"I am too crazy to have a kid"

"I am too crazy to have a kid".

Another wonderful gem of wisdom that has oft fallen from my overactive mouth. If you are thinking that such a sentiment is offensive, I fully agree with you.
I quick Google search will reveal that I am not the first, and nor shall I be the last, to consider biology and mental disorder in the decision to have a child. Here, here and here are three quick examples that came up in the first page of Google results.

Disclaimer: I did not read these articles, they are simply to demonstrate the fact that there are obviously people out there considering mental health in relation to having and raising children.

I am not writing this with the intention of debating whether people with mental disorder should or should not have a child. That is neither my right nor my desire.

In fact, once I finished writing this post it turned out to not be about children at all. Maybe I will tackle that another day.

"It's not that hard to walk into the room. Just do it".

Thank you to everyone who has ever said this to me, for the unhelpful and frankly insulting advice you so willingly bestowed upon me. However could I have gotten by without you?

If you do not suffer from social anxiety, understanding the gravity of the situation for someone who quite literally can not walk into the room, will probably be difficult. But not impossible. A little empathy goes a long way.

When I talk about my social anxiety, I am not talking about the kind of nerves that could be considered normal. For example, I get nervous before a job interview, but those kinds of nerves are normal, common, healthy and have nothing on my social anxiety. When your anxiety is pervasive and debilitating, like the kind I am about the describe, action of some kind needs to be taken.

At some point you will have met someone at a party, or work, or in some other social setting since life is a series of social episodes for the most part, who struck you as a little... 'off'.

Maybe they seemed rude. Arrogant. Too quiet. Spoke at inappropriate times. Was snobbish. All five are things that I have been described as. I am inclined to agree with number two, and maybe on occasion number one, and certainly with number four. Is it possible to be 'too quiet'?

Snobbish is the trait adorned to me most by new people. And not so new people. I am usually cast as confident yet too quiet, and therefore a snob. I am seen as actively choosing to not participate in their conversation. When asked a direct question I balk at answering because I merely do not have the desire to entertain them with my attention.

In reality, I have usually spent a decent amount of time working up the courage to walk into an event. Or my workplace. I worked in the same office from 2010 to 2013, for an area of police that complimented by university degrees and that I had wanted to work in for a lengthy period of time. I loved my workplace. I was more than competent at my job. I got along exceedingly well with my managers and most other people in the office. I had friends in my workplace, two of which went on to be my bridesmaids. I met my now husband in this office. I was involved in all the social events, both in the office and away from the office.  It still is without a doubt my favourite workplace as far as people were concerned.

And yet I used to take a deep breath every morning as I swiped my proximity card to get into the building. A deep breath and a reassurance to myself that I could do this. I could walk in. Nothing bad was going to happen to me. Nobody cared that I was walking into the building. No one was intently watching me. Just walk in.

And I nearly always did walk in without having to dwell on the landing on the stairs, trying to not think about how much I wanted to vomit at that point in time. But the price I paid for the apparent confidence was to walk past the first few desks to my right side as quickly and quietly as possible. I did my best not to make eye contact. I rarely engaged anyone in a good morning lest that person did not hear me and not respond and other people who did hear it but to whom the good morning was not directed thought to themselves 'what a loser'.

My friend on the other hand, a very confident and very lovely extrovert would enter the office everyone morning with a loud and jolly "Good morning!".

Beer does a lot to loosen tongues, and few of the guys from the office decided to tell me over a few nights out that I was 'not friendly enough' in the mornings, and that I should be more like my friend.

I'd be lying if I said that I did not take their flippant and well-intended remarks to heart. How were they to know that it was an achievement for me walk through that door every day without letting a panic attack dictate my morning?

I have suffered from anxiety my entire life.

Or at least for as long as I can remember. I was prompted to write about my experience of anxiety disorder, in its many glorious forms, after I watched the season finale of Insight on SBS a couple of nights ago. If you have anxiety, know someone with anxiety, are a psychology or counselling student or you are generally interested in the area, I strongly recommend watching it. It was a very brief insight into a complex area, but a good place to start. Watch it here.

I quite often use the word 'crazy' in a play-it-down self-deprecating sense, and yet I avoid it when describing others, and actively scold when I hear people talk about themselves in such a way. I do not like the word crazy. Dealing with a mental disorder does not make you crazy.

