If you haven't read parts one, two, and three, go do that first.
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By the summer before Senior year, everything seemed to be going well. I was set to graduate pretty close to on time, so long as I didn't fail anything. I was getting in shape - I had given up sugar, become a vegetarian, and started doing yoga. I was in what I thought was a happy relationship. I was one year away from finally being able to escape my family for good.
Then I found out Brunhilda wouldn't be coming back. She couldn't swing the tuition payments, and had found an equally good program at her local college - for a quarter of the price. While that did suck, it would work out alright. I would just have the apartment to myself.
I started off the year fairly well. My classes, while difficult, were at least somewhat interesting, for the most part. All my friends were still there, except Brunhilda. I was very active in the gaming club. Life, while not necessarily easy, was still good. Until it wasn't.
November 1, 2013. Opening night of the movie version of "Ender's Game," my favorite book of all time. I had class in the morning, but I drove all afternoon to get home in time to take my sister to see it with me at the movie theater that night. I made it just in time to pick her up, drive the 30 minutes to the nearest theater, and get tickets and popcorn. We sat down just as the previews started rolling.
In the darkened theater, I watched as the characters I had so grown to love were, at last, brought to life on the big screen. It was magical. I was on the edge of my seat, even before the movie started.
Then, about halfway through the movie, I felt a twinge of pain in the back of my head. I thought nothing of it. Until seconds later my heart started pounding out of my chest. My head started swimming, and my fingers and toes started going numb. I immediately started focusing on controlling my breathing - in, out, in, out. I was pretty sure I was having a heart attack. Not wanting to alarm my sister, I sat through the entire second half of the movie in this state. When it finally ended and we stepped out of the theater, I finally told my sister, "We need to call mom to pick us up. I can't drive, something is very, very wrong with me." It was the single most traumatic experience of my entire life.
I found out later, this was the first of what would be many, many panic attacks.
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By the summer before Senior year, everything seemed to be going well. I was set to graduate pretty close to on time, so long as I didn't fail anything. I was getting in shape - I had given up sugar, become a vegetarian, and started doing yoga. I was in what I thought was a happy relationship. I was one year away from finally being able to escape my family for good.
Then I found out Brunhilda wouldn't be coming back. She couldn't swing the tuition payments, and had found an equally good program at her local college - for a quarter of the price. While that did suck, it would work out alright. I would just have the apartment to myself.
I started off the year fairly well. My classes, while difficult, were at least somewhat interesting, for the most part. All my friends were still there, except Brunhilda. I was very active in the gaming club. Life, while not necessarily easy, was still good. Until it wasn't.
November 1, 2013. Opening night of the movie version of "Ender's Game," my favorite book of all time. I had class in the morning, but I drove all afternoon to get home in time to take my sister to see it with me at the movie theater that night. I made it just in time to pick her up, drive the 30 minutes to the nearest theater, and get tickets and popcorn. We sat down just as the previews started rolling.
In the darkened theater, I watched as the characters I had so grown to love were, at last, brought to life on the big screen. It was magical. I was on the edge of my seat, even before the movie started.
Then, about halfway through the movie, I felt a twinge of pain in the back of my head. I thought nothing of it. Until seconds later my heart started pounding out of my chest. My head started swimming, and my fingers and toes started going numb. I immediately started focusing on controlling my breathing - in, out, in, out. I was pretty sure I was having a heart attack. Not wanting to alarm my sister, I sat through the entire second half of the movie in this state. When it finally ended and we stepped out of the theater, I finally told my sister, "We need to call mom to pick us up. I can't drive, something is very, very wrong with me." It was the single most traumatic experience of my entire life.
I found out later, this was the first of what would be many, many panic attacks.
My second panic attack occurred exactly a week later. I wasn't feeling good all morning and when I went to lunch, I stood to take my tray up, and my stomach dropped. My heart started racing, and my head started spinning and all I could do was call public safety to escort me to the campus nurse. I couldn't even form complete sentences. I ended up waiting three hours in the nurse's office for my mom to drive all the way from my hometown to the school to pick me up.
She took me to the emergency room, where they put me on an EKG, did a blood test, and told me there really wasn't anything wrong with me, and it was just a panic attack. They gave me a shot of Ativan, and sent me home.
I spent that weekend back home and went to see my doctor the following Monday. After a brief examination, and listening to all my symptoms, she diagnosed me with a panic disorder. She prescribed citalopram, the first and last psych drug I would ever - and will ever - take.
You know those side effects you hear about in every medication commercial? The ones they only have to list on the one-in-a-trillion chance that you'll actually get them, but no one ever does?
