The Evolution of an Anxiety Disorder
In my current life as an adolescent sexual health educator, when I read through the statistics about LGBTQIA+ youth having higher rates of anxiety, I have to shut off part of my brain. If I don’t, I am thirteen again and my father is asking me if it’s okay for two men to have sex with each other, does that make it okay for a man to have sex with a child?
Anna Jankowski
Then I am fifteen again at a friend’s house. She is telling me how she and another girl sometimes make out because they’re bored. She asks if I want to kiss them. Every fiber of my being is yearning to but my brain is telling me “don’t. you’ll like it too much and then you’ll have a problem.” When I’ve told this story to some other bisexual women, they’ve decided in their infinite wisdom that that anecdote, in fact, disproves that I am bisexual because if I really was, I would have done it. But they did not live in my house or go to church every Sunday, and then see crucifixes again at school, all in a claustrophobically small town.
I felt it was a risk I couldn’t take, like the second I kissed those girls a scarlet letter “L” would appear on my chest. I feared I would make some kind of face during the next inevitable homophobic remark that would give me away. People look at heterosexual couples with an automatic understanding. I couldn’t stand the idea that my sexuality would be dissected and convoluted when it was so deeply private. I never wanted to be on display. The thought of it makes me sick and (surprise!) severely anxious. Can you imagine wanting to kiss someone so badly but being held back by a fear so strong it makes you feel like you are losing your mind?
I wonder what my father would think if he read this. He has since apologized for that comment he made nearly ten years ago. I think he feels terrible that he said it. In retrospect, I don’t think he ever really equated those two things. I think he thought he was making me think. He has come a long way. He watches Modern Family and enjoys the gay characters as much as the straight ones. He did not treat my friend any differently when she had that girlfriend in college. People evolve, thankfully. Even so, I wonder if he would feel like he succeeded because I didn’t kiss those girls? Or would he get a sinking feeling because he had a chain around me that hurt me so deeply that I felt like I could barely function? I think he would be shocked more than anything. I also think he would finally understand why I have resented him for so long.
So here I am, trying to be sympathetic to April from high school when I learn that she has anxiety. She had never had it until she got into the program she has worked to get into her entire life. She didn’t know how to cope so she had to defer until next year. Part of me looks at her getting the treatment as a luxury, even though I know it is anything but that. Still, most of us don’t get to hit pause on our obligations to go to therapy. Some of us just had to keep going through our lives and act like nothing was wrong. Some of us felt like we were losing our minds because we didn’t know who we could talk to. With many of the adults in my life, there was about a fifty percent chance they would even know anything about LGBTQIA+ youth. There was probably a similar chance that they would be tolerant. Part of me thinks that she couldn’t possibly have it as bad as me, but I know that’s an unfair comparison.
I’m so sick of anxiety being treated like a trend; like it’s something cute to throw on this season. Sometimes I want to grab the world by its collar, slam it up against a wall, and scream in its face:
“LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT ANXIETY. IT’S NOT NERVES. IT’S NOT PART OF AN AESTHETIC. IT’S NOT A QUIRK TO ADD TO THE CHARACTER YOU’VE BEEN WORKSHOPPING. IT’S NOT THERE TO SELL YOUR BULLSHIT WELLNESS PRODUCTS. IT’S NOT A PUNCHLINE IN A MEME OR A THEME FOR A LISTICLE. ANXIETY IS ISOLATION. IT’S FUCKING ISOLATION.”
I tell people that what really made the difference for me was cutting out caffeine and exercising regularly, with an honorable mention to getting enough sleep. Those will be my first recommendations to April because they’re the easiest. I will probably throw in something about breathing exercises too because literally anyone can do them.
But these bad habits did not give me anxiety in the first place. I diagnosed myself with random panic disorder sometime in high school after near-continuous panic attacks with seemingly no trigger. The first one came in eighth grade. It was minor, but unsettling and happened after talking to two girls at lunch for twenty minutes. They didn’t say or do anything that should have made me anxious; after doctors and a therapist confirmed that what I was describing “sounds like anxiety,” only to immediately change the subject. I decided random panic disorder made the most sense.
Let me clarify: one doctor did ask about a family history of anxiety. My mother was in the room and she explained that there was a long, colorful history on both sides of the family of anxiety, then the doctor brushed it off. This doesn’t surprise me as an adult; women are less likely to be taken seriously by medical professionals. It does, however, infuriate me.
