My Suicidal Happiness Essays - Psychiatry, Psychology, Anxiety

My Suicidal Happiness Marissa Thomson Some of the thoughts sneak into your mind without your knowledge, and some of the thoughts are already in your mind without your knowledge. Music can either trigger this hidden knowledge, or it can draw out the already present knowledge to the surface of your mind. Anxiety disorder doesn't arrive at your doorstep with a pretty little bow and it doesn't just go away within one day either. Anxiety among us sufferers can be debilitating even when faced with the activities of our daily life. Going to school, to work, to shops, paying bills or even going to the doctors can seem incredibly difficult for someone suffering with anxiety. Relief only appears from avoidance and withdrawal from these aspects of our daily life. This often translates into some types of depression, a common secondary effect of prolonged and/or untreated anxiety disorders. The purpose of this narrative essay is not to provide you with ideas on how to treat anxiety or panic, but to tell you my story with my daily struggles and to remind you that anxiety, depression, or any other mental diagnosis doesn't define who you are, and one day you will see that going through your struggles is what made you the great person that you are. I honestly can't pin point an exact time in my life when the signs of anxiety started showing, maybe it's because they were always there in the back of my mind. If I had to pick a certain event in my life that could have possibly planted the seed of anxiety into my life I would choose my parents divorce. I know I know, I'm 18 years old, I can't always blame my parents divorce for whatever goes wrong in my life, but why else would a five-year-old girl start showing symptoms of anxiety? If anxiety were my only issue throughout my life, I could probably handle that but I can promise you that there is a lot more to me than just severe anxiety disorder. Throughout my childhood I would always do my best to fit in with the other kids, but growing up in a catholic school it was made very clear that divorce was a sin and I, being the only child for 6 years with divorced parents I knew and everyone else knew that I was different, and the way I was treated was a reflection of that. I was fin e knowing that I was different from everyone else, because I knew that regardless of the fact that parents weren't together I still had two parents who loved me more than anything in the world, but the kids at my school didn't see it that way. Year after year, sitting in the same classroom with the same kids I was always the weird one', I always sat by myself, eat lunch alone, and spent recess alone. Even though spending all this time alone was hard, the real struggle started when the taunting began. In the fifth grade people in my class actually started to include me in activities, and this was the most exciting news for me, until I found out that they only started to build me up to tear me down. "You're a freak" "Nobody loves you" "Its your fault your parents got a divorce" "Why don't you go kill yourself and make everyone happy?" I still ask myself on a daily basis what I did to deserve that, why on earth was that conversation on the playground. It was this bullying that I believ ed caused my social anxiety. To this day I still find it hard to take a compliment because in the back of my mind I still think that someone is just trying to tear me down again. The anxiety caused from the thoughts that someone is always trying to hurt me in some way eventually lead to my second diagnosis; major depression disorder. Thinking that someone is always out to get you is not a healthy way to live your life, but the events in school that most likely caused my anxiety are not completely the cause of my depression disorder. I was so young when my parents