Her Name is Anxiety

For many years Depression was my homeboy, hanging around like a toxic friend who made my life miserable and wouldn't go away. I didn't notice his quiet accomplice - Anxiety - mooching in the background. I was on and off anti-depressants from my late teens until my late 20s, but I was 33 when I first met Anxiety on her own.

She is more subtle than Depression. Sly and passive-aggressive. Depression would whack me about the head with a baseball bat, stab my heart with knives, evoking inexplicable, palpable grief. Experiences which should have been small bumps in the road would throw me completely off course, small disappointments were magnified as enormous sadness, leaving me in the foetal position, weeping in what seemed like physical pain.

I knew Depression. As a teen, I knew how to ask for help from teachers and school counselors and Kid's Helpline. As I got older, I knew when to go to the GP or call a psychologist. But those experiences were so huge and all-encompassing that Anxiety was able to weave her black magic around my mind and my heart completely unnoticed, like smoke slowly filling a room without a fire alarm.

I didn't understand what Anxiety was or how she made me feel. I thought it was all me. I believed every lie she told me, every untruth she breathed in my ear while curling her long fingers around my heart, squeezing it, making it thump in my chest and the adrenaline course through me. She would whisper in my ear:

"Everybody hates you."
"You're such a loser."
"You have no friends."

And her favourite, used indiscriminately about anything I want to learn, or do, or try, every time I tried to better myself or step away from what might have been expected by my family:

"You can't. You're not good enough."

She kept me up at night, pacing the floors, drinking tea and crying. She was there the day I withdrew from University six weeks before finishing my Undergraduate teaching degree, too terrified to teach for my six week final placement. "If you can't do it for six weeks," she sneered, "What makes you think you can do it for the rest of your life?" She was there when I was offered a promotion at work to the Leadership Pool. "Everyone already hates you," she whispered. "This will only make it worse. Don't make your life harder than it already is."

She was there when I traveled to Europe, convincing me to hole myself up in hotels and lounge rooms of my extended family, too frightened to step out the door and experience the countries I had journeyed so far to see. She has been there every time my husband and I have decided to leave our home town for a more enriching life in the South-East corner of our state - where we have wanted to live for 13 years - causing me to panic so badly that he gives in to appease my panic. "Better the devil you know than the one that you don't," she tells me. "You'd never be able to drive there, you couldn't handle the traffic."

She's there every time I decide to quit my horrible job. She reminds me how lucky a loser like me is to have a job like mine. "You're nothing. You're lucky you've even got this job - after ten years you're still not good at it. Everyone knows more than you. You're so stupid. Someone will find you out if you leave. It doesn't matter that it's soul destroying - that's penance for being such an imbecile."

I recognize her now. I recognize the rising panic in my chest, the adrenal response for no real reason. I recognize her lies but I've been listening so long that I don't know how to believe otherwise. But I'm learning. I have to. Because I see her somewhere else now, somewhere that is terrifying but that also steels me with new resolve to beat her:

I see her in my son.