I got every. Single. One.
Extreme anxiety. Severe depression. Suicidal thoughts. Debilitating paranoia. Nightmares. Nausea. Headaches. Insomnia. Loss of appetite. Loss of motivation. Loss of libido. Weight fluctuation. Difficulty concentrating. If it was printed in tiny type on the side of the bottle, right next to "take with water," and "FDA approved," it was my reality.
I lasted a month. When I ran out of pills, I went back to my doctor and told her I wanted off. She agreed. Normally, she would have weaned me off slowly, but she gave me permission to quit cold-turkey, since I was already on the lowest prescribable dose.
By the end of the semester, I was failing half my classes. I wasn't sleeping. I wasn't eating. I spent all day holed up in my room fighting to convince myself to even go to class anymore. Ultimately, I decided it was time to leave. I was done with Olivet and all its oppressive rules and self-imposed isolation. The Friday before finals, I packed up most of my things and took them home. I was such a mess, I couldn't even bring myself to go back for finals week. I arranged with my professors to do them all in one day, my dad drove me up and packed up the rest of my things, and then I turned in my key and walked away from the campus that had been my home for the last three and a half years.
I slept on my parents floor for the first two weeks I was home. I had such horrific paranoia, I would go to sleep at night one-hundred-percent convinced I was not going to wake up the next morning. After that, I moved to my sisters' floor. They treated it more like a fun sister-sleepover than a fully grown 22-year-old woman who can't handle sleeping alone. I was grateful. I wasn't ready for them to know just how serious it was. I did this for another two weeks.
The first night I slept alone, I woke out of a dead sleep to a panic attack. I threw up. I called my mother's cell phone from the bathroom, too weak and anxious and nauseous to walk the three rooms away.
Throughout this endeavor, one thing remained constant: my parents' insistence that this would all be over if I would just dive back into Jesus. It was the all-too-common Christian belief that any form of mental illness is just the result of something in your life that needs to "get right with God." If I was anxious, it wasn't because of a chemical imbalance or PTSD, it was because I didn't trust Jesus enough. Panic attacks were the result of a failure to pray or read my bible or do my daily devotions. Depression and lack of motivation meant I wasn't seeking God's will for my life seriously enough.
For a time, I tried. I tried as hard as I could. I cracked open my old student bible. I bought devotionals and christian self-help books and went to church with my family and prayed and prayed and prayed. I clung as hard as I could to that old rugged cross, pressing my fingers into the splinters and soaking it with my tears. Hoping against hope that this time, if I tried hard enough, if I was good enough, maybe this time he'd show me mercy and end my suffering.
And every time, it failed. Every day, I watched my hopes drain away, crushed by the reality of chemical imbalances and traumatic experiences and attack after attack after attack. And every time, I felt like a failure. Translating mental illness into spiritual weakness meant that every panic attack was a sign that I wasn't good enough. Every sleepless night was catastrophic failure at making myself worthy of mercy. I fell deeper and deeper into debilitating depression, believing that if I tried hard enough I would be cured, but knowing at my core that I was tired of trying. So very, very tired.
This wasn't the way mercy was supposed to work, I thought. Mercy is not something that you work for, something that you earn if you just try hard enough, if you're good enough, if you prove yourself worthy. It is, by definition, something that is given exclusively to the unworthy. This, for me, was the beginning of a radical change of faith. A faith in which I am accepted as I am, because God loves me, not because I was the best Christian. A faith that says, "you are worthy," even when you fuck up. A faith that says, "your opinions and interpretations are valid, even if others disagree."
I couldn't talk to my parents about any of this, of course. Every time I had a panic attack, my parents would, at first, tell me I needed to trust in Jesus more. After a while, they started denying them entirely, basically telling me I was making them up, coming up with every other possible explanation. Muscle spasms, adrenaline rushes, low blood sugar, anything even remotely connected to my symptoms. Sure, it may have started as any one of those, but my PTSD meant that if I thought I was having a panic attack, I did, whether I already was or not.
But over and over and over I was told to pray, to read my bible, to study my devotions. How could I tell them it wasn't working? My mother was, and is, the patron saint of piety. If there is anyone who could be healed on faith alone, it is that woman. My father, on the other hand, wanted me to just suck it up and move on. It's just a panic attack. Everyone has them. It's not a big deal. You're fine. Shake it off.
This all put a great deal of strain on my relationship with George, as well, especially with him living in Pittsburgh during the semester, and Spain with his family during breaks. He didn't know how to help me. I didn't know how to help myself, for that matter. We got in several fights over the course of that month. For us, I think, this was the beginning of the end.
