July is finally here, and I'm usually so excited about my birthday. Well, I'm not super excited this year. I'm more worried about having my anxiety ruin my birthday because, I know I've mentioned before, that in July, shortly before my birthday, was the time when I had my meltdown that landed me in therapy. Last year was a birthday that I do not look back on with happiness.
My therapist asked me last week what I thought might be causing the heightened anxiety that I've been dealing with since around mid-June. I shrugged because I was sure it was PMS-related and that it would go away. Then a few days later, I caught myself thinking, "Man, I hope my anxiety doesn't ruin my birthday this year." I even caught myself praying more and more often that my anxiety wouldn't ruin my birthday. So...that was the root of my anxiety. I remembered the place I had been in last year at the time of my birthday, and I was terrified of being in that place again.
I even caught myself guarding against my own mind, trying to protect myself from anything that made me anxious. I was so afraid of the way I felt last year at this time that I desperately wanted to avoid anything, any place, any thought that could send my anxious brain into overdrive lest I experience a major setback and have more panic attacks again. It’s like my anxious brain was constantly running a threat assessment and then deciding that everything my mind thought was a threat. It had been 8 months since my last panic attack, until Monday when my anxiety reared up and consumed me in a crowded park where I had hoped to watch some fireworks. Ever since that super high, panicked level of anxiety broke through the walls I thought I had built up, more anxiety has come. I wouldn’t say that I am back in that frightening place of last July, but I have definitely had a setback, all because I was so worried about how my anxiety was going to affect my birthday. The difference this time is that I know it can get better. I know I can climb out of this black hole of anxiety and feel okay again.
Almost as often as I was worrying about my anxiety and praying that it wouldn’t ruin my birthday, I found myself saying things like, “Alright, Megan. You know how to handle this. You can get through this like you did before. It’ll just take time.” Sure, the OCD creeps in and makes me worry that I’ll be like this forever, in this heightened, anxious state, terrified of what dreadful thing my mind might throw at me next, but I know that is just the OCD this time around. It isn't a reflection of how good or bad a person I am. It isn't some punishment because I am a bad person. It's just chemicals off balance in my brain that gave me an anxious brain.
I’m dealing with the same strange things as always, but at the moment, my response to anything related to my mental health is heightened because I have been so worried about my mental health lately. Mental health conditions do wax and wane over time. I also know that new obsessions can form with OCD, and that old obsessions can change. I had been guarding against developing new obsessions for months now (which also means that my anxious brain was running threat assessments in the background of my mind this whole time.) So, the background business just pushed through to the front and gave me even more things to be anxious about.
I feel like a crazy person, and this time I bought my ticket to crazy town. Maybe if I wouldn’t have been so worried about my upcoming birthday, I wouldn’t be struggling with a setback at this very moment. Maybe I self-sabotaged this entire month instead of thinking that, after 3 years of bad birthday experiences, I deserved a great birthday. Or, maybe in my cycle of dealing with panic attacks and OCD, it was just the time my symptoms flared up, which, accidently, also happened to be around the same time as the meltdown last year.
I'll end with this: An anxious brain can see a threat in the smallest thing, and it can form associations with some time, event, place, or even person that we might not be consciously aware of. Living with an anxious brain doesn’t mean that I am a crazy person; it means that I am human. Setbacks are a normal part of recovery, but we can’t let ourselves get stuck in them. Also, please know, that it won’t be like this forever, no matter what your anxiety, OCD, or depression is making you think during your setback. Just take it one day, or even one hour, at a time.
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