The beginning

I am starting this blog to not only raise awareness but to use my experience to have a positive impact on others who may be struggling with anything from stress to severe mental health issues. This is one of the things I wish I looked into when I first learned I was diagnose with severe anxiety disorder and severe panic disorder. Read along and let’s hope that you can use my story to possibly change the future of yours! It all started for me in the 6th grade, the average age for people to experience anxiety disorder is around your 20s-30s. You can imagine how confused and scared I was not knowing anything about anxiety. I would notice little things like worrying so much about things that to someone else would be something they could just brush off and forget about. I would spend hours thinking about a small inconvenience or irrational scenario that could never happen. For example I remember crying in my parents bedroom because I thought I was going to die because there was a coyote in the woods behind my house. I know, I was inside how could I ever be in harm’s way? That’s the irrational scenarios I would let ruin my day. I knew it wasn’t normal. That was the beginning of my anxiety disorder that I did not know I had yet. A few months later, I began to have episodes where I would be chilling in the living room with my family, watching a movie, doing homework, laughing, playing, etc. . The episodes consisted of a sudden halt in my breathing. One minute I would be relaxed or even having fun and all of the sudden, within seconds I felt that I couldn’t get any air and I began to hyperventilate. I would cry, shake, get dizzy, sweat, feel super cold, lightheaded, and I to this day I can tell you that each time this happened I felt like I was going to die. It was the scariest thing that has happened to me, when you have no idea what is going on and it keeps happening, it is a new level of scary where I can tell you it was torture. I went to the doctor and he said I showed every sign of anxiety disorder AND panic disorder. He said that my symptoms were also very accelerated by what I described and I said it was very severe for both cases. I didn’t know at the time that mental health disorders are not deadly but that is what I thought when he said severe. He said I could take medicine and try therapy but he said it will never go away fully. We could only try to make it better. I will go more in detail about my experiences with my disorders up until now in new posts but for now all I will say is that I know how hard it is to deal with. It sucks, but even though a doctor says that it will never go away, it can. My medicines were a joke and my therapist made me feel ashamed, I didn’t take medicine or do therapy at all after my experience with them. Today, I am free of both my disorders because I found ways to calm my mind when I had episodes. I will explain more later but just know that I know it sucks but it is not permanent if you force it to be temporary.