A story
I was in the bath a bit ago, reading, when I started thinking back a couple years. Maybe it's because I was looking at a picture of me and my husband about a month after we started dating (we look like such babies! We were 19 then...we're 26 now.)
The beginning of my sophomore year in college, I ran into a guy named Jason that I knew vaguely from a theatre class we took together. I was moving back into the dorms, and he was involved in some sort of student group that was going around giving out information (I can't remember what about). We got to talking, and at some point after that, exchanged IM information (fuzzy on the details of how we started talking, also.)
One night, we got to talking, and decided to take a drive down to the cliffs by the beach (college was wonderful the way I could just randomly do things with people at any time of night...once I just went driving with a friend, talking, for hours in the middle of the night.) Jason had a girlfriend, but we were connecting, and eventually sort of admitted we were interested in each other. I was quite genuinely interested in him, in the way that I hoped he'd break up with his girlfriend and date me instead, not in the way where I didn't care that he had a girlfriend and just wanted to hook up with him (yes, I've been there, as well.) I remember he told me I had the most amazing eyes and that he had been watching me in the class we took together.
Nothing happened. It was innocent, but I felt hopeful that it might go somewhere, be something. I'd had a boyfriend through my last two years of high school, one I didn't like, but stayed with because I was unhappy and alone in California, and being with someone who loved me was better than being on my own. We broke up a bit into my freshman year. I spent the majority of that year single and casual (best decision ever), but I was feeling sort of ready to find someone, be with someone, again. He drove me back to my dorm and played me a song he said was one of his favorites. It was Must Be Dreaming by Frou Frou, which I had never heard, and I loved it. He played it loud, and the song made me feel...I don't know, HAPPY, so filled with happiness that I literally had to hide my smile behind my hand. He noticed, and told me it was cute. Things were left with him thinking about what and who he wanted.
A couple days later, I went out to a movie with friends. I came back and found a message from him that he was sorry, but that he just couldn't do it. He was going to stay with his girlfriend. And that was the night things reached a head with regard to my anxiety and depression. Not because of him or the situation or anything having to do with it. In fact, my anxiety that night was based on completely different thoughts. I'd go into it, but that's really a story for another time, and one that I have a hard time telling.
I've been anxious my whole life: a cautious kid with parents who worried frequently and often in front of me. I took on their worries, and their behavior encouraged my own. Beyond that, genetics clearly predisposed me to anxiety. I went through periods of insomnia as a pre-teen and teen, worried and depressed about everything and nothing at the same time. I wasn't atypical though, in my family, so it was never paid much attention to. Plus, my mother has been of the opinion that anti-depressants change your personality, and openly expressed her disapproval of them. I never thought I had an options, any way to get help, or that this was something I needed help for. I thought, this is just who I am.
That night, I laid in bed, my thoughts racing, feeling out of control of my mind, of MYSELF. I completely broke down. I called my parents and asked them to come get me. They raced over while I was on the phone with them, because I couldn't stand to be alone with myself. I didn't want to kill myself, but at that moment, I really felt that I would, that I wasn't in control of my actions, and that I was teetering on the edge of slipping into something disastrous. I don't know how to explain it...I feel like this sounds trite. It's the only time in my life I've felt like that...I frequently feel anxiety or depression, but never again that feeling of losing my grip on myself and my life.
I slept on the floor of my parents' bedroom at home that night, and they took me to a psychiatrist the next morning. She identified what had happened as a panic attack and recommended I start taking medication. As it wouldn't kick in immediately, I had tranquilizers to take in the meantime, if I felt too out of control. At that point, I was so desperate that I didn't care what my mother or anyone else thought. I wanted something, ANYTHING, to fix this, to fix me. I felt like my thoughts would never be my own again, that I'd never live the kind of life I wanted, that I'd constantly be haunted. With the exception of earlier this year, when I tried to ween off Cymbalta, I've been medicated ever since. There's a part of me that still feels like that's admitting some sort of defeat. But I am what I am.
In the days that followed, weeks, then months, things slowly got better. Not amazing, but better. Those first days were terrifying. I felt alternately numb and out of my mind. I ran into Jason again in the days that followed. He asked me how I was, and I think I unthinkingly mentioned in a semi-lighthearted way that I had had a mental breakdown. Yeah. And after that, he never really talked to me again. I think he always thought it had something to do with him, and avoided me because of it. And still, to this day, I feel badly about it. Because even if we weren't going to be together, it was the worst time to be rejected by someone I genuinely liked. Hell, I would have stayed his friend.
In the end, I suppose, I can't complain. In the week that followed that night, I met my husband. Years later, the timing still amazes me. That was the lowest I've ever been in my life. And out of that, I found the one person who truly accepts me for who I am, that I love, that loves me. He met me and fell for me when I was barely me. And if Jason had wanted to be with me, I'd never be where I am now.
I met my husband because his roommate was interested in me. He was my lab partner and invited me over to study. And I saw my husband, laying on a couch (my first thought about him was that I thought he was LONG, not TALL -- he's 6'4" -- because he was horizontal.) We played video games with his other roommates...I was too interested in talking to him to study. And his roommate noticed my interest, and kept trying to sit closer to me, gain my interest. But he couldn't. Later, when he told me he was interested, I told him I was flattered, but that I was sort of interested in his roommate. Trying to be the nice guy, he offered to set us up.
He went on a date a couple days later. We talked so much in the car that he missed the exit off the freeway to go to the restaurant we were heading to. After dinner, we sat on the beach and talked. I asked him if he was the sort of guy that would kiss a girl on the first date (I was SO the aggressor in our courtship). He was. I talked a bit about the emotional stuff I was going through...it didn't put him off. He found it interesting. He's the sort of guy that's bored incredibly quickly, and I think my quirks have kept him intrigued. It's been like that from the beginning. I've always been foreign to him, emotionally and mentally, and he to me. We're similar where it counts, I think, but so very different.