We Run. We Fall. We Get Back Up.

Anxiety is something that is really hard to talk about. It's also very hard to write about.

I tend to write better than I speak. When I speak, sometimes all the wrong things come out. I can't remember the names of things. I mix my words up. I fumble over what I'm trying to say.

That doesn't happen when I write.

But it happens when I write about anxiety. Sometimes there just aren't words for how anxiety makes you feel. But today I'm going to try to write about how anxiety makes me feel, because quite frankly, these past four days have been horrible and I need to get this out somehow. And people need to know about it. They need to stop saying things like, "Stop worrying" and "It will be fine".

People need to understand that this is real and that words will not fix it.

On Tuesday morning I wrote about how I felt like I was running headfirst to England, diving straight into graduate school applications to British schools that have the programme that I want to pursue. Everything was absolutely perfect and I was only worrying about small things; who I was going to eat dinner with so I didn't have to eat alone, if I remembered to feed Hamlet, when I was going to read Crime and Punishment for my senior English class, what I was going to write my 20 page paper on, if I had time to work on my thesis.

To combat my anxiety and to keep in control, I make plans. There's already a flaw in this tactic because if my plan fails, I have nowhere to go, nowhere to run to. Sometimes I make plans upon plans upon plans, which is always very stressful for me. But it's always nice to have a backup plan in case something goes wrong. I am always overly prepared. And if I'm not, I internally drown.

On Tuesday, after I posted my latest post in here, my entire day plan shattered and it changed very drastically. Rather than doing my homework, eating dinner with my friends and watching Netflix in my apartment, I spent the day with one of my best friends, Barbara, and we drove to Grand Rapids to pick up her mother at the airport.

There was nothing that I would rather have done with my day than be there for Barbara when she needed me and to drive her to the airport to pick up her mother, who flew in from North Dakota at a moment's notice.

But it was very emotionally taxing and I did not have time to process it.

I always need time to process things. When things that I deal with are not processed or not processed properly, they turn into giant anxieties. When they become giant anxieties, they become harder to process back down to what they were originally. I usually can't do it by myself.

Tuesday was such a large thing that I didn't process that I became emotionally flatlined.

My junior year in college I was on antidepressants for my anxiety. (I'm currently not.) On a cold, rainy day in November, I forgot to take my pill before I went to bed.

The next day was one of the worst days of my life.

I laid in bed for five hours and stared at the same blank stretch of wall. I did not have the energy to talk to anyone. My boyfriend at the time came to check on me and it took him an hour to coax me out of my room, where he carried me to his room. I then sat on his bed and didn't speak to him for two hours while he ordered a pizza and made me eat.

The past four days for me have been like this, and I have been battling it with all of my might.

On Wednesday I felt the emotional blankness, but I pushed it aside. I had three classes to attend, I had the English Honourary induction of new members to attend. I didn't have time for this gigantic feeling of emptiness.

Thursday it came in full swing. I had the intention of working on my thesis in the library for four hours after class but was unable to do so. I ended up going to my friend Adam's room and laying on his bed and watching mindless television. We ate dinner together and he made sure that I went to my chapel band rehearsal. Normally singing in the chapel band is one of the greatest parts of my week. I felt nothing the entire time I was there and I felt nothing when I left.

I was on RA duty on Thursday night. I spent my three hours that I had to be awake lying on my bed with Adam, who held my hand. When I went to go on my last round at midnight, I became so frightened of leaving my apartment that I broke down in tears and refused to leave. Adam held me while I sobbed.

On Friday I forced myself to attend my eight thirty class. Afterwards I normally nap, but I knew that if I crawled back in bed that I would stay there. I wouldn't eat, I wouldn't see anyone, I wouldn't shower, I wouldn't come out. I forced myself to get in the shower, pack up my things, and go to the library. It was exhausting. After lunch I went to choir and I went to class. My last class of the day was the longest fifty minutes of my life and while I sat there and listened about contrast and proximity in web designs, I felt like I was internally drowning. Everything was suffocating and I couldn't sit still. It took so much effort not to cry.

When class was over I immediately ran to my therapist's office. She had fifteen minutes before her next appointment and I sat in her overstuffed chair and broke down.

I am so used to feeling. Anxiety makes me feel everything. All of my emotions are always intense, over the top. I am never just excited. I am never just upset. I am never just generically anxious.

Not being able to feel was very terrifying for me and I didn't know what to do about it.

