“I can’t write a book!” was my first reaction when my sister suggested I write one.
“Why not?” she asked.
I could already sense a million reservations building up inside me (okay, maybe not a million but at least three to start with.) The biggest one—the one that kept coming up repeatedly—was what I’d imagine everyone else would be thinking.
Who does she think she is?
This was something I’d battled my entire life. It was the voice in my head I had always listened to. At times, it could be loud and unyielding, other times it was a whisper.
Who do you think you are?
I’m not a psychiatrist, psychologist or a mental health therapist. I wasn’t even an active patient of a psychiatrist, psychologist or mental health therapist. I wasn’t an expert.
I was merely someone who was fed up with dealing with anxiety.
Someone who was no longer willing to accept things as they were.
Someone who had made a deal with herself to do everything she could to fix herself.
Someone who had done what she had set out to do.
The fact that I had successfully managed my crippling anxiety to the point that it no longer affected me was something that made me proud.
The fact that I had completely changed my life around after two years of intense research and work meant I had learned a lot.
Of course, I wanted to share my mental health success. Who wouldn’t?
The problem was that to share my story and help others; I would need to share something I had kept hidden from the world for so long. Sharing my mental health story would require courage to be vulnerable, and I didn’t think I was brave enough.
I turned to the vulnerability queen—Brene Brown—for guidance and eagerly devoured her books. I knew that vulnerability would be hard but was it worth it?
Vulnerability is the birthplace of connection and the path to the feeling of worthiness. If it doesn’t feel vulnerable, the sharing is probably not constructive. ~ Brene Brown
Sharing something I had been deeply ashamed of was difficult. And sharing it with the world (or at least the ten people who might actually read the book) definitely felt vulnerable. So perhaps it was constructive and worth the discomfort.
I had already lived in the trenches of discomfort.
Anyone that battles anxiety every day knows the feeling of discomfort intimately.
Everyone experiences anxiety in different ways but we all have one thing in common—we suffer!
Constant worrying thoughts, sleepless nights, and panic attacks had taken their toll. I had often been in a state of mental, emotional and physical exhaustion. Anxiety is not a comfortable place to live, and I had survived it. Hell, I had conquered it and lived to tell the tale.
But was the tale worth telling?
Would it matter?
Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD) is one of the most commonly diagnosed disorders in the world. According to the World Health Organization (WHO) “between 1990 and 2013, the number of people suffering from depression and/or anxiety increased by nearly 50%, from 416 million to 615 million. Close to 10% of the world’s population is affected, and mental disorders account for 30% of the global non-fatal disease burden.”
Statistics like these can be overwhelming. It was easy to get discouraged and believe my story didn’t matter.
How could my story make a difference when the problem was so huge?
Never believe that a few caring people can’t change the world. For, indeed, that’s all who ever have. ~Margaret Mead
I thought about Margaret Mead’s quote every time I doubted myself. I knew I wasn’t going to change the world but could I change at least one other person’s world?
Would helping one person be enough to sit in the discomfort of vulnerability?
It took some time to convince myself to write because I needed to find my voice.
I needed to be standing so far away from the edge of the cliff that I no longer feared the fall.
I needed enough space between who I once was and the person I had now become.
With help for Brene Brown’s Daring Greatly, I put on my big girl knickers, grabbed a pen and started writing.
Taming Crazy – Confessions and Lessons: A True Story for the Worried, the Fearful, and the Anxious is my story.