I am also of the firm opinion that it does not make you weak. I'll delve more into this as I go on. Today I am going to discuss specifically social anxiety. 

It was 1990 when I experienced social anxiety for the first time that I can remember. 

I was 6 years old and my parents were late getting me to school. By the time they dropped me off in the car park, class had commenced. I have a vivid memory of the occasion, one that evokes the same dread I felt at the time, whenever I recount it.

The schoolyard was deserted. I walked from the car park to the benches outside my classroom building without passing another person. My classroom was in a building with a couple of other rooms, and you had to walk into a large area with computers in it, and then the classrooms came off this room.

I loved school and I was upset that I was missing out. I hated to disappoint anyone, especially a teacher! I had to get into class as soon as possible, of this I was resolute.

I walked into the first room. I heard teachers talking. My classroom was straight ahead. I immediately felt sick. I started to sweat and my heart started racing. I quietly walked back outside with a sense of urgency, yet careful not to arouse attention from anyone. My escape was not spoiled.

I sat on the bench outside, too terrified to move. If I went inside and people stared at me as I entered the room, it seemed truly as though the world itself would end. The feeling of dread, unknown in the world of an otherwise happy 6-year-old, was overwhelming.

I distinctly remembering thinking that I was probably going to die.

I sat outside the building for over an hour, my school bag on the ground between my legs, my head in my hands. When I so much as considered getting on with it and walking into the class I so desperately wanted to be sitting in, I would immediately feel nauseous and I was physically unable to move.

Eventually class broke for morning recess and I was found by my lovely first-grade teacher Mrs O'Neill, who exclaimed, "Ebonnie! What on earth are you doing out here? Come on, let's get you inside".

And that was that. From this point on I had a problem with walking into a class late. As a child with little control over when I arrived to events, this was painful to manage. My problem with walking into a class late soon turned into walking into any room that was filled with people. In the ninth grade I was asked to visit a few classrooms to deliver information about something, the something has not remained with me after 16 years. However the feeling of nausea, trembling and wanting to bolt from each room has. Even in spite of the fact I took two friends with me to complete the task.

If you take the silver linings approach to life, one benefit of this aversion to being late, is that I am obscenely early on most occasions that involve people or situations that I do not know. Job interviews, university workshops and lectures, important appointments.

It is all my mother's fault.

Okay that is a bit harsh. But I most certainly did get the anxiety genes from her side of the family. And more importantly, she taught me indirectly, how to be scared. My mother used to get me to go into shops for her because she hated going into them. I used to fill the car up with petrol because it made her visibly anxious to do so. Before I was 6 I knew that driving in traffic was terrifying and so was the prospect of getting lost. Surprisingly, neither of these two things have even been an issue for me. Walking into rooms and shops on the other hand stuck.

I always get excellent marks for public speaking and drama.

Always. The first I remember was in fifth grade when I was awarded for my presenting skills in a national competition. I had tried to skip class the day of the event. I didn't even have to feign illness; my physical symptoms were plenty. Unfortunately for me, my parents were wise to the fact I was suffering from anxiety, and refused to allow me to stay home. I hid in the back of the room trembling and wondering what horrible thing was going to happen to me as soon as I stood on the stage, apprehensively waiting for my name to be called and for my life to end. After what seemed like a lifetime, my name was called. And I delivered the three parts of my presentation. And I did it well. On the outside I was cool, collected, clever. On the inside I was a mess who just wanted to please sit down. Please.

My avoidant behaviour continued well into adulthood. I chose my third year elective undergraduate units on the basis of not having to deliver a presentation. Two years of throwing up in the Business and Law faculty student toilets before my non-negotiable presentations was more than enough for me. When I enrolled in my Master of Criminal Justice by Research, I immediately started to stress about oral defence I would have to deliver of my research proposal: there was almost two years between enrolling and presenting. I found myself back in the same toilets, trying not to be sick. I was successful. And when I did present, I was told by multiple staff members that I did a great job. They obviously couldn't see me shaking.