Last night I spent all night in my apartment watching movies and colouring with Adam. When he left I spent some quality time by myself in my bed watching Inception. My friend Marie came over around eleven and we made pumpkin cookies and I talked to her about how I was feeling. When we had to step into the hallway outside of my apartment, she held my hand and I managed to cross the threshold.

This morning I had enough energy to get out of bed and go to the cafeteria without it being a serious struggle. I'm beginning to feel again. I don't know what I'm feeling, but I'm getting back.

Sometimes we run. But we cannot run forever. It's very cynical, but sometimes good things cannot last and bad things follow. But good things always follow bad things and I try to remember that.

Sometimes we fall. I fell very hard this week. It's taking me days to pick myself back up.

But I am picking myself back up, and when I am back on my feet, I will begin to inch again.

We're Running!

The title of this blog is called Inching to England, mostly because most of the time, I feel like I'm inching. It's very hard to make big strides when anxiety is holding you back. Sometimes it's hard to even walk.

I currently feel like I'm running.

Throughout my not-so-impressive college career, I've had graduate school thrown in my face. Both of my parents went to grad school. They both have Masters degrees. My dad was on track for a PhD before he decided he wanted to teach high school. My parents are always telling me how much fun grad school was; the living in an apartment, taking the specialised classes that you wanted to take, getting a nice big grace period on your student loans.

GRADUATE SCHOOL! SIGN UP HERE!

Graduate school, fortunately or unforunately, was never really an option for me during the first three years of my college career. That would be because I was in the secondary education programme. Meaning that I was going to college to be a high school English teacher.

I've wanted to be a teacher, quite literally, my whole entire life. Both of my parents are teachers. Everyone in my family is a teacher and sometimes it's exhausting. I mean, I have great aunts in Ohio that are teachers. When I say that everyone is a teacher, I really mean it, and it does get exhausting when Thanksgiving dinner is nothing but discussing governmental educational mandates and how they're ruining my parents' lives. 

I took every single education class in the programme except two during my first three years at school. I did 72 hours of field placement at the local high school in 9th grade Spanish, 11th grade English, and 12th grade English. I taught lessons. I even taught a lesson on Macbeth without actually reading Macbeth, and I thought that was a pretty decent victory.

I made the decision this year that I was going to drop out of the programme, not student teach, and just graduate with my Bachelor's in English and Writing. It was a very big decision filled with lots of tears, calling home and crying, and meeting with professors and crying. Just generally... lots of tears.

So that left this gigantic void in my life that went, WELL NOW WHAT?

My whole college career professors would come up to me and say, "Beckett, I really think that you should pursue grad school." And my comeback would always be, "That's nice, but I'm getting a teaching license. Going to grad school would hinder my ability to get hired."

Now all of my friends are furiously taking the GRE and applying to grad schools and suddenly this feels like an option.

Even typing the word GRE is making me almost too anxious to continue writing this post. It is very obvious that I am not going to take that exam and that I never will. I have also discovered it is very difficult to find a Master of Fine Arts programme with an emphasis on creative fiction writing that does not need a GRE score.

And then I sat down and I seriously thought about my life. And I realised something really important. I do not have to go to grad school, but it is sounding appealing even though I'm miles behind in the application process. I have the ability to take a gap year and do something neat with it. I also do not have to go to grad school in the United States.

And that was when I discovered Study Across the Pond.

Study Across the Pond is a programme designed specifically for people like me, people that want to study in the UK. I instantly signed up and now I have a personal advisor. This means a few things.

1. My personal advisor sends me lists of schools that have my programme for me to look at.

2. I can apply to 3-5 grad schools in the UK for free.

3. If I get accepted to one, my advisor will help with my travel plans.

4. She will help me with getting a visa.

5. She will answer any and all questions I have.

I currently have an email from my advisor, Jackie, and in that email is a list of about ten schools that have an MFA in creative fiction writing. Two of them are in Scotland, one is in Wales, and the rest are in England. I can start applying whenever I want and it's free. 

This means that I'm not sitting alone in my apartment wondering how on earth I'm going to get to England, because that's what everyone asks me. "Hey, uh, Beckett? How exactly are you going to get to England?" And the answer is always a sad smile and a little shrug. Or just a generic, "Hell if I know."

But now I have a definitive answer.

"Well, if you must know, you incredibly nosy adult, I am going to graduate school there and I will leave with a Masters of Fine Arts in creative fiction writing." 

I mean, obviously I'm not going to grad school yet. I did my running, and I'm kind of back to inching until I actually apply. And before I do that, I need to actually research the grad schools. And of course, in all that time and tinkering I have to do, anxiety is going to weasel its way in and it's going to do everything it can to keep me from going.

