This morning I saw a post popping around my newsfeed from a popular large, non-denomination church in Nashville that simply said, “Worship and worry can’t coexist.” Now, I’ll be upfront in saying that I didn’t listen to the message (though I intend to)…but my point here is not to critique it. In fact, I’m not really talking about the intent of that statement – I want to share with you what it brings up for me, and what I hope my anxiety-prone friends will come to see in themselves.
I have always been a worrier, and I come from a long line of them. The women in my family are smart, prepared, courageous and ready to anticipate what might be ahead. Couple that with some medical trauma I encountered as a pre-verbal child due to asthma and you have the perfect soil in which an anxiety disorder can grow. I never realized my anxiety was anything out of the ordinary. I remember nightmares from my childhood of monsters standing around my bed – and of jumping off the bed to run into my parents room so that no hand could reach out from underneath and grab my ankle. In those early years, it was pretty typical, magical kid-thinking. But the monster kept growing. Every time my parents left town, I assumed that they were going to die while they were gone. Every time I had a big or exciting event coming up I assumed that something would happen to me before it took place. Every night I laid in bed afraid that someone would break-into the house – just waiting out the fear until I finally fell asleep. I was anxious about how I was perceived, quiet in class, found it difficult to make new friends, and was constantly imagining catastrophe. Here’s the thing. I heard all of these messages telling me that my anxiety was somehow my fault… I didn’t have enough faith, I wasn’t “casting my cares” on God enough, I wasn’t trusting enough, etc. Sometimes these were explicit, but sometimes they were implicitly woven into the fabric of everyday conversation.
Going to college didn’t help, except to bring to light that some of my fear was very much abnormal. My new friends thought it was funny and gave me a hard time about what a scaredy cat I was, and it became a part of my identity. I was once again the quiet one in class, but what only my close friends knew was that it killed me to be so quiet. I wanted to speak up so bad and I had so much to say, but I just couldn’t. I would beat myself up constantly, and write in my journals about my goals to “say one thing in class today” and to stop being so afraid. I read Tillich’s “The Courage To Be” hoping to find some nugget to jolt me out of my fear. By the time I graduated, I came to the realization that fear ruled my life and my decisions…but the messages never changed. I needed to work harder at it. I needed to be braver. I needed to have more faith. I needed to be better than this. What was wrong with me that I was so afraid all the time. I internalized ALL of it as a character flaw – as my main character flaw.
Anxiety affected every facet of my life, but I managed and internalized it fairly well (so that others couldn’t see the depth of my suffering) until I went through significant trauma around the birth of my children. When Micah was born I had severe pre-eclampsia that continued into a very scary bout with pulmonary edema after delivery. After Remy was born (most people don’t know this) I got to take an ambulance ride to the hospital and leave my six day old baby at home with my mother because half of my face was paralyzed and we thought I was having a stroke. I kissed that baby goodbye and thought it was forever. People…just so you know…that’s trauma…(sometimes we think our trauma somehow doesn’t “qualify” as trauma because other people have experienced so much worse…and this is incredibly dangerous because trauma needs to be stabilized and reprocessed, not repressed or ignored or downplayed…). After an overnight stay in the hospital, away from my newborn and toddler, I was told by a neurologist that I had a lesion on my pons that was most likely multiple sclerosis. I was set up with a specialist and sent home to process the diagnosis while I awaited an appointment. To make a really long story short (maybe I’ll share it all another time)…I do not have M.S. Two years of follow-up MRI’s and doctors still don’t have a conclusive answer for what is on my pons – but their best estimate is that it was a tiny vascular incident.
All that to say, this trauma took my tiny little anxiety monster and grew it epically. I started therapy to process the trauma right away. I spent countless nights awake, thinking I was having a heart attack. I googled and became frantic that I had a tumor in my brainstem. I was worried that it would happen again and I would become locked in. What if it wasn’t M.S. but what if it was A.L.S? I spent hours hiding in the bathroom googling and panicking. Here is the thing – I was legit having all sorts of physical symptoms. I had actual twitching in my fingers, and numbness and tingling on my left side. I had throbbing pain in my arm and cognitive disturbances. I had panic attacks that sent me to the emergency room. Guys, it was SO awful.
And because of all of these messages I internalized over the years, I still thought it was somehow my fault. I wasn’t brave enough. I didn’t have enough faith. I wasn’t mature enough. I was too scared.
I missed out on so much of my life.
After two years of therapy and yoga (both of which I still do, and both of which have been invaluable to my recovery) I finally “gave up” and started on an SSRI. Y’all…this is one of the hardest decisions I’ve had to make for my health. I was SO terrified about this medication. What would it do to my brain? What would it do to my creativity? What kind of side-effects would it cause?
It takes a solid eight weeks to adjust to an antidepressant medication…and it was a really rough eight weeks. But I have to tell you, I feel like I have been reborn. For the first time in my life, I don’t lay awake at night worrying about what is going to happen to me while I sleep. I don’t worry about what is going on in my brain. I haven’t had a single panic attack. While I still fret from time to time, I don’t obsess and ruminate about things. You guys…I am living without severe anxiety for the first time in my whole life and it feels so amazing.
I’ll go more into this someday but I wanted to write this post for several reasons. First, maybe it’s true that worry and worship can’t coexist…but that doesn’t mean you have to fix your worry so you can worship…There are a lot of ways to treat anxiety outside of medication that work for many people…but you can’t “will it” away or “trust it” away…or dare I say, “pray it” away… If your anxiety was clinical, as mine was, you have to attack it head on…and realize that it’s not a character flaw. It’s not something you’re doing wrong or something you need to get better at. When I started taking that pill, all of that hard work I was doing in yoga and psychotherapy and faith was finally able to make a difference for me…Bottom line, sometimes it’s a chemical thing. Second, I think that “worry and worship” phrase can sort of insinuate that your negative feelings aren’t welcome before God…which is something else I find extremely damaging…but we can get into that another time. Third, I wanted to make this public because I had so much shame around starting this medication. It was reading someone else’s facebook post that I respected, and seeing how she was vulnerable about her use of medication, that finally gave me the courage to try. That post changed my life, y’all. This is extremely long, so I will cut myself off for now.
Photo by Sarah Diniz Outeiro on Unsplash
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