For most of my life I have battled anxiety. I can remember times it felt like a debilitating curse that would swallow me whole for no good reason. During a panic attack, I would be convinced that each breath was my last, like there wasn’t enough air in the room. It was as if I were trapped in a coffin and buried alive… I have so many dreaded memories of wanting to jump out of my own skin and run away from myself because I just couldn’t take it anymore.
I remember having a conversation on the prison phone about a loved one struggling with anxiety. I got to thinking about myself and my own issues and then it hit me. What I was conjuring up was memories of feelings from the past, I realized my anxiety was no longer on the center stage in my life. I came to prison and through my obsession with self help and psychology books that I had learned to recognize and cope with my own anxiety. This new awareness sent me on a mission to figure out how this had come about. Was it the routine or the institutional boundaries keeping my anxiety at bay? How did I not notice it was gone? I sure don’t want it back, but I want to know what ran it off, I might just be able to help someone with my story…
I remember my anxiety starting when I was a teenager. More specifically, after I had a pretty severe horse wreck and suffered head trauma. I was 15 and I was barrel racing and came out of the arena and pulled back on the reins, probably harder than I should have. My horse reared up and flipped over backwards with me still on board. I took a board and a fence out with the back of my head with the weight of my horse coming over on top of me, then my horse landed on me. The horse got up and miraculously so did I, only by the grace of God. It was a miracle that I had no broken bones but I’m pretty sure that head injury was a game changer in my life. The impact on the back of my head was extremely painful but as a 15-year-old, I was more focused on my swollen jaw that didn’t seem to be able to open. I was taken to the hospital but back in the dark ages head injuries weren’t taken too seriously. If your skull wasn’t cracked, you were fine.
I didn’t really realize how bad my head was bruised because my hair was long and thick, and I didn’t pay attention to the back of me. I remember showing up to cross country practice two weeks later in a tank top and my hair pulled up on top of my head and seeing the looks of people’s faces when they noticed the black, blue, and green streaks down my neck and back from my bruise draining from the back of my head. When I took a mirror and really looked at the back of me, it kind of freaked me out.
Looking back on that time period, it was obvious that something had changed in me. I was different. I wasn’t coping with myself and day to day normal things started to become harder to process. Being a teenager, I didn’t bother to notice or take inventory. At that age, you just don’t know how to do that and it’s easy to brush off things like this as just teenager stuff.
As time went by, I began to struggle with what I now know to be anxiety, I started to self-medicate and I lost myself even further. Shame kept me from reaching out for help or even feeling like that was an option, no one in my family did drugs and rarely was even seen with a drink, I felt like a disgrace. I was sinking and overcompensating to hide the fact that my anxiety had manifested into an addiction. I was involved in everything at school and even lettered in academics. While it looked like I had it all together, I was sinking. I had learned to live a double life. I was no longer transparent and what you saw was not who I was. Keeping up this other life will propel anxiety.
I had little panic attacks here and there over the years but not enough to think much of them. We humans are really good at dismissing what should be giant red flags. By the time I got to law school, my panic attacks had become a whole new monster. I remember having to pull over my car because I felt like I was dying after I had left a class one day. I didn’t know what was wrong and it was like I had disengaged with my body and myself, I was losing it. I had such a bright future ahead of me and the closer I got, it seemed to be blinding me. I didn’t fit in law school. I wasn’t ready and I didn’t know what I wanted. Looking back, I realize I was so wrapped up in myself I couldn’t see a foot in front of me.
So, I quit. I quit school and I quit panicking. I relaxed and got over myself, opened my eyes and looked around. I went on to start a career in real estate, got married and had my daughter, the love of my life. Life was good. I was able to get out of my own head and out of my own way, for a while. I was living in the present.
I believe I had trained myself to be prone to anxiety and I feel like it was just lying dormant, waiting for the right time to surface. After living with it for so long, anxiety just becomes a normalcy, and it becomes part of your identity. To people that like a little rush, anxiety can actually give you that little hit of adrenaline, and before you know it, you might just be “rewarding” yourself and not even be aware of the rabbit hole you are heading down. As anxiety began to surface my marriage began to fail, followed by my career. Just like that, anxiety and panic came back with a vengeance, like old friends just dying to join the party. In my mind I was so busy, but there were days that all I could manage was to hide under the covers.
I remember getting to the point that the ping of social media or an alert from a text or email would trigger anxiety. There were days when my phone would ring and I didn’t want to answer it because I was afraid of bad news, I had no logical reason to think this, maybe just an affliction for drama. I had become the proverbial chicken little and I was positive the sky was falling. I was spiraling and taking everything out in my orbit.
