Was It Even Real?: Existing Beyond Your Anxiety and Mental Illness
“We all have
a bag. We all pack differently. Some of us are traveling light. Some of us are
secret hoarders who’ve never parted with a memory in our lives. I think we are
all called to figure out how to carry our bag to the best of our ability, how
to unpack it, and how to face the mess. I think part of growing up is learning
how to sit down on the floor with all your things and figuring out what to take
with you and what to leave behind.”
—Hannah Brencher
I’ve often found myself asking this question, especially in regard to the games my mind has played on me and the tricks my anxiety likes to pull. When all is said and done, and we accept that it’s time to let some things go, was it even real? Am I even real? Who am I without my anxiety?
I’ve only recently learned that part of the reason why I’ve had such difficulty letting go of my anxieties is because they have made up a great deal of who I am. I’ve learned that I have always resorted to rituals and compulsions to make things right in times of high stress. I’ve learned that my history of insomnia was not in fact remedied by my rituals, but made worse because the rituals only made me more anxious. I’ve learned that it was my own impossibly high standards of perfection that stressed me out, rather than the standards of a teacher or the stress of a workload. I’ve learned that nothing in life is perfect and nothing is worth the stress trying to make it perfect. But, at the end of the day, it was these standards that I’ve held dear most of my life. It was these anxieties that I clutched like a security blanket because I thought holding onto the worry was healthier than not. It was these rituals and compulsions that, even when I had to go out of my way to satisfy them, made me feel better and was often the only thing that brought inner peace. So what do you do when you learn that the things you thought made you feel better are actually bad for you? Who are you without those things? Your anxiety was playing tricks on you this whole time; everything you’ve held dear is a lie. Was it even real? What’s real and what’s fake? How can you separate illusion from reality when you’ve been steeped in make-believe your entire life?
On the other hand, another thing I’ve learned—and discussed numerous other times—is that the key to arriving at some version of successful adulthood is embracing the grand uncertainty and ambiguity that is adult life. Children are held to a different standard than adults. We often don’t let children make mistakes, express anger, be grumpy, or have bad days—all things that adults know to be parts of life. Some children are also nurtured with an illusion that certainty exists, that adults know what they’re doing and there’s nothing to worry about. But adults can only hold up that blissfully innocent facade for so long. There’s a reason some children grow up faster than others, because their parents decided they could not and would not hide them from the truth anymore. I’m someone who continued to barricade myself in the blissful innocence of childhood long after my parents, like all parents, gave up. I believed in Santa Claus until I was fourteen years old. Friends who were younger than me used to make sexual jokes and pretend that I was too young to understand them, when in fact I was older than them in age. I never stopped watching The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh. I guess I subconsciously figured out very early in life that nothing is certain, even when the adults my world tried their damnedest to keep up the illusion for me—when they faltered, I continued the illusion myself.
I refused to grow up. I was able to maintain this refusal until I was eighteen, when everyone started expecting more from me. These expectations only made me more hesitant to enter adulthood and I retreated back into childhood, staying there longer than I should have because the past felt like the only place where everything was certain and concrete and nothing would go wrong. But as anyone can tell you, we can’t live in the past. We live in the present, whether we want to or not. I created yet another illusion for myself, thinking I could stay a child forever in my own untouchable bubble, where everything was perfect and I was perfect and I could control everything. Guess what? That bubble burst. Here’s what else I’ve learned since then.
I’ve learned that by refusing to grow up, I held onto many of the age-old anxieties of youth longer than I should have. I’ve learned that embracing the uncertainty and ambiguity of adult life is much easier than living in the past and pretending that life doesn’t go on or that children don’t grow up. I’ve learned that a lot of my anxieties were normal and natural; we just don’t talk about them out loud enough. I’ve learned that embracing uncertainty is letting go of the false sense of certainty in childhood—in other words, sometimes living in reality is in fact better for us than living in fantasy, especially when most of your anxieties were rooted in said fantasy. Was the fantasy of certainty in childhood real? No, it’s just that most kids outgrow that faster than I did, and that’s fine. Were my anxieties real? Yes, they were one-hundred percent real. Were the things my anxiety told me real? No, they were not, and those are the things we can let go of as we continue to grow.
Pop singer Camila Cabello, who has been vocal about her struggles with anxiety and OCD, recently opened up about how she went from an extremely anxious child who would burst into tears anytime her parents tried to watch her perform, to a chart-topping pop star who tours the world on arena stages. In a post on Instagram, she wrote,
—Hannah Brencher
I’ve often found myself asking this question, especially in regard to the games my mind has played on me and the tricks my anxiety likes to pull. When all is said and done, and we accept that it’s time to let some things go, was it even real? Am I even real? Who am I without my anxiety?