I'm not going to let it keep me from going. I have a clear path to doing what I want in my life and what's more, to doing it when I want to do it, and I'm going to run as fast as I can to get there.

Hopefully it won't be like this.

Caterpillars and Light Bulbs.

"What do you want to be when you grow up, Beckett?" is always such a loaded question.

There a lot of things that I want to be when I grow up. I want to be a professional blogger. I want to be a mother. I want to be happy. I want to be someone who travels. I want to be the person that says they're moving to England and actually moves there.

But what I really want most of all to be is a functioning member of society one hundred percent of the time.

Today was a day where I was not a functioning member of society and I needed to be.

Today I had a picnic at my professor's house. It was an England get together; everyone who had gone on our England spring term last May and studied Shakespeare over there was coming over for a barbecue at eleven. We were given directions and told to come hungry. I had posted on Facebook that I had a van and was willing to take people, but nobody had said that they needed rides, which was fine, but I really wanted someone to go with me so I didn't have to go alone.

I found my way there with the help of my all mighty iPhone and I realised that I was the very first person there. I never want to be the first person anywhere because the what ifs are impossible to deal with. I was going to sit in my van on my phone until someone else came, but my professor, Dr. Aspinall, came walking out of his house wearing a bright red shirt with a pin-up mermaid on it and yelled, "Come on in!"

And so I was left alone with his nine year old son and a caterpillar.

Anxiety mounts when I'm alone with people that I don't know and I'm with random bugs.

The caterpillar kind of looked like I was feeling; he was on the steps with people stepping over him as they started to arrive and he looked absolutely terrified of being squashed. So I let him ride on my shoe.

Once people started arriving and the caterpillar had crawled halfway up my leg, I was feeling a lot more relaxed. These were students I'd spent a month in England with, had ridden the London Underground with, had gone to plays with, had studied Shakespeare with, had gone to Scotland and Wales with. These were my friends and we all shared the elusive bond of spending a wonderful month in England together.

After spending a nice afternoon eating chips and hummous and hanging out with my England friends, I came back to my apartment to find that Hamlet's basking light had burnt out. And for some unknown reason to me but totally apparent to GAD, I panicked.

I frantically texted my best friend Adam and he diligently came over from the music building and we drove to Wal-Mart. Wal-mart in and of itself makes me anxious because I absolutely hate that I have to shop there. But while I'm at school, I'm too poor to shop anywhere else, and I hate myself for having to shop there. You know, fight the man. That kind of stuff. 

The whole ride there I drove too fast and my hands started to shake. Was Hamlet getting cold? How long had the bulb been burnt out? I'd only been gone for a few hours. What if I crashed my van and killed us both? What if what ifs never stop coming ever ever ever?

Going into Wal-Mart was agony. Adam took the lead, grabbed my lamp and waited in line at the hardware counter, ready to ask for the specific type of bulb. I stood behind him and panicked with a capital P. My hands were shaking, my ribs were doing that metaphorical snapping thing, and I was breathing really heavily. Adam calmly rubbed my back while I focused really hard on breathing. When it was our turn Adam did all the talking, found the right bulb with the help of the friendly Wal-Mart guy, he checked to make sure it worked in the lamp, and he directed me to the self-check out lane so I wouldn't have to deal with people. Adam even helped me walk when I got dizzy from my heavy breathing.

Once the lightbulb was purchased and we got to my van, Adam said, "Hey, look at me. You did it. You did it."

But it feels like I didn't. It feels like I just drove home to Wal-Mart after frantically texting him and he walked in and did all the talking and all the adult stuff. So I looked at him and said exactly what I was thinking, "When will I be an independent adult? I'm twenty-two years old."

He shrugged and said, "Never lose sight of how independent you already are. So you had to call me and have me to go to Wal-Mart with you. At least you let me know and we went. Isn't that a better alternative than sitting in your room and crying while Hamlet didn't have his basking light?"

This is undoubtedly true.

It's thinking like this that I'm working on, thinking that terrible things like having small anxiety attacks in Wal-Mart aren't that bad. Thinking that this is a work in progress, that I'm a work in progress. Anxiety isn't something that will go away, it's something that I have to work on. 

And it's thinking like this, thinking that I'm a work in progress and that it's okay that I have to ask for help and that sometimes I can't be a member of society, that's going to get me to England. Like my therapist says, big terrible mountains don't have to be big and terrible, they can be victories.

I went to Wal-Mart today and I had a small panic attack trying to buy a light bulb for my bearded dragon. But I got the light bulb and like my mother says, I didn't die.