That spring, I enrolled at Sauk Valley Community College, about a twenty minute drive from home. I changed my major to theatre and enrolled in a few classes, just enough to be full time, with the intention of transferring to Western Illinois University in the fall, where I could live with my grandmother and finish my degree.
It was there that I met my husband.
[Continued in Part Five]
I lasted a month. When I ran out of pills, I went back to my doctor and told her I wanted off. She agreed. Normally, she would have weaned me off slowly, but she gave me permission to quit cold-turkey, since I was already on the lowest prescribable dose.
By the end of the semester, I was failing half my classes. I wasn't sleeping. I wasn't eating. I spent all day holed up in my room fighting to convince myself to even go to class anymore. Ultimately, I decided it was time to leave. I was done with Olivet and all its oppressive rules and self-imposed isolation. The Friday before finals, I packed up most of my things and took them home. I was such a mess, I couldn't even bring myself to go back for finals week. I arranged with my professors to do them all in one day, my dad drove me up and packed up the rest of my things, and then I turned in my key and walked away from the campus that had been my home for the last three and a half years.
The first night I slept alone, I woke out of a dead sleep to a panic attack. I threw up. I called my mother's cell phone from the bathroom, too weak and anxious and nauseous to walk the three rooms away.
Throughout this endeavor, one thing remained constant: my parents' insistence that this would all be over if I would just dive back into Jesus. It was the all-too-common Christian belief that any form of mental illness is just the result of something in your life that needs to "get right with God." If I was anxious, it wasn't because of a chemical imbalance or PTSD, it was because I didn't trust Jesus enough. Panic attacks were the result of a failure to pray or read my bible or do my daily devotions. Depression and lack of motivation meant I wasn't seeking God's will for my life seriously enough.
For a time, I tried. I tried as hard as I could. I cracked open my old student bible. I bought devotionals and christian self-help books and went to church with my family and prayed and prayed and prayed. I clung as hard as I could to that old rugged cross, pressing my fingers into the splinters and soaking it with my tears. Hoping against hope that this time, if I tried hard enough, if I was good enough, maybe this time he'd show me mercy and end my suffering.
And every time, it failed. Every day, I watched my hopes drain away, crushed by the reality of chemical imbalances and traumatic experiences and attack after attack after attack. And every time, I felt like a failure. Translating mental illness into spiritual weakness meant that every panic attack was a sign that I wasn't good enough. Every sleepless night was catastrophic failure at making myself worthy of mercy. I fell deeper and deeper into debilitating depression, believing that if I tried hard enough I would be cured, but knowing at my core that I was tired of trying. So very, very tired.
This wasn't the way mercy was supposed to work, I thought. Mercy is not something that you work for, something that you earn if you just try hard enough, if you're good enough, if you prove yourself worthy. It is, by definition, something that is given exclusively to the unworthy. This, for me, was the beginning of a radical change of faith. A faith in which I am accepted as I am, because God loves me, not because I was the best Christian. A faith that says, "you are worthy," even when you fuck up. A faith that says, "your opinions and interpretations are valid, even if others disagree."
I couldn't talk to my parents about any of this, of course. Every time I had a panic attack, my parents would, at first, tell me I needed to trust in Jesus more. After a while, they started denying them entirely, basically telling me I was making them up, coming up with every other possible explanation. Muscle spasms, adrenaline rushes, low blood sugar, anything even remotely connected to my symptoms. Sure, it may have started as any one of those, but my PTSD meant that if I thought I was having a panic attack, I did, whether I already was or not.
But over and over and over I was told to pray, to read my bible, to study my devotions. How could I tell them it wasn't working? My mother was, and is, the patron saint of piety. If there is anyone who could be healed on faith alone, it is that woman. My father, on the other hand, wanted me to just suck it up and move on. It's just a panic attack. Everyone has them. It's not a big deal. You're fine. Shake it off.
This all put a great deal of strain on my relationship with George, as well, especially with him living in Pittsburgh during the semester, and Spain with his family during breaks. He didn't know how to help me. I didn't know how to help myself, for that matter. We got in several fights over the course of that month. For us, I think, this was the beginning of the end.
That spring, I enrolled at Sauk Valley Community College, about a twenty minute drive from home. I changed my major to theatre and enrolled in a few classes, just enough to be full time, with the intention of transferring to Western Illinois University in the fall, where I could live with my grandmother and finish my degree.
It was there that I met my husband.
[Continued in Part Five]
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