Maybe I would still have had anxiety at a young age if I was straight. And maybe it’s a coincidence that my only other close friend who struggled with anxiety at a similarly young age is also bisexual and spent a large portion of her formative years denying it. Isn’t it funny how we both had boyfriends in high school who we had little interest in because we secretly wanted girlfriends? Even funnier how we were so careful about it that one never suspected the other? That is until my friend had a serious girlfriend in college.
That friend of mine has had a much more difficult life than me, though. It makes sense that she would have anxiety, my sixteen-year-old self would reason. And I would start to list off all the ways my life is not tough; I have never had cancer. I have both of my parents. School comes easily to me. It’s not like I was suffering. Suffering was only what happened to people in developing countries and Jesus during the crucifixion. In comparison, my life was a fairytale. This was a twisted exercise in gratitude; mental gymnastics to remind myself that I really don’t have it so bad.
I wonder what all the adults in my life who describe themselves as allies but remained silent while the truly homophobic ones spoke would say. Just keeping the peace?
There’s still the issue of family history. Long, colorful history. Both sides, but one much more so than the other as far as I know. One relative on my father’s side has anxiety, and I have my own theories as to why (being a woman and her husband being deployed more than once when she had small children has probably contributed). But my mother has it. And her brother has it. And her father has it.
Ever since I was first introduced to the concept of epigenetics, I was fascinated. One of the first articles I read on the topic described it as such: “According to the new insights of behavioral epigenetics, traumatic experiences in our past, or in our recent ancestors’ past, leave molecular scars adhering to our DNA. Jews whose great-grandparents were chased from their Russian shtetls; Chinese whose grandparents lived through the ravages of the Cultural Revolution; young immigrants from Africa whose parents survived massacres; adults of every ethnicity who grew up with alcoholic or abusive parents — all carry with them more than just memories.”
Maybe it’s a coincidence that my grandfather is (was?) an Ashkenazi Jew (he now goes to Unitarian Church), one of the groups that could have inherited historical trauma on a cellular level. There’s no way to know if this has nothing or everything or something to do with the reason for why so many people on this side have various anxiety disorders. But I still wonder.
Maybe my biology determined I would have this. None of my life experiences would matter. Hormones and puberty likely played a role. Maybe that’s why women and girls usually have higher rates of anxiety than their male counterparts.
And maybe it was a coincidence that the panic attacks really picked up after a man followed me at 15, trying to get me to take a bath with him. He did the same thing to a friend of mine a few months later. I didn’t tell my mother for a year. I didn’t know what to do, except feel even more scared. Like I said, I never wanted to be on display.
And then, there’s my mother’s mother. My grandmother has had serious mental health issues since before I was born, to the point that she has disowned her entire family (she and my grandfather have long been divorced) except her two children, my mother and uncle. I have only good memories of her because my mother made sure of it.
Throughout all of my panic attacks, there was always a nagging voice behind them: what if you are like your grandmother? What if you don’t have what the rest of your family has and instead you have what she has? What if you shut out everyone else in your life and are all alone like her?
I finally sought out a counselor at College and went to one session. I expected to learn how to meditate. Instead, I broke down crying at 8:30 in the morning about how I’m bisexual and I felt like I couldn’t tell anyone, even though I don’t necessarily want to shout it from the rooftops with a rainbow flag either. What made me cry more was how scared I was that I would end up like my grandmother and how that fear only made the panic attacks even stronger.
“How often do you let yourself just feel sad about all this?” He asked.
I thought back to my list of all the ways I don’t have it that bad. I’m privileged in so many ways. I hadn’t realized that I had been burying things deeper by counting my blessings like it was a contest. Like I could trade in ten good things for one difficult thing if I just kept trying. But it wasn’t a contest. It has never been a contest.
“I don’t think I ever connected it all before,” I said.
So April, I am so sorry this is happening to you in your twenties but I am glad it didn’t happen in your teens. Try the breathing exercises, kick the coffee habit, and get a solid eight hours by all means. All this will only benefit you. But know that you will probably have to dig deeper than that and you may discover that your random panic disorder may not be as random as you thought it was. You’ll be fine, but you might need to let yourself feel sad for a while.
Anna Jankowski is an editor at Iambic and adolescent sexual health educator in Brooklyn. She enjoys doing yoga and Pilates, reading, and planning her next trip.