And Hamlet is happy.

Happy Hamlet, happy Beckett.

Good Excuse, Bad Excuse

When it comes to things that we are obligated to do, we have a list of good excuses and bad excuses for not doing them. Kind of like when we talk about legitimate and illegitimate government in my political science classes. (What is a legitimate government? What is illegitimate? How come democracy is the only legitimate one?)

GOOD EXCUSES TO MISS THINGS

Projectile vomiting
Family emergency
Your car deciding that it no longers wishes to live
That time I got parked in at my brother's frat house and popped my back tires on broken beer bottles trying to drive on the lawn to escape
Death deciding to come knocking

BAD EXCUSES TO MISS THINGS

Your dog ate your homework
You were up late watching Netflix
Anxiety
Depression

I feel like there are two things in the list of "Bad Excuses to Miss Things" that shouldn't be on there. (Hint: they're anxiety and depression.)

The other week I got a bid for the music honourary, Sigma Alpha Iota. This was my second time getting a bid from them and I wanted to know more about it, so I talked with the former president and my next door neighbour from freshman year, Katie.

She told me the basics about being an SAI brother, how much of a time commitment it would be, how much the dues would cost, if I had to take a little, all that good stuff. I was very excited because this was something that I wanted last year and I wanted it this year, too. But I had some stipulations.

1. I'm president of the mental health advocacy group on campus, Active Minds.
2. I'm a Resident Assistant.
3. I'm deeply involved in Chapel.
4. I'm in a sorority.
5. I spend a lot of extra time taking care of myself because that's how living with GAD works.

All of the time commitment issues were solved. I drew a little pyramid of "Beckett's Heirarchy of Extra-Curriculars" as a mental map.

Then I looked squarely at Katie and said, "I want you to understand that sometimes I won't be able to go to events. And it's not because I don't want to go, it's because I can't go. It's because I'll be too afraid to leave my apartment or because I had a bad day and had problems getting out of bed, or because something minor happened that sent me spiralling out of control and I had to take an hour long shower and cry on the floor for a while. I need you to understand that."

I did not expect her to understand it. Most people don't. The other week while working on my senior thesis, I was missing a paper clip and it sent me spiralling into a panic attack in the middle of the library and I was on the floor for a good twenty minutes, holding my knees and trying to breathe.

There are people that do not understand that this is real and that it's hard to get out of bed when the whole world is scary, that sometimes you just need to lock yourself in your apartment and listen to loud music until you can cope with your own mind.

But Katie looked straight back at me and said, "As long as you send me email that says that you're too anxious to come, you're excused. Don't worry about it."

There are some organisations that I'm involved in where this isn't the case. And it's not that people are mean, or they're terrible people or they secretly have a vendetta against mental illness.

It's that they don't understand what it's like to be afraid to leave your room and miss an important event because you thought that you were internally drowning.

I'm working on a way to make this different. What I know right now is that it needs to be talked about, and that's why I have this blog. I get to talk about my own anxiety and how I deal with it, how I have good days and bad days and in between days that I'm not sure what to do with, and somehow it all rolls together in how I'm moving forward with my life to get where I want to go, not where my anxiety wants to go. And hopefully people like you read it and can relate, and if you can't relate, you can try to understand that life isn't a simple thing, that getting out of bed and deciding what to wear is sometimes a huge ordeal and it's exhausting.

I wasn't able to join SAI. My bank account was too poor. I plucked up the courage today to tell Katie that I really wanted to join but I didn't have enough money, but she just gave me a hug and told me not to worry. I have a love/hate relationship with that phrase, and I probably always will.

I have a network here at my small school, a network of people that I work with that understand what it's like and get it when I send a text that says, "I can't do this right now" and it's accepted without comment, except maybe a "let me know how you're doing".

In order to feel in control, I've gotten good at making lists. Right now I'm making a list of reasons why I need to go to the Centre of Student Opportunity to talk to a nice woman named Laurie about how I want to move to England to blog professionally. It currently looks like this.

1. ENGLAND !##%!#%%$#^!!!!
2. Laurie is nice. She will not hurt you. Repeat. She. Will. Not. Hurt. You.
3. You have a professional blog to show her.
4. SHE CAN HELP YOU IF YOU LET HER.

These all look like good excuses to go the career office to me.

I Walked into Mordor. I Mean, I Used Photoshop.

My epic journey with photoshop in the realms of professional blogging continues straight from the Mac lab, where I am currently sitting, surrounded by people that I don't know.