I’ve only recently learned that part of the reason why I’ve had such difficulty letting go of my anxieties is because they have made up a great deal of who I am. I’ve learned that I have always resorted to rituals and compulsions to make things right in times of high stress. I’ve learned that my history of insomnia was not in fact remedied by my rituals, but made worse because the rituals only made me more anxious. I’ve learned that it was my own impossibly high standards of perfection that stressed me out, rather than the standards of a teacher or the stress of a workload. I’ve learned that nothing in life is perfect and nothing is worth the stress trying to make it perfect. But, at the end of the day, it was these standards that I’ve held dear most of my life. It was these anxieties that I clutched like a security blanket because I thought holding onto the worry was healthier than not. It was these rituals and compulsions that, even when I had to go out of my way to satisfy them, made me feel better and was often the only thing that brought inner peace. So what do you do when you learn that the things you thought made you feel better are actually bad for you? Who are you without those things? Your anxiety was playing tricks on you this whole time; everything you’ve held dear is a lie. Was it even real? What’s real and what’s fake? How can you separate illusion from reality when you’ve been steeped in make-believe your entire life?
On the other hand, another thing I’ve learned—and discussed numerous other times—is that the key to arriving at some version of successful adulthood is embracing the grand uncertainty and ambiguity that is adult life. Children are held to a different standard than adults. We often don’t let children make mistakes, express anger, be grumpy, or have bad days—all things that adults know to be parts of life. Some children are also nurtured with an illusion that certainty exists, that adults know what they’re doing and there’s nothing to worry about. But adults can only hold up that blissfully innocent facade for so long. There’s a reason some children grow up faster than others, because their parents decided they could not and would not hide them from the truth anymore. I’m someone who continued to barricade myself in the blissful innocence of childhood long after my parents, like all parents, gave up. I believed in Santa Claus until I was fourteen years old. Friends who were younger than me used to make sexual jokes and pretend that I was too young to understand them, when in fact I was older than them in age. I never stopped watching The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh. I guess I subconsciously figured out very early in life that nothing is certain, even when the adults my world tried their damnedest to keep up the illusion for me—when they faltered, I continued the illusion myself.
I refused to grow up. I was able to maintain this refusal until I was eighteen, when everyone started expecting more from me. These expectations only made me more hesitant to enter adulthood and I retreated back into childhood, staying there longer than I should have because the past felt like the only place where everything was certain and concrete and nothing would go wrong. But as anyone can tell you, we can’t live in the past. We live in the present, whether we want to or not. I created yet another illusion for myself, thinking I could stay a child forever in my own untouchable bubble, where everything was perfect and I was perfect and I could control everything. Guess what? That bubble burst. Here’s what else I’ve learned since then.
I’ve learned that by refusing to grow up, I held onto many of the age-old anxieties of youth longer than I should have. I’ve learned that embracing the uncertainty and ambiguity of adult life is much easier than living in the past and pretending that life doesn’t go on or that children don’t grow up. I’ve learned that a lot of my anxieties were normal and natural; we just don’t talk about them out loud enough. I’ve learned that embracing uncertainty is letting go of the false sense of certainty in childhood—in other words, sometimes living in reality is in fact better for us than living in fantasy, especially when most of your anxieties were rooted in said fantasy. Was the fantasy of certainty in childhood real? No, it’s just that most kids outgrow that faster than I did, and that’s fine. Were my anxieties real? Yes, they were one-hundred percent real. Were the things my anxiety told me real? No, they were not, and those are the things we can let go of as we continue to grow.
