Everything makes sense now.

My diagnosis, and what it means

I self-diagnosed with anxiety disorder roughly a day before it was confirmed. I couldn't get to sleep, and I started thinking about my procrastination. I was contemplating the fact that it made little to no sense- I'm not a lazy individual, I have no qualms with doing work, and I know it's necessary. So what's holding me back? I looked up procrastination on the internet, and I found a website which listed its two main causes, on a level such as mine.

Number one: Depression.. An inability to percieve the worthwile nature of the activity, and hence an inability to motivate one's self to partake in it. In short, apathy.

Well, this doesn't sound like me.

Number two: Anxiety. A fear that the work will, by default, be judged and mocked, be a failure and a humiliation, a stain on one's reputation and the irrational conclusion that no attempt at all is better than failure. 

Failure.

This word struck such a chord with me, my jaw literally fell open.

I looked up some online self-testing questionnaires just to solidify the conclusion I'd already jumped to in my own mind. One listed 13 questions, and said that if you answer yes to more than 3 of them, you probably have G.A.D (generalised anxiety disorder).

I scored 12.

I took another. This one was far more thorough. It listed just over 40 statements. Next to each was a scale, which ranged from 1- not at all/never- to 5- all the time/severely. The score was given as a percentage, with an explanation as to what this presumably meant about your psychology in terms of anxiety.

I took this test 10 times. I scored every time within the range of 79-91%, which they termed as 'high levels of existential anxiety'.

It took a while to get through to my parents, but I think they understand now. Shortly, I am to begin cognitive behaviour therapy, abbreviated to CBT- a fancy technical term for a type of therapy predicated upon replacing negative, fearful thoughts with more positive, or at least less crippling ones. Hopefully I'll soon be able to find the roots of some of my more pervasive and destructive paranoid tangents, although I doubt it's anything other than the manifestation of an irrational, primal fear, and therefore unquenchable. 

The main point I want to make, however, is perhaps an unconventional one. I don't want to talk about the persecution of mentally ill people in society, because this is a point best made by the more bleeding-hearted analysts, and a point which has been made a thousand times better than I ever could make it in the past. I don't want to talk about what you can do to support someone you know who's going through an illness- again, it's been done better than I could ever hope to do it, and in my view it's more down to you than it is to me to figure that stuff out. 

The main thing I want to get across is that, when I found out about my anxiety, when I truly put my finger on the pulse of my nightmares and found their root causes, it was not a death sentence. I was not devastated. It wasn't like a thousand doors closed at once, like my whole world came crumbling down around me. 

It was like the final piece of the puzzle had been connected. 

For roughly 10 months, I'd been seeing a psychoanalyst for an entirely seperate problem of mine. This had to do with emotional issues- not wholly related to psychological problems at all, but rather an inability to handle my emotions, separate from the anxiety. Neither of us had any clue, mainly because it was so effectively repressed. Not even I had any conception of just how pervasive the problem had become. 

Why?

Because it was normal for me.

Now I've learnt the meaning of 'sanity'. Sanity is stability. Sanity is being able to live day-to-day in a relatively contented state, able to cope with life without regular breakdowns. Sanity is living and feeling right, feeling safe, feeling like you actually belong and you're vaguely connected to the world around you. 

Paranoid tangents telling you that everyone around you is plotting against you is not sanity.

A constant and overwhelming giddy fear which shocks your entire body and overwhelms any real feelings you may have is not sanity.

Believing that you will die any second now, and that it's only a matter of time, and constantly speculating as to how, is not sanity.

Physiological symptoms such as aching joints, muscular aches and tension, dizzy spells, fatigue, light-headedness, nausea, racing heart and hyperventilation, amongst others, resulting from the toll taken by constant adrenaline surges and primal fear being your default state, are not sanity.

Random surges and troughs of attachement and distance from people for no reason, social anxiety and being consumed by surges in random emotion towards others are not sanity.

I've begun a journey towards sanity. The road will be long and arduous, but the first step along this path was learning to accept that I'm not fully sane, not even remotely. You cannot change if you don't feel the need. You can't stop the sickness if you don't want the cure.

If your emotional tendencies are destructive, irrational and unmanageable, let no one tell you that you are one thing or another.

You are the only one who can take the first steps- nobody can push you, and nobody else can pull you back once you've started.

You are the master of your own destiny, no matter how much you may feel otherwise. 

If you feel wrong, something probably is, and it needs fixing. Don't delay, don't feel embarrassed and don't feel like you're simply being silly. 

Of course, the flipside is just as damaging. Don't think that just because you're emotionally erratic this means you're disordered. Just don't be afraid to consider this possibility.

Point is, most importantly, don't let yourself believe that you must be normal just because someone else told you so. Whether that person was someone else, or yourself.