Some People Like Arts and Crafts...I Have Anxiety

If there’s anything worse than dealing with chronic anxiety, it’s being diagnosed with an anxiety disorder. Like, by a medical professional. Officially. To be clear, I have not officially been diagnosed with an anxiety disorder…or at least, not directly. Let me explain. Like many other adults in the 21^st century, I have occasionally sought out mental health counseling to help manage stress, anxiety, a little depression, and just the reality of living as a full-time working adult in an overstimulating modern world. After a few visits with a therapist, I was reviewing the after-visit summaries she had typed up and printed out for me after each appointment, and towards the bottom of the page, the following words jumped out at me: “Diagnosis: Generalized Anxiety Disorder”. Wait, what? This therapist had never verbally diagnosed me with anything, so why would she feel the need to include this on my after-visit summary? At first, I brushed it off, and a few hours later, I promptly stuffed the document into my cross-cut shredder because I was so unexpectedly indignant about it. Who is she to “diagnose” me with an anxiety disorder? What, after a few 45-minute therapy sessions, she thinks she knows me?

Being the reasonably emotionally intelligent person that I am, I caught my defensiveness and thought, well maybe it’s true, and maybe it’s not such a bad thing. Millions of people have anxiety disorders, so it’s not like this makes me some kind of freak. And anxiety issues run in my family, so is this really so novel? And, hey, it helps to explain some of the symptoms I’ve been experiencing for so long, which I can’t seem to shake no matter what self-help methods I try. It’s actually quite freeing, really, to finally know what’s wrong with me. Right?

And then, like a yoyo, my reason gave way to defensiveness once again. If I really have an anxiety disorder, why wouldn’t she have told me to my face? It must have been a mistake or just some formality in the mental healthcare system to show that I’ve been “taken care of” or a ploy to get me to keep coming back for bi-weekly visits at $20 copays a pop. What a racket. Before I could explore the “diagnosis” any further, that particular therapist switched to another clinic, and I was assigned a new one. The new therapist wasn’t a particularly good fit, and I started to feel that the cost and hassle of the sessions weren’t worth what I was getting out of them, so I stopped going.

In retrospect, I think what bothered me so much about this supposed diagnosis was being labelled someone with “Generalized Anxiety Disorder”. Although one of the primary reasons I started going to counseling was to get help with my anxiety, something about anxiety being described as a core part of my being, my biology—and a disordered one at that—suddenly made me feel like a victim. I knew it was something that hindered my everyday existence, from a young age, but I never really saw it as something I was stuck with. I always maintained a belief (or delusion?) that it was a temporary problem that would eventually go away under the right circumstances with the right behaviors. I didn’t like the idea that I was now a member of the millions of Americans with a diagnosed mental health disorder. I couldn’t even bring myself to identify with the label because of how stigmatizing it felt, so I distanced myself from it entirely.

The interesting thing is, I have never been one to demean or marginalize folks with mental health issues. As I said, it’s something that runs in my family, something that has gained increasingly wide-spread recognition in our culture, and something that I know is extremely common, albeit often hidden. I also pursued an education in the social sciences, which exposed me to a great deal of learning about mental illness, sparking a personal interest in going to grad school for counseling. Ultimately, I decided the profession would be too emotionally draining for me, so I pursued education instead. Ironically, much of my exposure to mental health issues has arisen from my work in education, so I guess the joke’s on me.

The difference between my understanding of mental health problems and facing my own is that the former allowed me to view the phenomenon as an outsider, an objective observer analyzing something from a purely academic point of view. The latter forced me to analyze the essence of myself and my own life’s potential. I guess had always subliminally believed that being educated about mental illness and wanting to avoid it would vaccinate me from ever having to experience it. I guess I was wrong.

That being said, I still take issue with the idea of identifying as someone with a mental health disorder. I simply don’t want to incorporate that into my self-image because I feel that it does nothing to help me overcome the challenges I face. Instead, it makes me feel resigned to fulfill the prophecy of the diagnosis and blame it for all my woes—to play the mental illness card, so to say. This makes me feel conflicted because I know that, for many, being diagnosed with a mental health disorder is the first step in seeking treatment and healing for what can be a debilitating daily existence. I also know that naming mental illness has done a great deal of good for our society, which previously ignored it at best and demonized it at worst. I acknowledge that everyone deals with mental illness in very personal ways, despite its prevalence, and I in no way wish to dictate how anyone should feel about it or identify with it.

For me personally, however, I choose to view it as something that I’m dealing with, just like some people deal with social awkwardness or perfectionism. It’s a part of my personality, and yes, a part of my chemical make-up that is probably largely genetic. But as long as I can find ways of managing it and still living a fulfilling life, why does it need to be a disorder? For example, I realized that drinking coffee every morning made me more anxious, especially in situations where I needed to perform (work presentations, speaking in meetings, meeting new people, etc.), so after doing that for several years, I decided to switch to tea instead. For about the first week, the drop in caffeine intake made me feel like a zombie, but eventually my body adjusted, and I realized I felt much less anxious than before. I also go to a primary care provider who recommends more naturopathic remedies before resorting to more synthetic ones. She suggested I try taking a tablet of L-Theanine (the natural ingredient in green tea) whenever I’m feeling a little wired or obsessive, and it actually kind of works. In terms of behavioral or environmental remedies, I finally admitted to myself that a full-time career in which I talk to people all day long and frequently deliver group presentations was just not sustainable or fulfilling. This took some time to accept because there were other aspects of my work that I really enjoyed, and people often told me that I was good at it and encouraged me to advance. Choosing a different pathway felt like giving up. But now that I’m in a role that involves more behind-the-scenes work, I feel so much less dread when I wake up in the morning and so much less drained at the end of each day. Harnessing my social anxiety has been a gnarlier beast, but I’ve been making improvements there too. I realized that putting myself in social situations where I have to meet a lot of new people at once and/or perform propel me to use alcohol as a means of calming my nerves and being a more authentic version of myself. While I don’t believe that occasional escapism or moderated indulgence is a bad thing, I don’t want to feel frequently beholden to them. I less frequently put myself in these kinds of social situations, and I try to maintain friends who fully accept me for who I am and don’t make me feel like I need to perform.

I’m not going to sugarcoat it—all of the above changes and remedies have not cured my anxiety. I still encounter it every day, and it still brings me discomfort, insecurity, and isolation. I’m sure that I will always have these challenges, as I pretty much always have in my life thus far. But addressing my anxiety as an inherent trait that I must accept and continually work on has been a lot more productive and liberating than addressing my anxiety as a disorder that I must medicate and continually keep at bay. Again, different people will choose different methods for managing anxiety, and I acknowledge that some have much more severe forms of it than I do. As long as people are doing what they need to do to feel healthy and happy, more power to them. I just want to offer an alternative perspective that you may just be kind of an anxious person by nature—it’s a small part of who you are, not what you are. Some people like arts and crafts…and I have a little anxiety. And life goes on.