My Mental Health Journey
I wrote this post a while ago because I wanted to share my story and potentially help people in a similar situation as me & let them know they are not alone in this. I was hesitant in posting it because I was nervous until I thought about one of the main reasons I started “Curated by Catie” and one of my blog's most important values is that mental health matters!
One important thing I learned in life is that mental health is an extremely important thing and also something never to be embarrassed about. I am sharing my story to help others and let them know that they are not alone.
From the time I was a little kid, I have always been an anxious person. I was diagnosed with attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder when I was five years old and always struggled with school. When I was younger, I thought that my ADHD was a bad thing because some of my teachers would get frustrated with me for things I couldn’t control.
As I got older, I learned many strategies to help manage my ADHD. I also learned that there are benefits of having ADHD, such as creativity, spontaneity, sense of humor, and resilience. I often find myself hyper-focusing on things a little too much and a little too energetic but those are not necessarily bad traits. I also discovered that ADHD is more common than I thought and so many successful people are diagnosed with it, such as Justin Timberlake, Paris Hilton, Simone Biles, Michael Phelps, and so many others.
Although I have been an anxious person my entire life, my anxiety significantly increased at the beginning of 2020. From May until the beginning of August 2020, I could not go about my life doing everyday things. I had severe anxiety and started having at least one panic attack every day. I didn’t know what to do or what was causing my body to have these reactions.
Panic attacks can have similar symptoms but affect people in various ways. For me, when I am having a major panic attack, I cannot feel my feet or my hands, it feels like I cannot swallow or breathe and it feels like my skin is getting tighter and tighter suffocating me or like I am dying. Severe panic attacks for me usually last 10 to 30 minutes but feel like hours. For me, less severe panic attacks have similar effects to severe panic attacks like feeling like I cannot breathe, not being able to swallow, and often feeling like my skin is getting tighter.
Panic attacks are most frustrating for me because most of the time there is no reason for them and they just come out of nowhere. These frequent anxiety and panic attacks affected my driving, eating, drinking, walking, and school work. I was too afraid to tell my psychiatrist because I thought since I already had ADHD people would look at me even more differently because on top of that I would have an anxiety and panic disorder. In mid-August of 2020, I finally sat down and talked to my psychiatrist about what I had been going through.
With a lot of self-love and research, I have been able to manage my anxiety and panic attacks. There are many natural ways to help reduce anxiety and there are also a lot of resources for anxiety disorder. Every once in a while I still have bad days and that is okay. I know I have the strength to get through anything, and so do you!