Pop singer Camila Cabello, who has been vocal about her struggles with anxiety and OCD, recently opened up about how she went from an extremely anxious child who would burst into tears anytime her parents tried to watch her perform, to a chart-topping pop star who tours the world on arena stages. In a post on Instagram, she wrote,
“I sang in my room when my parents left for Walmart and cried when one day I saw them filming me through the crack of the door, I got teary eyed when people sang happy birthday to me because people looking at me actually made me overwhelmed. I was generally incredibly nervous and socially anxious when I was little; and people always have this look of disbelief when I tell them that … I feel like my whole life there’s been two Camila’s in me. There’s little Camila that is terrified of the unknown, is aware of all the ways everything can go wrong, (actually can picture them vividly), and thinks it’s safer to stay home than to play ball. Then there’s the other Camila. And she knows what she wants out of life, is aware of how little time I have to let little Camila run the show while time passes by, and grabs young me by the hand and forces her out the door saying ‘Let’s go. You’ll survive, and I’m not gonna miss out on this. Let’s go.’ And that is literally how I can sum up how I’ve gotten to this point in my life … The truth is you decide who you’re going to be. Every day. I’m not talking about talent or success. I just mean the type of person you’re going to be. If you haven’t been very brave, or very social, or wild, or an adventure seeker, if you describe yourself as the opposite of those things... it doesn’t mean you can’t be. The other you needs to grab little you by the hand, yank you by the hairs and tell you, ‘Let’s go.’ Little me hasn’t left. I just don’t let her boss me around as much. I felt like sharing because I think sometimes we see other people do things and think ‘Ah, well.. that’s just not me. I’ve never been like that.’ It’s NOT TRUE. I’m telling you. I went from never wanting to sing in front of my family to being addicted to performing, from being too anxious to hang out with new people to... still being a little anxious but having THE BEST time and making irreplaceable memories. The essence of me is the same, but I’ve changed so much as a person. You choose who you’re going to be. Force yourself to do what you’re afraid of, always - and go after what you want and who you want to be, because you’re worth that. You’re worth the fight. It’s the most worthwhile one there is.”
They say that everything you want is on the other side of fear—and another thing I’m learning is that everything they say is true. When I was eighteen or nineteen, which is what I would describe as my most anxious years to date, I refused to believe people when they told me that the stress is “not worth it,” worrying “won’t solve anything,” or “nothing is worth compromising your physical or emotional self” (all actual things that were said to me over and over again by several different people during that period, by the way). I couldn’t believe that they were right. I honestly believed, somewhere inside my head, that excessive worrying would actually solve some things. If I worried about a test or exam and stressed myself out over it to the point of crossing the border into unhealthy territory, I believed that—because I had worried so much over it—things would turn out okay. Excessive worrying and overpreparing, two rituals I’ve held dear for most of my life, were things I believed could control the outcome of other things, like exams (I also believed they controlled the outcome of exams because my tendency to overprepare has been the root of most of my academic success practically since elementary school).
I never understood what people meant when they said things like, “Just have a little faith, it’ll all work out.” People saying those things to me made me want to punch them, and I could never articulate why. Now I can. It’s because in order to have faith that something else will work out just fine without excessive overpreparing or micromanaging, you must first have faith in yourself. I’ve only recently learned that I have a long history of having virtually no faith in myself, and this has been the root of a great deal of other anxieties. I was letting the little me, the one from childhood with all of those anxieties, continue to control me and boss me around, even though I wasn’t a child anymore. Little me was the only me I had ever known, because I was too scared to develop another me, and little me is—beneath the surface—an anxious little shit. I know now that I don’t want to be little me forever and let him boss me around and control me with old anxieties and worries that have long since expired. I’m done letting little Jeffrey run the show when she’s a nasty little bitch who deserves a smack across the face. I want to be the other Jeffrey, the one that exists now who is writing these words, to be in the driver’s seat for the foreseeable future. I want him to take little Jeffrey by the hand, who unfortunately still exists in part inside my head, and say, “Let’s go. You’ll survive, and I’m not gonna miss out on this. Let’s go.” I can let the positive aspects of little Jeffrey continue to live on, as long as I know how to draw the line and not let him boss me around as much. I’m learning how to grab him by the hand, yank him by the hairs, and tell him, “Let’s go. Life is too short.”
“You know, people do have more difficult problems. But your
anxieties are still real. They still count, yeah? ”
—Laura Silverman, You Asked For Perfect
“I am alone here in my own mind. There is no map, and there is no road. It is one of a kind, just as yours is. It’s in a vapor. It’s in a flap. It makes jelly. It chews toads. It’s a dummy. It’s a whiz. Sometimes I have to hunt her down. Sometimes I have to track her. Sometimes I hold her still and use a nutcracker.”
—Anne Sexton
“Change the voices in your head,
Make them like you instead.”
—P!nk, “Fuckin’ Perfect”
(Recommended listening for this essay: “Grow As We Go” by Ben Platt, “You Gotta Be” by Des’ree, “Beautiful U R” by Deborah Cox, “I Forgot That You Existed” by Taylor Swift, and “Strong” by Sonna Rele)
Follow It's Not That Deep on Instagram — @areyouthereanxiety — and listen to my playlist of mental health songs on Spotify and Apple Music
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