N is for Nanoseconds

This is the sixth installment in a series covering the issue nearest to my heart.  I still hope to have one every day, but we'll have to see how that goes.  I want to share how I came to the passion that I spend much of my time and resources on.  Since this story is mine and mine alone to tell, there will be portions that are vague and I apologize in advance.  The road to healing is a personal one and it's not my place to tell the story for someone who may not be ready to have their part of it told.  Some material may be triggering.  Please read at your own discretion.

To read from the beginning, find part one here.

"The storm is coming but I don't mind.  People are dying, I close my blinds...I want to change the world, instead I sleep.  I want to believe in more than you and me.  But all that I know is I'm breathing.  All I can do is keep breathing.  All we can do is keep breathing now."  ~  Ingrid Michaelson, Keep Breathing

If you've never experienced anxiety attacks or other forms of mental illness, it's really hard to adequately grasp the toll that they take on your life.  Your brain sometimes seems split into two.  Your body doesn't respond to either piece.  It's like an eternal torture that you can't really escape because you can't run from something inside you.  I think that's why there is such a high incidence of people with these issues doing drugs or drinking to excess.  You'll do anything; try anything, to get some sort of relief.  A break from the madness in your mind.

Living in my first apartment was interesting.  I had to learn a lot of basic lessons that most people learn well before they are on their own.  At this point, my mom had become more of an ally than an enabler.  She had learned ways to help me cope, but also was really trying to teach me to be a grown up.  It's funny.  When you're little, you think that you will just naturally know things when you get to be a certain age.  Even my daughter will say things like:  "I'll bake cakes when I'm 22."  She somehow thinks that just the act of turning 22 will give her the knowledge and the coordination needed to bake a cake.  I guess I kind of thought that about life, too.

I think I spent a lot of time waiting.  Just waiting for the day that the anxiety would pass, that my need for attention would wane, that the little mundane things that are involved in grown up life would just come to me. They didn't.  Maybe they do for some people, but for me, every single small step was hard work.

I learned that it's important to save money.  Cause you kinda need it for bills and stuff.  I can vividly remember going to the music and movies store and spotting a complete boxed set of  Nightmare on Elm Street DVD's.  Oh, I wanted them so badly.  But I didn't have enough money for them and my rent.  In fact, purchasing them would be close to the amount that I paid for rent.  A grown up with experience would've walked away.  I bought them.  I figured that I would just pay the rent with late fee on my rent out of my next check.  But when you have crippling anxiety attacks and end up calling into work a few times, you don't make as much money as you did on the weeks that you didn't have anxiety attacks.  So payday came and I couldn't afford my rent.  I buried my head in the sand, thinking that it would go away.  I've had a life long problem with doing that.  A couple weeks later I was served with an eviction notice.  I had 10 days to get caught up or I was out.  I really didn't know what to do.  I felt embarrassed asking anyone for help.  Here I am at 19 and can't even do something as simple as pay my rent?  But I figured my mom would bail me out if I tucked tail and groveled.  And I think that was the turning point in which my mother began to really help me.  I asked her for the money and being my mother, she couldn't stand to see me evicted.  But being my mother, she couldn't stand to see me not learn how to do this for myself.  She paid it for me.  And then she drafted a payment plan for me to reimburse her....with interest.  To be honest, I was grateful and angry at the same time.  Because of my issues (and because of my highly honed manipulation skills), family and other people had always kind of given me what I wanted.  I yearned to be a productive adult yet was angry when I had to do the things that it takes to get there.  I think the step that my mom took to start ensuring I understood that you can't take advantage of people (even though it was a learned behavior by so many people taking advantage of me) was a tiny step in starting to retrain my brain.

It took a few other lessons before I started being more careful with money.  I remember going across the street to buy a pack of smokes and a Dr. Pepper.  I hadn't balanced my checkbook but went ahead and wrote a check for it...hoping it might float.  But it didn't.  Between the store fees and the banks fees, that pack of smokes and a drink cost me $63.  Something triggered in my brain from that.  But because I can never be "in the middle" on stuff, I went to the other extreme.  I counted every single penny coming in and going out and kept the most concise and perfectly handwritten ledger you have EVER seen.  (And I still do this today...I just don't update it every single day and read over it 200 times a day).

I was working and doing pretty good during the day...

But then there were the nights.  I still couldn't handle nights.  Panic attacks were almost nightly.  The only coping methods that I had were calling my mom and crying while she made every feeble attempt possible to calm me down or going out to the bar, being around people in those late night hours so I wouldn't have to be by myself.

