The Anxious Writer: Chapter Two

Not knowing is hard because you are left with a million possibilities.

But knowing can be harder still, because you have no idea where to start.

The moment I had it all defined, it got better, but not so much better. I had a name for what I was going through, a title, but that was it. I was still clueless.

I never thought that I would actually be diagnosed with anxiety or any other mental illness.

After all I was 18, I had some problems and issues but I knew that people had it far worse than I did, yet apparently that did not make a difference.

So what do we do now? Every disease has a cure, right? Medicine, surgery, therapy. But what was mine? I sat in silence listening to the therapist explain the reactions of my body to me. And for once it made sense.

“Your body goes into fight or flight mode,” my therapist explained calmly.

It is the same reaction a body would experience if it is about to be hit by a car. Your blood moves all the way from your stomach to your muscles real quick – fight or flight.

But because when I experience these changes while I am still, in a safe location and with no adrenaline rushing through my body, I feel it more intensely.

I have more time and space for scary thoughts to creep in. It comes rushing in and that is when I know I’m experiencing an anxiety attack. And that was it, an overreaction.

At this point the element of uncertainty was gone, I was still scared and confused, but at least I had an explanation.

I did not know what the following step would be, perhaps a pair of pills for a few days would do the trick, but it turns out it was a bit more complicated.

I started my journey with therapy, one that I’ve come to doubt every single day.

I asked myself questions every time I rode my car to that clinic, how would talking make it all go away?

Despite all this doubt, I chose to continue going. I was desperate for change and I was desperate to get out of this vicious circle.

And the talking did help. My therapist kept opening boxes I had hidden deep in my memories that I would have never opened otherwise.

I started to make connections between things I feared. I listened to myself opening up out loud about issues I refused to even think about.

Through therapy, I realized the human mind and soul are extremely complex.

We tend to think we know ourselves and we tend to believe we have it all under control. But this is probably never the case.

Therapy helped me understand that the way I try to deal with what hurts me, drowns me. It made me think of the motive of every action I take.

So, one box after the other I started to reflect on the things that affected me the most.

I learned that it was the passing of the dearest person to my heart, my father, that had the heaviest toll on me.

Ever since that bitter September day in 2013 I have been open about speaking about my father, about the loss and about my feelings towards it.

I read an essay about him to my class in my senior year at high school and mentioned him in my graduation speech in 2014.

I was open about it, because I believe he deserves it.

But what was different with my therapist was that she was digging deeper into how that beautiful relationship with my father and how that sad accepted loss molded a young 18-year-old girl someone who suffers from anxiety to this day.

Mariam Mazhar
Senior Arabic Editor