By: Alyssa Ramirez
On the first day of second grade, I was so nervous about starting school that I threw up all over my desk. I had a knot in my stomach the entire morning and tried my hardest to hold down the urge to throw up, but once my teacher started class, it shot right out of me. Gasps and eventually a few EW’s and GROSS’s turned into laughter. I wanted to hide from my classmates. And my teacher. And the rest of the world. I hated myself in that moment. And I despised the knot that was still in the pit of my stomach.
I am not alone when I say that I have always struggled with anxiety. A few of my family members have battled anxiety their entire lives. My mother, who was abandoned by my father shortly after I was born, has struggled with paranoia for years. She also dealt with my grandparents’ rocky relationship most of her life. Once, when we were headed to Ikea, it started to pour and we saw nothing but the livid raindrops on the windshield. I had been busy thinking of any possible reasons a raindrop would have to be angry when I heard my mother’s breathing become rapid, a signifier of her oncoming panic attack. My godfather, her cousin, held the job of calming her down from the passenger seat; he repeated everything is going to be okay while I sat stunned and quiet in the backseat until we made it. In that moment, I blamed the angry raindrops, thinking they were at fault. But I didn’t say anything about what happened and instead just silently followed them into the overwhelmingly huge furniture store.
Anxiety also affected her parenting skills, she’d constantly yell at my two younger siblings and me out of frustration when we weren’t able to complete what she thought were the easiest of tasks. So my godfather began to take care of me when I was about eight years old, trying his hardest to become the father figure I didn’t have . It was a relief for me to get away from my mother when he’d pick me up. I’ve built a more stable relationship with her and only recently learned that she takes medication for her anxiety, but she still refuses to drive in the rain and has frequent panic attacks.
My grandfather on my mother’s side is paranoid and narcissistic. In his younger years, he had been an alcoholic but shaped up when my grandmother threatened to leave him. Now, he likes to pick fights with everyone and never admits that he’s wrong. He doesn’t talk to any of his neighbors and having lived in the same house with him for most of my life, I’ve heard his various accusations against them. The neighbor to the left, who had previously been a great friend of his, wanted to pitch in to build a new fence to replace the weathered wooden thing that had hardly separated the two houses. He agreed at first but then claimed that the neighbor wasn’t splitting the money equally, so he backed out and they’ve despised each other since. He was also friends with another neighbor, two houses down, but after some altercation about their trucks they don’t speak anymore either. My grandfather’s house is a perfect representation of him: disheveled and broken down. He’s stubborn and mean. Because he’s my grandfather, I’ve tried giving him the benefit of the doubt. But just recently, when I asked him if and when he would be fixing the humongous hole, the one that lets in the cold and the bugs, in the front window that’s been there for almost four years now, he laughed at me. He’s burned each bridge he built, even the one with my grandmother; she always tells me that he loves his trucks more than anything else, including her.
My grandmother claims that my grandfather is the source of her anxiety and since they refuse to speak to each other, their house is filled with nothing but the staged audience’s laughs in Family Feud coming from her room and loud clanging from my grandfather’s endless work on his two trucks that fill the garage. She likes to go to Target to get popcorn because she’d be out of the house, and also because she heard from a show she’d been watching on television that popcorn helps with stress, something I’ve yet to confirm. I’d go with her sometimes, she would order while I’d walk one lap around the store. When I would make it back to the front, I’d see her sitting in one of the chairs with her red paper bag as she looked out into the parking lot and munched on popcorn, content with a hint of sadness. It’s a toxic house, she always told me when I still lived with them, and that’s why I couldn’t wait to get out.
Like my grandfather, one of my two uncles is also paranoid. He turned to alcohol to cope. An hour into my fourteenth birthday party, my uncle still hadn’t shown up. My grandmother decided to pick him up and bring him even though he was clearly drunk. While there, he raced up the relay-style bounce houses and slid down the steep and slippery slides. It made everyone, but mostly me, extremely uncomfortable. I think there’s still a part of me that hasn’t forgiven him for that, but I haven’t brought it up. And neither has he. A few years back he spent some time in a rehabilitation center, which didn’t really help him. It wasn’t until recently that he began shaping up.