If I couldn’t catch my breath, I would listen to my dog’s breath or put my head on their chest to hear the rhythm of their heartbeat to bring me back to earth and calm me. A big fat, smelly, heavy breathing dog seemed to save my life. I love mastiffs and always had one with me in case of emergency on bad days. First was Norburt for 13 years, then came Maducea. They were both huge, unruly and untrained, but to me they were service dogs and I needed them. They were pretty much terrorists and I’m probably the only one calmed by them. All I needed them to do was sit and breathe and they never failed to do that.
I fought to feel calm and I told myself that was all I wanted when I began to self-medicate once again. I started drinking to take the edge off my anxiety. Already under the influence of antidepressants, Xanax and Valium, the drinking would often end in a blackout. Then I would wake up with more shame and worse anxiety than before. Next came the drugs. It was never my intention to become a drug addict, and it was never acceptable in my mind, but I was a prisoner to the mold I had made of myself. I was running from myself and running scared from life itself. While I am aware that what we resist persists, I couldn’t get my mind and body to agree on a necessary change. I woke up each day sliding down that slippery slope with my anxiety getting worse, and it just kept getting steeper. It was like I was stuck in survivor mode, without intending or needing to be. At the end of the day, the truth was I was addicted to self-induced suffering.
Then came 2014. In January, my truck was stolen from my driveway and totaled; in February, I was shot in the back of the head, and by July I was federally indicted. And just like that, my mind and body decided they better get it together and make something happen. Just barely hanging on wasn’t working. Banging that square peg into a round hole over and over was no longer an option, but it was going to be a long hard road.
2014 was one crisis after another of epic proportions and you would think it might just be the end for someone already hiding under the covers when something stupid like the phone rang or something pinged. Instead, I learned what I was made of. When I was shot, I heard something tell me it was time to fight, and that is what I did. I got up and fought through my head injury, my drug addiction, and all the pain from the hits that just kept coming from the trauma typhoon that just didn’t stop until 2017. When terrible things happen, way worse than you already feared or imagined, the dust settles and you are alive and breathing and all your body parts are moving and getting along with one another, you finally see your resilience and your strength.
I was forced to stop reliving emotional memories that held me hostage with anxiety because I had a whole new set of real big problems headlining and I was forced to live in the present moment. In 2016 I decided to just rip off the band aid and get off the antidepressants and anxiety meds and just commit to feeling. Exercise was my new obsession and with the possibility of prison on the horizon I didn’t want to be dependent on anything. The meds may be out of your system within weeks, but it takes a long time to get back to really being yourself. There were plenty of times I thought I had made a mistake getting off the meds but I had a friend that was constantly encouraging me to stay off of them, so I did, and I am so grateful. My anxiety rode with me through it all and held on for dear life. It may sound crazy but somewhere on that old bumpy dirt road of my crazy journey, I outran that anxiety of mine.
Here I am in prison. For some reason, even with all my dumb behavior, I really didn’t see this for myself. It turns out that while I am here studying everyone around me and their behavior, it is a nice quiet place for me to figure myself out.
I have been so busy living in the present and not worrying or looking at myself, I didn’t notice my anxiety was no longer riding shotgun. I’ve decided that anxiety will struggle to exist when you ground yourself in the here and now. I have stopped obsessing about my future, and I have let go of reliving the emotional pains of my past that I insisted on dragging along with me for so long.
Writing this has been a journey and has been rather interesting to take this quest and to figure this out. I found myself being afraid to even think about my anxiety. I started to question writing this because if something is broken, don’t fix it. However, I knew I decided that facing my anxiety was necessary even if it was laying dormant. I want to take precautions to ensure my success when I get out and I feel that now is the time to get things figured out. I think there are a lot of contributing factors that led to the dismissal of my anxiety. So, allow me to share some of my conclusions.
FAITH
1. First and foremost, finding God and achieving the ability to have faith that I can fully rely on God’s grace forever, is a blessing beyond words. Just writing that statement brought a smile to my face and I immediately felt a sense of peace come over me. I know that my schedule and plans are all subject to God’s will and when He is ready for my path to change, I’m all in. Sometimes I get carried away with control, or thinking I have control, but I take greater pleasure in knowing it’s not all up to me. With God’s grace I don’t have to live with shame or fear, I can be transparent. There is no reason to hide anything from anyone and there is no need for any mask. I can be exactly who I am.
