I'm Not Going to Quit this time

 

We went to Duke this week for orientation, and it scared me. I felt like my 2^nd grade self when I was told I didn’t quite test high enough for the gifted program. When the professor put up a slide filled with scripture and an outline, the words looked like a sea of letters with no form or connection. That’s what happens when my anxiety takes over, my cognition is impaired, and I can’t think. All I can do is feel, and the feelings are overwhelming. It felt like a preview of what returning to class would be like, and I did what I’ve done the last few years when life has felt overwhelming. I opted to shutdown and look for the exit – anything to make the feelings stop.

I loved my non-profit so much – the horses, the clinicians who worked for me, the people we helped. I wanted it more than anything, but I felt like it was breaking me. Since my aunt died by suicide, I’ve lived every day with fear that life could break me like it did her – that the human heart and brain can only take so much. I grew up watching my grandfather – the patriarch of our family and a brilliant, well-read man of extraordinary Faith lay in bed day after day. Mental illness stole over half of his life and neither intelligence nor Faith could save him. As an adolescent, I feared the same outcome for myself because I too suffered with episodes of depression and addiction to an eating disorder, but I refused to face it alone. I saw my grandfather suffer silently, so I committed to doing the opposite. I went to therapy, I sat in groups with others struggling, and I told people – both those who could understand and those who couldn’t – how difficult it was, and I let that pain fuel within me a drive to heal myself and others. That pain outweighed my imposture syndrome and insecurity, and the results of my hard work built what I thought was an unbreakable confidence until my aunt died. I knew when I made it through my twenties without developing schizophrenia like my maternal grandmother, that I was beyond the years of a typically developing psychotic episode, so I thought I was in the clear. But when my aunt's psychosis hit in her 50s, it went against everything I learned in graduate school. It made me fear that stress could intersect with the aging process (hormonal changes, vulnerabilities) and be too much for the mind and heart to navigate.

The day I closed the non-profit, it was because I was scared and felt I needed to discontinue the stress that could ruin me. Similarly, when issues in my marriage caused pain, I worried that it too would become too much and that I needed to protect myself. So, again, I tried to close off to the pain and file for divorce. The unexpected emotions of divorce left me unable to work and function, and again I quit work to stop the pain. I quit functioning, and I asked for help. I went to residential treatment because I feared my mental health, and I knew the only thing that saved me in the past was treatment and navigating my mental health struggles with others who were in pain.

I returned to work and to my marriage, but I haven’t been able to shake this new narrative born out of my aunt's death. These experiences of quitting on the non-profit, my marriage, and work have shaped a new narrative of myself at middle age – no longer strong, fearless, and persistent, and more prone to quit or avoid discomfort due to fear of a mental breakdown.

This narrative is what I now have to overcome, so even if I fail all my classes this first semester, I am not going to quit. I’m going to live even if it feels like I’m drowning in fear because I can’t be a therapist to others and give up on myself.