Anxiety has been a constant in all our lives, and for me since the incident in second grade is when it inexplicably began. Thankfully since that time, I’ve had only a couple of panic attacks. I once thought that I had missed my bus and got so nervous that I felt like I had lost the ability to breathe. That feeling sent me into an even further panic, one that I felt I could not escape but somehow did. I’ve more often had a countless stream of anxiety-ridden thoughts that have caused me to be afraid of change, pushed me to doubt myself, and forced me to stay within what I thought were the safe boundaries of my own mind. I remember my godfather, with some input from my mother, decided on a prosperous middle school for me to attend that was different from the school all my friends in elementary school were going to. It was a change I hadn’t wanted to make, mostly because it was just that: a change. I also remember that on the first day, my mother mingled with some kids my age, got to know one, and brought her over to me so that I had someone to talk to since the ever-present knot and I couldn’t bring ourselves to talk to anyone. The school being more prosperous, they geared us toward Honors classes and prepared us for college. I did well, I probably could’ve done better, but the small stresses of these classes and the pressure to make friends heightened my anxiety.
Around this time was also when my godfather began to show his strict tendencies. He himself lived in a strict household, his father had been in the army, and so he took what was familiar to him and used it to parent me. He very rarely let me spend nights at my friend’s homes, and if he did, he needed to interrogate their parents first. I resented him for his stern tyranny and acted out, fighting both him and my mother on most things they told me, even if I knew they were right, and most of the time they were. I became accustomed to my godfather deciding things for me, and even now I have a hard time deciding things on my own. I don’t blame him for it though, he had no children of his own before he took me under his wing and tried his best to steer me toward better things. He was just trying to figure it all out.
Entering high school heightened my anxiety further, since the transition from that tiny middle school to a seemingly humongous school filled with hundreds more people I didn’t know was a stressful leap. For the first half of my high school career, I continued to take mostly Honors classes and even tried my hand at Advanced Placement classes, but mistakenly thought I could handle them as easily as I did before. With the sudden change and greater stress, I gave up on my almost failing grades and dropped a couple of my harder classes my freshman and sophomore years, something my godfather was not happy about. My anxiety shot up as my GPA tanked and I knew I had lost the opportunity to attend Pepperdine, my dream school since I had done a middle school project on the breathtaking university by the ocean. I eventually accepted the fact that I had a very slight chance of getting into any private universities or any colleges in the University of California system and instead focused on getting into smaller and cheaper ones, which included those in the California State University system. I also learned my lesson and avoided Honors classes for the latter half of high school, managed to turn my GPA around, and temporarily the knot loosened. As I began college my anxiety reemerged. I struggled to make the adjustment from my strict household to the new freeing but exceedingly demanding environment. Here is also where I noticed I really do put way too much pressure on myself, something I only got a glimpse of in high school and something my godfather told me since he took me in all those years ago. I enjoyed living on campus, but I was always so fearful of that environment, even though it was one of the smallest, if not the smallest, colleges in the California State University system. And so I itched to be somewhere else, but I didn’t know where. It was that type of itch you feel but can’t place; I knew that I wasn’t completely happy there, my anxiety had tightened yet again, and I desperately wanted to be somewhere else.
But then, I found something that described what I had been feeling all my life. It explained why I had always been an introvert and why simple things like speaking up in class, ordering food, and making phone calls tightened that infamous never-ending knot. It explained why I was always so afraid of making friends and why I was so fearful of the college environment, which included living in the dorms. I was taking a psychology course and immediately connected with social anxiety, a chronic mental health condition in which social interactions cause irrational anxiety. Once I discovered this, I realized that this was something others struggled with, too.
I had never talked to my family about our anxiety. Despite my love for them, I always felt a little out of place. They were always so loud compared to my quiet nature; it felt like I had been drowning in a sea of exuberant fish, unable to grab onto anyone to save me. My godfather tried to help me, and so did my mother, but I never wanted to talk about my emotions or bring any added attention to myself. So after I found out about social anxiety, I was a little more at peace with myself. I thought maybe I could connect with others who also had trouble communicating with people, and I didn’t feel so alone anymore. I thought maybe I could stand up for myself. Maybe I could become more confident in myself and my decisions. Maybe I could even overcome my anxiety, and permanently loosen that never-ending knot.