This is a high anxiety environment for me.

Referring to my previous post, I spent all weekend trying not to dread Monday, where I would be using photoshop again in class on a computer that I refused to name Gerald. (My previous post is here if you're interested.) In fact, I spent all weekend off of campus and it was glorious.

When Monday rolled around, I tried very hard not to dread working with photoshop again. I told myself all of the things that my therapist told me, happy mantras like "you are not your anxiety" and "crying in front of your entire class won't kill you". I like that one. My mom is very fond of it.

"Beckett, you're not going to die. I promise you if you talk to this store employee, you aren't going to die."

I got my borrowed Macbook, opened it up, and waited with nervous anticipation for class to begin. My professor started out with an apology for the complexity of Friday's tutorial and told us that we had a new assignment; take an image and some text and put them together into a visual argument that had something to do with our blogs.

My initial thoughts: This is going to be fun. I'll make a really cool graphic. But what's my blog really about? It's obviously about England. But it's also about anxiety. I mean, it's really a whole bunch about anxiety. I should probably focus on that. Where am I going to get an image from? Google. Should I Google stock photos? Should I Google inspirational quotes? I should open up photoshop.

I found photoshop by myself, which was a personal victory. But when I tried to open up the proper version, CS6, it wouldn't let me open it because of my preferences. My professor told me just to use CS5 and if I encountered any problems, to flag her down. I resisted the urge to vomit at the idea but opened CS5 and Google to prepare for finding an image.

I spent a lot of time looking up things like England and English Coast and London Underground. I found some really cool pictures.

Oh the beauty of England!

(I wish to impress upon you how long it took me to put that image in my blog simply because I'm currently on a Mac and totally out of my element. But I still have feeling in my feet, I haven't cried, and my ribs have not metaphorically snapped.)

Most of the pictures of England were too busy for me to put text over and I spent the entire period contemplating them on Google. I never actually did anything with photoshop, I just lounged around on Google wondering on earth I could do. When class was over I went to the library and I decided that I was going to use a picture from my tumblr that really had nothing to do with England but more to do with anxiety. But what should I use? What text could I use?

I found this and thought Well, I could do something neat with this.

Lungs are my favourite organ and when I get really anxious, I sometimes have problems using them. I thought about doing something with these interesting flowery lungs. It was also in the back of my mind that there was a prize for the best image that was created, and I happen to be overly competitive. It's a problem. Whatever I did, I wanted it to be good.

After a lot of frustrated clicking, I figured out how to put text at the bottom of the picture. I wanted it to be nice and small and not very noticeable and I wanted it to align exactly between each flower lung. In class we discuss a lot about alignment and proximity and what those can mean. I managed to type in the word "breathe" and stick it at the bottom, exactly where I wanted it. I wanted it at the bottom so that it was the last thing that you saw; you could look at the flower lungs and ponder those first before you got to the word breathe.

There was a new problem: breathe was sitting there, perfectly placed. But it was just plain text. How uncool was that?

So I highlighted it and literally just clicked on everything that I could find to make it look interesting.

The finished product of anxiety and photoshop.

I had a lot of fun playing with the text. I wanted it to contrast with the cream coloured background and I also wanted it to match, relatively, the lung colour. The shading gave it some semblance of standing out and giving it a kind of 3D quality that the lungs had. I wanted it to match the lungs as much as possible so it didn't stick out too boldly. The focus was meant to be on the lungs. I also had the weird idea that the word "breathe" was going to be faded because breathing to me feels like a rather faded idea.

Leave it to me to come up with a strange English major metaphor that I can't fully explain.

So here I am, still in the Mac lab surrounded by people that I don't really know, typing this out and posting my final product of my first real foray with photoshop. I did not need to ask anyone for help. I told myself that I wasn't going to die and as far as I know, while I'm sitting here writing this, I'm not dead. I could ask the person next to me if I'm alive, but that would involve talking to someone that I don't know, and I'm not that good at that kind of thing.

My ribs feel a little bit like snapping. My feet are rather tingly. But I haven't started crying, I haven't hyperventilated, and I can focus clearly on what the rest of my day is going to look like outside of whatever anxieties came out of photoshop.

Have I conquered photoshop? Seeing as I still haven't managed to even open the latest version, I'm guessing that I haven't. But I think at this point, I've figured out how to play with it well enough that when I think about it, I won't want to curl up into a ball and cry.

One small step for Beckett, one giant leap for mankind.

Hopefully my next step is going to be to the Centre for Student Opportunity to look at graduate schools in England.