To this day, when I deliver a presentation, I am usually commended. If not anything else, I am never revealed to be the fraud I am, despite loudly declaring that I do not want to be speaking in public. Just a couple of months ago while I was still working as a Data Analyst, my team was required to deliver a presentation on the program we use to code programs that analyse data. Although I was never forced to do it, the lack of choice in the matter was implied. I made it clear I did not want to do it. My objections were blissfully ignored.

In fact, I was asked to do the entire thing on my own, since I had conveniently been sick on the day of the last presentation our team gave. I stressed over this for weeks - the choice of content, my understanding of the content, standing up in front of a room full of people I hardly ever spoke to and who I was pretty sure did not like me very much, either as an analyst or a person. On the day, the presentation went well. Two managers who were not mine told me I was excellent at presenting. I smiled vaguely and went to the bathroom to hide for about 15 minutes while I calmed down.

Just because someone appears confident and speaks well, does not mean they are confident and want to be speaking. It simply means that they have learned how to hide their fear incredibly well.

My anxiety started to seriously affect my life when we moved to a new town in 1997.

It was my first year of high school. I never had a large group of friends anyway, but I had known the people at my last school for four years, long enough to be able to cope with the incessant bullying I experienced on a daily basis. I was skinny, pale, extremely blonde and a very smart nerd who struggled to identify with children who hated school, didn't read books and thought it was cool to not know things. Being ostracised by my peers was probably inevitable. But it reached a new low when I got to high school.

On the first day my dad made me tuck my shirt into my pants. I cried. This was a public school (in Australia this means a government funded school - certainly not fancy) full of rich surfy kids who were a hell of a lot cooler than I had ever been. And dad was making me tuck my shirt in. At 13, this was too horrendous to deal with on my first day at a new school. To make matters worse, my parents had given me one of my dad's over the shoulder sports style bags to take as a school bag. I was mortified. I vaguely remember being hysterical at some point, which I now know would have more than likely been a panic attack.

Why couldn't I just have a backpack like the other kids. I need them to not notice me. I wanted nothing more than to not be seen and here my parents were, lighting me up like a neon bulb as a target for all and sundry. At least, that was how I percieved it. And that was all that matter.

I cried all the way to school on my first day. I got out of the car and immediately started to look for toilets to hide in. Unfortunately, I was spotted by the principal who introduced me to a lovely group of girls for me to be friends with. Or so would have been the case if her best intentions had been supported by an ability to pay attention: the girls were in the ninth grade, something I quickly found out when the bell rang and we compared our timetables.

That entire charade of pretending to be a bubbly, happy and confident new girl had been a waste of time! And I would have to do it over again!

Eventually I did make friends. But I also experienced more bullying in a couple of months than I had collectively in my time at my last school. And the last school had fostered in me an eating disorder (which I may blog about another time), to give an indication of how bad this new school was. The three insults I remember most, probably because I couldn't walk from one class to the next without hearing them, were 'Pig', 'Albino', and 'Snow White'. I was never sure if I was more upset about the degradation or the fact these kids were stupid. I was very, very blonde and pale, but obviously not an albino. And Snow White? She has black hair, idiots. Which is what I told them. And telling them so made me even more of a target. I bit every time they threw the bait. I had no intention of lying down and surrendering.

Yet I started missing incredible amounts of school. I was ill. Headaches and nausea usually. My mother didn't mind my truancy, since my grades were uneffected: I was doing eleventh grade mathematics, ninth grade economics, teaching boys in my English class to read. I missed at least a third of the school year, but I still made the Honour Roll.

Things became more serious when the Chaplain visited our house to talk about my suicidal behaviour - I was only 13.

I don't know much of what was discussed between the Chaplain (who I remember as a very caring and astute young man) and my mother. I do remember I was very embarrassed that someone had noticed how anxious I was and that it was bleeding out into my social and school life. It was about this time that I started to actively try to hide my nerves, my mood; what I thought then to be my personality.

And that worked. Too well.

If you watch the Insight episode, you will see a girl talking about how it feels to be not cared about. You are struggling with these horrible (untrue) thoughts about yourself, and yet your family and friends just carry on as though it was no thing. And that makes you feel worse. You begin to think things, such as in my personal experience, 'Of course they don't care about you. Why would they? What makes you so special? You aren't the only person in the world, let alone the only one who gets nervous sometimes. Maybe you should be better at making friends, then people wouldn't know you are such a loser'. And so on.

