t just mean in every single post I write (though that seems to be a thing as well). But the thing about mental illness, in my own personal experience, is that it acts sort of like a quiet background soundtrack to the rest of your life. Sometimes, the volume is turned down. You still hear it, but there’s enough going on that you drown out the sound most of the time until the rest of your life quiets as well. Then, there are times when someone (WHO DID THIS?) cranks the volume until you feel the bass beat pounding against the insides of your skull and you’re left stumbling, grabbing at walls for balance as you drag yourself through this shell of a life you have right now. A passive participant, rather than an active one, as you do whatever it takes just to simply survive the day.

So I wanted to take some time to talk about my own experience with anxiety, what it felt like before I was diagnosed, when I swung back and forth between complete denial and hesitant acceptance of the possibility, as well as what life is like now that I’ve been diagnosed.

I do want to be very clear: this is my own personal experience with anxiety. Anxiety comes in so many different forms and everyone experiences it differently. So all I can speak through is my own personal experience. However, if you read through this and find details relatable, I would recommend talking to a qualified medical professional. For the longest time, I was afraid of being diagnosed, afraid of what the label might mean. Which meant I went for a long time not getting help that would have made my life better sooner.

Also, final note I want to make before I get started: I am in no way a medical professional. Again, this is my personal experience. If you are struggling with mental health, please speak to a medical professional.

Okay, let’s get started.

BEFORE DIAGNOSIS

I think I knew something was going on with my mental health back around the end of middle school. But given that this is also the time of…well…puberty, it was also relatively easy to write off. Mood swings, depressed days, I read it all as par for the course. But I also remember seeing antidepressant ads and thinking “that sounds sort of like me.” Which, you know, chill thought for a 12-year-old.

There was a bunch of “little things” that should have signified that what I was feeling wasn’t “normal,” but somehow it didn’t click. I’m talking things like:

• I had to check the outlet behind my bed every morning because I thought it would catch fire.

• I was terrified of accidentally seeing someone else’s paper in class. To the point that I had to ask a teacher once if it was okay.

• There were short spurts of time where I would wash my hands incessantly.

And that’s just high school. When it came to college, I’d wake up each morning almost gasping for breath. My stomach filled with acid at the prospect of facing the day. I couldn’t think of anything other than how scared I was of everything. And I spent the first hour of everyday shoving down my fear. I tired to overcompensate for it by working on my assignments as early as possible, but that ended up with my head constantly spinning. Once, my body just forced me to stop. On a weekend where I had so much planned that it was overwhelming, I made myself sick with dizziness and difficulty eating anything. I knew it was because my body needed a break. Even still, I tried to keep writing my thesis in bed.

Basically, I got used to the shaking. Thought an acid-filled stomach was just how my body started days. Went into adulthood and my full-time job after college just constantly afraid that at some point, people would realize that I wasn’t good enough at whatever I was supposed to be doing.

Until, I stopped being able to ignore it anymore.

GETTING A DIAGNOSIS

My diagnosis started in small things. Like I mentioned in a previous post, I found that running resulted in distress, like I couldn’t breathe and my heart would race before I could even get a couple laps in at the track. Eventually, I got tired of my inability to workout. Thought I might have asthma. And decided to go through the process of getting tested.

My breathing test came back normal. So did my EKG. I forget the rest, only know that everything from my lungs to my heart were fine. But I was still having trouble breathing. There was a strange stabbing pain in my chest that terrified me.

And then there was the random day, at work, when I just couldn’t breathe.

The morning didn’t start well. Snowstorms aren’t exactly a foreign phenomenon in northeast Ohio, and I’ve spent a lot of time driving through them. I drove through one on the way to work that morning. It wasn’t pleasant, not really, but it also wasn’t the worst thing I’d driven through.

But after I got to work, I struggled to catch my breath. My chest ached. I pushed through the pain, kept working. I was on a major project at work and was determined to ignore this strange thing I didn’t understand. My coworkers, thankfully, cared about me. And once they realized things weren’t getting better, the program manager told me that I should go to the medical center at work, that there was no reason to prioritize the project above my heath, and even instructed one of my other coworkers to go with me to make sure I didn’t collapse on the way.

Honestly, if not for them, I don’t think the rest of this wouldn’t have happened. I am so thankful for them.

After being given a breathing treatment, the nurse practitioner ran through a questionnaire and then by the end, told me, “You realize that this is a test for anxiety. And you answered yes on almost every question.”

And finally, I had to stop hiding. Had to stop lying to myself. Had to accept the fact that my health was a wreck and that accepting weakness meant someday again finding strength.

AFTER DIAGNOSIS

I won’t walk you through the challenges of finding the right medication. Just know it’s super not fun to try a medication that doesn’t help and then be weaned off it and on to another. That’s basically a week of your life you drag yourself through. But the second medication we tried…it made a difference.

And not just a difference. It made me realize: oh, this is what life is like.

Writing this now, three years divorced from this experience, I struggle to place myself back in who I was pre-anxiety meds. I have to speak in metaphors because the specifics are lost now. But it was like a constant buzzing quieted in my head. My hands weren’t constantly shaking. I could take a full breath. I woke up without a stomach full of acid and eyes full of tears.

I found myself asking, “Why didn’t I just admit this and get help sooner?”

I won’t lie: there were things that did become harder. Okay, one thing: writing changed. My connection with writing changed. It was like I had to rewire that part of my brain to learn how this new version of me would write.

But honestly, even experiencing that challenge, I knew I wouldn’t take back the choice to start taking medication (properly prescribed) for my anxiety. And my fear that it would be out of my price range? It’s like a few dollars for several months-worth. I suffered for years because I thought it would be out of my price range. Was afraid of what it meant for my life opportunities. In reality, being diagnosed with anxiety just made me able to exist.

And now?

It’s not like my anxiety is gone. It’s different now. I still take medication everyday, and I will say the hardest part of my day is the morning right before I take my anxiety medication. Some mornings, I still feel the shadow of that pressure on my heart and my lungs as anxiety tries to wrap its sticky hand around them. I still struggle with thoughts of perfection and feeling good-enough. Some days are still just bad and anxious.

But I don’t feel like every single moment of my life is a wall I need to shove my head through.

Anxiety still plays a huge part in my life. If you’ve read the other posts, you can see all the little ways anxiety still touches every single thing I do. I have to be conscious of how much coffee I drink, because some days my tolerance is lower because of my anxiety. My thoughts still spiral toward worst case scenarios, so I’ll reach out to someone I trust to help me see the logical end point rather than the anxiety one. Some days, I just know I have to cry until there are no tears left.

So what’s the point of all of this?

I guess…it’s the same in all I write. If you read this and relate, then know you are not alone. Know that these feelings are not isolated to you. Know that there is a future past this, one that’s worth reaching.

And if you need help, please don’t be afraid to ask for it. It’s worth it, it’s worth it, this single life that you have to live is worth it.