Emma Stone once said, “Anxiety is something that is a part of me, but it is not who I am.” This is my journey of anxiety…so far. 

Growing up, well, I still am growing up, but as a toddler, my mom always described me as inquisitive and creative. My dad described me as artsy, “more Liv than Maddie”.  My brother described me as short, annoying, and obsessed with princesses. I’m not sure what I would say about myself honestly. I always had my own routines and way of doing life. I might not have made sense to others, but I made sense to myself. 

Looking back on old videos and pictures, there were definitely early signs of anxiety. I find it intriguing to see how I would obsessively bite my nails or twirl my hair or zone out, all things I do now to control overstimulation. I wish I could go back to those moments in the still pictures and ask myself what I was worried about or what I was feeling.

Living with an anxiety disorder is not fun, and it is hard being in constant fear. I find myself constantly shaking, avoiding people, and throwing up all because my heart decided to do the tango inside my chest.

 I remember one specific day, June 15, 2019, where I was in Chicago watching horse racing. I was 10 soon to be 11. A part of horse racing is gambling on which horse will win. Picking my horse was a horrible experience. I was using my uncle’s money, and I had fear that I would pick a horse that would lose and I would disappoint him. My horse was in the last round of racing; the entire day I sat in a chair and bit off every single fingernail until they were all bloody and stubby. My mom looked pensively at me and said it wasn’t a big deal if I lost. I savored her validation. I would heed my brother’s jokes that made everyone cackle laughing and try to replicate them. I cared so much that my family, and really anyone around me, found me prolific and original, but instead, I just looked gawky. Gazing around like Hei Hei, the chicken from Moana.

My life went on for two more years like this. Me, trying to make myself sound older than I was and every time, not being perceived in the way I wanted. I began to lose myself. I was so focused on what everyone thought of me that I got rid of all my special qualities that made me, me. I stopped wearing glasses, started straightening my curls, I wore basic clothes instead of the fun bright colors I used to love. I fell into a deep pit and didn’t realize it until I couldn’t climb out of it. Every day was a struggle. I spent my morning classes agonizing over who I would eat lunch with and my afternoon ones worried that no one would want to hang out with me after school.

Eventually, in November of 2021, I hit a breaking point. I woke up every day not being able to fathom how I would get out of bed. I couldn’t eat breakfast because I felt so sick with nerves. I was petrified to talk because of the odds I would say the wrong thing. The constant thoughts were a plight to endure. I remember thinking, if the rest of my life was going to be like this then why am I even alive? Those thoughts quickly spiraled darker and darker, and one night I found myself in the waiting room of the Big Lots Behavioral Health Pavillion at Nationwide Children’s Hospital, getting assessed for suicidal ideation. It was the hardest day of my life. I felt humiliated that my parents had to take me; I felt angry at myself for not being good enough. But most of all, I was concerned about what my friends would think.  I remember turning off the Snapchat location feature that night while waiting in the hospital.

It is safe to say that my hospitalization experiences were not the best. I went 3 times over the course of 2 months, and each time the psychiatrist told me I wasn’t “sick enough” to get treatment. To put that brutally, they were saying that unless I actively attempted suicide, I wouldn’t be a priority. 

My third (and last) time in the hospital, I had a nurse who was doing my intake; he asked me what my symptoms were. I told him, “I worry what others think of me and it never stops. I feel like the only way to turn off the voices in my head is to die.” I was vulnerable and raw and emotional. “I think those are just healthy worries,” the nurse told me. In that exact moment, I felt like absolutely nothing; I felt invalidated; I was done.

Once again, I left the hospital being told I wasn’t sick enough but that I should “seek treatment somewhere else.” Walking past the glass doors of Children’s that were covered in butterflies and forest animals, I knew that there was no possible way I could go back to the hospital. I was done being humiliated by nurses and therapists, and I wouldn’t go back. I couldn’t. 

I’m not sure if the scare tactic is what the nurses were aiming for, but that is what happened to me. 

I went into treatment at a Partial Hospitalization facility. I went five days a week from 8-2 and missed three weeks of school. And while I’m not saying that it was a complete waste of time, I don’t think it helped my anxiety all that much. I truly think most of the worst I did to fight my anxiety came from myself and my outpatient therapist. I had sessions twice a week where we would pick apart any and all thoughts from the last few days. I found the names for the different ways I was thinking: catastrophizing, black-and-white thinking, mind reading, etc. I had to correct my thoughts and retrain my brain to think the way that I needed it to. I had to find outlets for my anxiety that didn’t come in the form of breaking down. I picked up habits like painting and piano and walking and journaling and baking (so so much baking). It was so hard. So so hard. I was challenging the way my brain had functioned for 13 years and for the first time in my life, I had to truly rely on the people around me to support me. We had a lot of family movie nights. I played a lot of cards with my mom and I took countless walks with my dogs.

It has been just over two years of fighting my anxiety disorder, and I’m alive–  I didn’t give in. And it was freaking hard. But my point is that I made it through. Anxiety is an internal battle that tears a person apart, but I truly believe that we all have the tools to stitch ourselves back together.  When I look back over the past two years, I am really proud of how far I have come.  I am not ashamed of my past struggles because these struggles have helped me become who I am today. And I like who I am right now.