WRITING
2. My writing has been an amazing therapy for me. I am constantly looking for topics to write about with prison life. So unconsciously I turned off my human default auto pilot and took off my blinders. This place is a fascinating human experiment full of life lessons, and in order to write about it, I must live it, right here and right now. Writing has enabled me to anchor myself in the present and forces me to sit with myself for long periods of time. I find myself taking notice of my thoughts and feelings as they come upon me and writing has given me that opportunity to realize I can control my thoughts and feelings and decide which ones to dismiss.
SCHEDULE AND BOUNDARIES
3. I believe the institutional boundaries and my self-inflicted schedule help me. Here, if you tell me a day and time of the week, I can probably tell you where I will be and what I will be doing with little variation. From before my feet hit the floor in the morning, until the time I go to bed, I have my day mapped out. I’m up at 6 am and all my hours have a purpose. Working, exercise, teaching, writing, napping, reading and learning, and bedtime, all have a place in each one of my days. I want to keep life like this for the rest of my time and when I get out, I plan to do the same, but with a big old world to play with. I always try to keep my creativity alive, even if I must schedule small bursts of time.
SLEEP
4. I find sleep to be as important as anything else when dealing with anxiety. Regular sleep is a new thing for me. I used to not want to sleep in fear that I was going to miss something or just battling anxiety about something. I had to program myself for that real restful, all night kind of sleep that is around 8 hours. You know how they say to let a baby cry herself to sleep? Well that was me in federal holding. My eyes were swollen for months as all my grief leaked out every night. This may not seem like fun, but it sure was necessary. I remember people begging me to get on meds because they were worried about my depression. I almost did, but now I am so glad I changed my mind. You must deal with your grief, and this was my way. Now if I am not looking at the back of my eyeballs by 10 pm I’m beside myself. I also schedule a tentative nap time 3 days a week. If I don’t nap, I stay still and quiet and gather and process my thoughts. You must reset yourself; this is nonnegotiable. Drain it all and let that anxiety leak out.
WORK OUT
5. Exercise is an important part of my anxiety free life. Not just any kind of exercise and not auto pilot type workouts, although I do some of that too. However, I set out to do something difficult every single day, push a little harder, a little further, or completely break the mold and do something totally different. It’s hard to surprise or impress yourself, but I work hard and do a pretty good job. It inspires me to inspire others. I love to see people overcome things and get out of their own way. It helps me to attain goals when I can help others with their goals and to push others to go further and not to be afraid of difficult tasks. I think it is important to not just focus on yourself, help someone along the way too.
LET GO OF EMOTIONAL ADDICTIONS
6. Prison helped to unchain me from my emotional addictions that had me captive. This time to myself has helped me to realize how much I used anger as my go to emotion. I felt the most comfortable during chaotic times and all I knew was to be full of anxiety. When you flip that anger switch and fly into a rage, you get a hit of that adrenaline. I couldn’t, or wouldn’t, turn off my fight or flight switch. I am an adrenaline junkie, so I have to check in with myself to make sure I am not turning on my emergency system and activating my anxiety because I crave a rush and I am just looking for a way to alter my state of consciousness as an escape. I have learned to tame my thoughts as they come to me, thus capturing my emotions and taking back the power to decide to react in a positive manner. I realize that my addiction to anger had me on a roller coaster of emotions that took me high and low over and over. Now I practice flying level every day, all day. I have managed to hop off the outrage parade and I work hard to stay away from controversy and unnecessary problems with people that have opinions that are simply none of my business. It seems everyone is outraged about something these days. When I see someone going crazy with rage and hate, I must wonder, are they really mad for their cause, or are they seeking that adrenaline rush?
In conclusion, after head trauma and life trauma I was lost in my amusement park in my own head. Hoping on a ride of anxiety or anger every chance I had. I wasn’t interested in a healthy existence and subconsciously, I was only seeking a rush. We can’t always control our environment, but we can control our thoughts, which can exterminate anxiety. I would strongly suggest renovating that mental entertainment park to spark creativity, passion, positive thinking, and to reinforce staying present. I have had to focus on my thinking and feelings and completely retrain myself both mentally and physically. I was blessed when my life was dismantled, and my identity was destroyed. It gave me the opportunity to rebuild myself from scratch. I get to write my own comeback story now. I strongly believe that awareness must be a priority and staying present is a full-time job, but it is necessary to alleviate anxiety.
By Sabrena Morgan on .
