Living with anxiety and depression

My everyday life is filled with headaches, difficulty concentrating and just always being exhausted. A constant feeling of not being good enough rules my mind, not matter how irrational it is. When I was younger I didn’t realize what was going on, all I knew is that I would often feel sick. I would force myself into social situations, even though they completely exhausted me. For a while I seemed “better”, but it only got worse and worse. As I got older the symptoms went from feeling nervous and trembling to headaches and a general tired feeling. Yet I just assumed I was being weird and there was nothing wrong. After all, everyone feels tired right? It wasn’t like that for me, it was this constant feeling of despair that I wasn’t good enough, I would never be what they wanted. Even when I was with friends, I’d feel like a burden and just clamp up.



It is so annoying to want to do things with people, but just not feeling like you can go out of the house that day. When I feel myself going in that spiral I cancel plans, because I know it’s simply not going to happen. Then I got my diagnosis. Generalized Anxiety Disorder(GAD for short) and high functioning depression. Now, let me tell you, I hate labels. Hate them. I never wanted to get a label stuck on my file, but when I got this label…. Things suddenly made sense. There was a reason I was always so tired after being social, why I felt the way I did. While it wasn’t an excuse, it was a relief. I remember thinking “This I can work with” – and I did.



For over three years I worked on myself, learned how to take time when needed and when to actually be social. I found a balance. Then, almost a year ago I made a choice that changed everything. I decided to move to a different country for a job. – It was a conscious choice I made, one that required a lot of thinking. Could I do this? Did I really want this? It was so incredibly scary, the ultimate test for my GAD. November 2017 I moved to Germany. My mother and stepfather brought me over to Berlin the first weekend, along with the stuff I needed. And on my way my GAD decided it did not like this at all. I developed a stress headache and got physically sick. To the point of puking my guts out. I remember it like yesterday, because I was supposed to go for a room viewing the evening we arrived and I stood there, outside the apartment building, puking. – It was so embarrassing and I felt so weak. That first weekend I spent my time in the hotel we were staying at, sick in bed while my mother and stepfather explored Berlin. I didn’t eat anything substantial for three full days, because everything came straight out. But I pulled through and on Monday I started my job on a basically empty stomach.



It was a huge challenge, because that same evening my mom and stepfather dropped me off at my home for the first month and they left. I cried my eyes out that first night, holding the teddy bear I brought close to my chest as I went through so many tissues. The next day I pulled myself together and as my anxiety settled a bit more I went to work with more confidence. The first month was quite heavy, even though I didn’t cry after that first day, it was weird to come home to a quiet house. I had grown up with a house that always had someone in it and now I was officially alone. It took some getting used to. Over the next few weeks I found a permanent place to live and started to meet people at work, this made the transition a bit easier. While I was not confident in most areas of my life, when it came to working I was laser-focused. Around Christmas I went home to see my family and I enjoyed it, but also looked forward to going back to Germany. The longer I was away, the more I realized that leaving was the best for me. That town was filled with memories I couldn’t handle, so many dark times where I felt anxious and depressed. I just didn’t feel at home in that town, so I had been glad for the change.



But as we all know, the first realization comes the moment things don’t go as you expected, you feel broken and just want the comfort of your family. You can’t just go home and get a hug from your mother to comfort you. You have to get through it by yourself. This happened to me when I was up for a job promotion that I didn’t get. I had so looked forward to getting the promotion that when I didn’t get it, I was shocked. There was this enormous shock overtaking my body and I had already been a bit homesick at the time. So I ended up having a mental breakdown. This overwhelming feeling of not being good enough, not feeling wanted, and the only people who could comfort that thought were 677 kilometers away from me. I started bawling my eyes out at work and there was no end to the waterfall cascading down my cheeks as I texted my sister to tell her what had happened. For the first time I felt like I really couldn’t do this anymore. As my sister called me and I tried to explain how I felt, she just misunderstood. She just thought I was overreacting and told me to just take some time off to calm down. In reality it was much more than that, I was broken. All the walls I had built over the years to help me deal with the anxiety, they were crumbling down. And all I could think was “I’m done. I’m done with all of it.”



This overwhelming feeling of hopelessness and sadness that enveloped my entire being was something I had never felt before. In the past, even when I felt hopeless, I knew there was a light at the end of the dark tunnel called depression. While the small rational part of my brain told me it wasn’t that I wasn’t good enough, the biggest part of my brain told me I was not good enough. I was never going to be good enough, I was worthless, I was nothing. While I had taken to scratching open my skin in the past to help with the pain, it just didn’t feel like enough this time. For the first time my brain was searching for viable options of suicide. A knife? – Too painful. Jumping in front of a car? – Didn’t want the driver to live with that. While my anxiety kept telling me that I was good enough, that small rational part kept getting louder and louder the longer I lay there. Thanks to the voices that were instilled in me by my mother and sister and the coping mechanisms my therapist had taught me in the past, I was still there at the end of the worst day I had ever had. My sister said that having a mental breakdown was inevitable and part of growing up. But she will never realize just how close I came to ending it. At the fact that I had put my shoes out to put them on and had the house keys in my hand.



Living with anxiety and a constant feeling of not being good enough is not easy. But it’s part of my life and all I can do is keep taking it one day at a time. Because no matter what my mind thinks during those times, I am stronger after every episode. I get up with my demons every day and go to sleep with them every evening. But with each day that passes I prove that I am a fighter and that is something to be damn proud of.