You start to keep people at an arm's length away from you always, all the while appearing confident, collected, calm. My friends often referred to me as confident. Sometimes, people still do. I try not to choke on my own tongue each time I hear it.

People do not acknowledge your struggle because you have painted over it so well that they are unable to perceive any crack at all.

Of course people won't offer you support if they have no idea you need it. That is fairly logical. It has been my experience that hiding your anxiety has absolutely no positive impact on your life at all.

I have often felt that not being honest about my anxiety when I was a teenager lead to greater problems in adulthood and most definitely effected my friendships. I firmly believe that hiding my anxiety ruined friendships that could have been wonderful.

I caught up with a girl recently who had at one time been a very good friend in the ninth grade. We had a falling out about something, as you do when you are 14. I can honestly not tell you what it was about. I can tell you it would have been frivolous and inconsequential. I saw her again in 2011 and realised she was still a wonderful person and that she would make a great friend again, in spite of the time that had passed.

But I could not organise that coffee. Just thinking about suggesting catching up socially made me feel sick. And I had ample opportunity to request said coffee. We saw each other again once more recently and I realised that I regretted not having a friendship with her now (NB: Facebook friendship in isolation is a friendship not). Social anxiety ruined reconciling our friendship when I was 14 and it continued to hinder growing a new friendship as an adult.

I have only been honest with friends about my anxiety in the past four years. 
And those years have been the easiest.

It is surprising I have any friends at all, given how much anxiety I experience before I see any of them, that is. I have a small group of girlfriends, and I get nervous before I spend time with all of them. Some of these girls have been my friend since we were 13. All of them know very personal things about me. One of them was the first person I told after I experienced being unknowingly given a drug and sexually assaulted. I would trust these girls with my life.

And yet, although it bares no correlation to my feelings about my friends, I still quite often get the usual feelings of anxious dread and waves of nausea, before I knock of their door or they knock on mine. And I probably always will.

These days however, I have learned how to manage it. When I feel anxious, and I am very aware of the situations that spawn panic attacks for me, I monitor my feelings, I accept them for what they are, and then I carry on.

I used to spend hours stalling before going into social events. Subtle stalling would be taking too long to do my hair or make-up. More blatant stalling would be standing outside a pub or club, waiting for my friend to look at her phone and see the text that explained I was outside and needed someone to walk in with me.

These days I just keep walking. 

Without fail, each time I pop into my husband's (and my ex-colleagues) social club events, I start having a panic attack about a half a kilometer away from whichever establishment I am en route towards. Sweating, trembling, nausea. The routine is so predictable it has become boring.

But I do not stop. Not even for a second. I keep placing one heel in front of the other. I shake the nerves out of my hands. I think specifically about the last time I did this, and how nothing bad happened, and I had a good time.

And I walk straight in, and nothing bad happens, and I have a good time.

Focus on what went right. Forget about all the what-ifs and could-bes.

I used to not talk about my anxiety because I felt that I would be judged as 'crazy'. The discourse around anxiety and depression has increased exponentially in recent years, making it much easier to acknowledge a problem, seek treatment and move forward. I strongly encourage anyone suffering from anxiety to talk to someone about it. I also encourage people to be aware of the signs of anxiety, so that you can help those around you.

They may not always immediately appear to need (or want) it.

Obviously this is just my personal recounting, recounting that started on a Thursday night and has finished early in the morning of a Friday. I have only scratched the surface, but the main point I wanted to make is that you can live a perfectly happy existence if you know how to manage your anxiety.

You control it, not the other way around.

And when I do have a panic attack that really knocks me, I no longer dwell on it as a failure. I accept it as part of my life that I need to be aware of and manage. I approach it in the same way I would if I was told tomorrow that I was diabetic.

And it works for me.


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I would like to stress that this is simply my thoughts and experiences as prompted by the #InsightSBS story on anxiety. I am not a mental health practitioner and I do not intend any of my comments to be taken as clinical recommendations. 

If you feel that you need to speak to someone about your anxiety, please contact a mental health organisation such as Lifeline on 13 11 14 (Australia only).

I share my experiences in the interest of furthering discussion of and destigmatising mental health.