I started frequenting the bar across the street.  It's funny, because at this point I was not 21.  AND I didn't drink.  I still don't really, save for the occasional night out.  But this bar had karaoke.  I've always loved to sing and am pretty good at it.  I had won several talent shows growing up and I had done karaoke at my aunt's house when she bought that giant laser disc karaoke system.  I grew up in a really musical family and had sung with bands and done a lot of small community concerts.  So I thought I'd try my hand at that.

The really interesting thing about karaoke for me at this point in my life is that it got me attention.  But this was the first thing in my life that I could do, liked to do, that got me positive attention.  People were recognizing my talent and not my body.  The owner of the bar actually gave me a job after hearing me sing Unchained Melody.  I was going to be a karaoke jockey on Thursday-Saturday.  It was a great way to supplement my income and I loved doing it.  Then it developed into me having my own show on Thursdays.  It was pretty awesome.

But I guess I wasn't ready to accept positive attention.  It didn't feel right to me.  I still don't know if I just had a hard time accepting compliments or if I couldn't believe them.  I'm not sure what was going on in my brain, but I basically ruined it for myself.  I took the completely benign act of being a great singer and turned it into something else.  Because of my history, it was almost like if there wasn't a sexual or self mutilating component to it, I couldn't navigate it.  So I began to sing songs like I Touch Myself or anything else that was suggestive or that I could at least put on a suggestive show to.  The bar owners loved it because soon, we had a huge loyal following for my Thursday night "shows."  They were making money, I was making money....but it wasn't enough.  I still didn't feel validated.  So I would take whoever my "biggest fan" was, home to my apartment.  It became a vicious cycle.  I'd sleep with him, then hate myself.  Then pour my emotions out on stage, start to feel alone, find someone...do it all over again.  Sometimes these would turn into relationships; sometimes not.  When they did, usually a guy would have a threshold of how much "Crazy Girl" he could take and when it got to that point, he bounced.

I'd sit in my living room and cry until I couldn't breathe.  I hated myself.  I hated men.  I hated everything.  I thought about how I thought I was going to do all these great things.  When I was a child, I had dreamed of being a doctor.  More than anything I hated running into Her.  That girl.  So many different faces but all the same.  The girl with so much self confidence that she kicked guys to the curb.  The girl so proud of herself and protective of her body that she would tell me about how she waited x amount of days/months/years to sleep with her boyfriend.  The girl that found her soul mate and was getting married.  The girl who didn't need a man whatsoever and was confident and comfortable just being alone with herself.  I hated that girl because I wanted to be that girl.  Meeting one of those girls just showed me that it actually was possible; that other women achieved it...but that I couldn't.  I wouldn't.  There was nothing for me but where I was.

At some point in that year, whether due to stress or genetics, no one is real sure, I lost my hair.  I was diagnosed with alopecia areata.  It started with a bald spot the size of a quarter and ended up with almost my whole head, some eyebrows, and eyelashes.  For a girl already struggling with self esteem, but ironically a girl who used her looks to get what she wanted, to get a sick sense of protection while farming herself out....it was devastating.  I ended up wearing a wig for a while, as the hair grew back short and stubbly, I converted it to a "boy cut."  I was on steroids for the condition and they caused me to balloon in weight.

The panic attacks became more and more frequent.  They weren't the kind that would send me to the ER screaming like they were when I was a child.  They were the ones where my brain was just telling me that I was going to die.  I would become almost catatonic at first, listening to the voice in my head.  Then I would get hysterical.  The thoughts would keep coming and I couldn't control them.  I was taking Klonopin at least 3 times a day.  The only thing I could do was numb myself. I sat and counted the minutes.  The seconds.  The nanoseconds.  If I could just get through this one, then would come another one.  10 minutes would turn into 20.  Sometimes that was a comforting thing, knowing that I was still here; second after second.  Sometimes it was agony; knowing that it was continuing second after second.  All I knew was that I was breathing.  I didn't feel like I was; but I just kept repeating to myself:  "I have to be breathing.  I'd be dead already if I wasn't breathing."  It's still heartbreaking to me that the fact that I wasn't dead already, was the only factor I had to determine that I was alive.

I had a therapist at the time who would just say "Bless you little heart" without offering any suggestions.  She was pretty much useless.   Except for one thing.

My insurance was going to run out when I turned 21 if I was not a full time student.  Having the medical issues that I did, I couldn't let that happen.  I had gotten my GED three months after I dropped out of school.  I had always wanted to go to college, but I just didn't think it was in the cards for me.  I didn't think that it was possible.  She informed me that I could go to a local junior college.  I started the registration process.  I honestly had no idea how I was going to be able to go to school and work while suffering through the panic. But I guess we would find out.

To be continued...