My Anxiety and Depression
I’ve been thinking about writing this post for a long time but I never knew how to start it. I still am not sure how to start but we are just going to go for it and see how it turns out. The reason I am writing this is to not gain sympathy from others but to help those who might be feeling the same way. I want those people to know they are not alone, there is nothing wrong with them, and I’m always available to talk. I’m still very much on my own journey so I may not have all the answers but I’m a pretty good listener and would love to help in any way that I can. Let’s start from the beginning.
I was professionally diagnosed with anxiety before my second year of college in 2014. Before then, I knew what anxiety was but I wasn’t fully aware that how I had been feeling was related to anxiety until that year. In middle school and high school, kids are always judging one another so I just assumed that my feelings toward being judged by others was normal for my age. I was constantly feeling as though people were pretending to like me or pretending to be my friend when secretly they thought I was weird or annoying. It wasn’t until college that I noticed that I was doing things or feeling certain ways about situations that wouldn’t have much meaning in someone else’s life. These included simple things like having all of the doors in the house shut and I was always overthinking everything. I have had this behavior for as long as I can remember but it didn’t become a huge issue for me until I was living on my own.
Summer of 2014, I moved into a tiny apartment by myself in order to stay at school and complete a summer internship for my degree. My family was all so far away, I didn’t really have any friends at the start of that summer, and I had never lived completely on my own before. Behaviors like needing all doors shut became really apparent when there were only two doors in my tiny apartment to worry about. There were many other things I was anxious about but a lot of it was based off of everyday worries from life like money. Shortly after that summer, I was diagnosed and put on medication to manage my anxieties. I did attend therapy while I was in school but it only seemed to help a little bit. I even registered Allegra as an emotional support animal. While medication is definitely not for everyone, it has helped me a lot. My husband can definitely attest to how different my mood is if I end up missing days of taking my meds.
Fast forward to the end of last year when I started going to a new doctor for unrelated medical issues. Because I was a new patient, he wanted to get a good idea of where I was overall, healthwise. Since I had checked off that I had anxiety on the new patient intake form, he decided to give me a paper test to determine where I was on the scale. I took the test and he decided to save the results until my follow-up appointment. I took the same test a second time about a month later. The doctor compared the two tests and ended up diagnosing me with depression. While the test did show that I did in fact have anxiety, the results on the depression scale were actually much higher than my anxiety score. This was kind of shocking to me because I had never thought of myself having depression but after all that had happened and I had been feeling the entire year prior to this diagnosis, it actually made sense. I had bounced around from job to job, never being satisfied with where I was and what I was doing. Every new job always started off great and around the 4-5 month mark, things were going horribly and something had to change.
Before I was diagnosed with depression, I got my dream job as a wildlife rehabilitator. I was finally being given the opportunity to use my degree and I was so excited. 5 months later, January of this year, I no longer had that job and I was destroyed. Let’s just say that never in my life have I worked somewhere so unorganized with co-workers who were so cruel. When people begin to make you hate your passion, things become extremely difficult. I still think about this period of my life and while I don’t cry at the thought of it anymore, it’s still really difficult to think and talk about. Again, I’m sharing my feelings and thoughts with you so that I can hopefully help those who are dealing with similar feelings.
These past few months have been the absolute hardest in my entire life. While I was so glad to finally be out of that place, I was so angry with the place, those people, and myself. I was angry for how I was treated and I couldn’t figure out why me. What did I do to deserve this? My anxiety and depression through this period went from mostly managed to complete unmanageable even though I was taking my meds everyday. I spent months searching for and applying for jobs. I applied for so many jobs that were in my field and that I was completely over-qualified for just to turned down or to not even hear an answer back about employment. This, on top of my car being backed into, and every little thing that seemed to go wrong, pushed me deeper and deeper into a hole that I thought I was never going to get out of. I started shutting down and pushing people away.
Let me just say, for your own good and if you can, try your absolute hardest to never reach that point. I still couldn’t figure out why this was happening to me and what was so wrong with me that no one wanted me to work for them. I started to second guess my education and career choice. For the first time in my life, I didn’t want to work with animals but I also had absolutely no clue what I wanted. I started focusing on homesteading research and of course this blog. At the end of April, I finally got a job. I started working at a local farm in their produce stand. I enjoy interacting with people in the retail side of the job and I’m also learning so much about farm business and growing produce. This is honestly the best job I have held since I’ve been down here because it’s the only place I’ve worked at since I graduated college where the people are so welcoming and not judgemental. Everyone feels like family and it’s the most relaxing thing to clean fruits and veggies and be in your own little world for a few hours a day.
While being able to do things that make you happy is important, the most important thing for those with anxiety and depression is to have a good support system and that’s why I’m writing this. Everyone deserves support from people who love and care about them. I honestly had no idea what I would have done without my husband supporting me through these past few months. He’s had to deal with mood swings, a ton of crying, being pushed away, and me not giving him all of the support that he needed during this time as well. I greatly appreciate everything that he has done for me and everything that he continues to do for me everyday. I would not be where I am at today without him.
Yes, I am still struggling everyday but I have finally began to make my way out of the hole that I am in and for those of you who have found themselves in a hole of their own, you’re not alone. Everyone’s situation is different but we all end up needing the exact same thing to make it through. We all need people who will deal with our emotional meltdowns and remind us every day of how much we are cared about. We need someone to reach a hand down into the darkness we are in and offer to help us out.
I want to help those of you like me. I offering you my hand and I hope that you will not hesitate to contact me if you would simply like to talk and get things off your mind. I am a huge ranter (ask my parents) and I am willing to listen to anyone who just needs to tell someone how they are feeling and what’s going on in their lives. Here on my blog, there is no judgement and YOU ARE CARED FOR.
* I want to give a huge thank you to my husband, my parents, my brother, and everyone else who has supported me through the beginning of this year. I love you all.
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