A Shared Anxiety

the pandemic has made victims of us all

I’ve always been this way; quiet, unsure, teetering on the brink of emotional disaster. The older I got, the more pronounced my mental unwellness became. Chased and haunted by frequent panic attacks, overrun with depression, unable to cope with the slightest upset. I had no skills for successfully navigating this life, I did not know how to obtain them, either. It wasn’t until my thirties when I sought help for my precarious mental state and even then, I just had a doctor throw pills at me, a cocktail of Paxil and Wellbutrin that made me worse instead of better.

Later, a more competent doctor diagnosed me with depression and Generalized Anxiety Disorder. It was good to have a name for what ailed me, even if that name spoke of a great maw where all my symptoms gathered to form a great despair. My doctor suggested I find a good therapist but I held off on that, not sure if I wanted to share my inner workings with anyone else. I took a new combination of drugs - Abilify and Trintellix - and these seemed to help me. While they didn’t make the depression and anxiety disappear, they certainly took the edge off and for the first time in my life I felt able to cope with the traumas both great and small that life handed me.

It’s been hard to explain to people what an anxiety disorder is like, what constant, low level panic does to your mental stability. I’ve tried putting it into words before, but I always come up short. I gave up eventually, thinking that it wasn’t really my job to explain it. It should be enough to say that you are unwell mentally, you shouldn’t have to act as DSM-IV for inquiring minds who are probably going to turn around and use that knowledge against you. So I never talked about it.

But then: a pandemic set in and, with it, myriad problems — economic uncertainty, massive death, the specter of the virus hanging over us, each of us wondering when it’s going to be our turn to either get it or maybe lose a loved one to it. We’re all reeling, we’re all living each day not knowing if we’re going to be locked down soon. We cough and wonder if we’re dying, we navigate the outside world like a minefield.

Suddenly, my anxiety is everyone’s anxiety; it’s become a shared experience. People who never suffered from this before now have that same low level rumbling, now feel unsure all the time, now can’t sleep, can’t concentrate, can’t comprehend how they’re going to make it from one day to the next without utterly breaking down.

Those who never understood me are now asking me “is this how you feel all the time?” or telling me they have a new found empathy for my mental plight, as they try to grapple with their burgeoning anxiety. The only difference, I tell them, is that generally my anxiety comes out of nowhere, with no regard for what’s going on in the world. It has no solid basis, no sound reason for existing. But on the surface, it’s the same. The feeling of impending doom, feeling the walls close in, dabbling in worst case scenarios. I see it in the eyes of people who I always thought to be the most stable. I hear it in the words of friends and relatives who are otherwise stoic. We are crashing. We are in the throes of a collective panic attack. And it’s all made for a better understanding of depression and anxiety. People are talking more openly about mental health and they are being met with knowing nods and an empathy most of us have spent a lifetime searching for. I don’t begrudge anyone that empathy that I didn’t have until now; we are better off for it.

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My husband left me five days ago. It was somewhat of a shock and I’m still reeling from it. I am sad, I am heartbroken, I am somewhat angry, and I am full of not only the general anxiety that plagued me before, but new, looming anxieties that were not there before. I don’t know how to navigate all of this in a pandemic world. There’s nowhere to go, nothing to do. I sit home alone and contemplate my life and worry about my future, agonize over the past, compartmentalize the present. I do all this while still feeling all the anxiety about the virus, while still feeling that low level buzz that runs through my head constantly. I don’t know what to do with myself.

The pandemic has taken its toll on most of us. We have been no exception to that. Sitting in the house day after day, work drying up, the weight of the world on our minds, the depression setting in. It’s all made for volatile times and we were just ripe for picking. It was perfect timing for issues to come up and boil over, everything magnified and amplified so that examination of ourselves and each other was inevitable.

Maybe I shouldn’t have been so surprised and that’s on me for not talking about it, for not being forward with my feelings. I thought he could see my depression, that it manifested itself in my actions or non-actions. He thought I could see his, that I’d recognize a fellow traveler. But we didn’t talk about it, because to talk about it would be to make it real. And neither of us wanted to believe we were so far gone that there was no coming back. I live with my anxiety and depression, I wallow in it, I sometimes revel in it, but I don’t want to talk about it. And that is the great undoing.

I can’t totally blame the pandemic for the dissolution of my marriage, but I can say it had a hand in it. Perhaps feeling our mutual depression so acutely and not addressing it was the real downfall. The not talking about it, because mental health is a thing you just don’t talk about.

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There is a lot of talk about mental health these days because we are in the beginning of a great reckoning brought on by the pandemic. I’m glad to see people addressing their mental illnesses publicly, talking about their depression, their anxiety, how they are manifesting. There’s great talk of self-care, of therapy, of taking care of ourselves and each other.

I want to gather everyone who is feeling anxious right now for the first time, the people who never had any anxiety related issues who now feel the thunder in their brains, the storm gathering in their soul. It’s a relentless feeling, one that carries with you from morning until night and then invades your dreams. I want to tell you how to handle it, how to keep it from overflowing and making you feel like you are constantly sticking your finger in an electric outlet. But I don’t know. I just know it’s something I’ve lived with my whole life and now that there’s a shared anxiety out there, now that we are all feeling this thing that has wrapped itself around me for all these years, you finally, finally understand how I feel all the time. This is not something I wanted to share with you, it’s not something I want others to experience. But here we are, you and I, the humming in our brains getting louder, the hand wringing more frequent, fear becoming more acute. We can overcompensate for all these feelings by panic shopping, buying up paper towels and toilet paper and bottled water until we feel a false sense of safety. We can eat an edible, drink some herbal tea, rewatch favorite tv shows until we feel calm, but it’s there, it’s always there, ready to leap out at us and say “hey, how about that pandemic” just when you’re feeling like you have your emotions under control.

So I have little advice for you about handling your new case of anxiety. I have no platitudes, no soothing words. I just want to welcome you to this world I’ve always known and tell you to settle in for the ride. Do what you can to make yourself feel better; practice self care, treat yourself good, wear a mask, stay inside as much as practical. We, as a people, are going to have to figure out how to deal with the mental health fallout from this pandemic. But until we get everyone health care so we all have access to mental health practitioners, the best I can tell you is to lay low and busy yourself and talk about it. Open up. Letting your fears sit there quietly only serves to make them worse. Be honest with yourself and others about it.  Anxiety is a son of a bitch and I don’t wish it on anyone. It’s too bad it’s basically got everyone now.

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