I didn’t realize I had so much to unpack with this series. If you haven’t read parts one and two of this series, you can find them here and here. I suggest reading them first.
My Journey with Anxiety – Part Three
After I left the cult, I continued to have issues with my anxiety. The things that I will discuss in this post are things that I still suffer with today.
The first, and the one I spoke about in the first post, was the breathing, or rather, feeling like I couldn’t breathe. I spoke about how it would happen while I was sitting in class or driving. It also started happening in movie theaters and airplanes. Movie theaters? Yes. I don’t know why, but being in the dark and so close to so many people, in the middle of the row where it would be difficult to get out if I needed to. I would being to feel like I couldn’t breathe. And I couldn’t talk to anyone. Obviously. Rude. I hadn’t yet realized that it was connected to my birth control.
The second thing I experienced was and still is scary. Sometimes, when I eat, after I’ve chewed my food and gotten it to the back of my throat to swallow, I can’t. I can’t get the food to go down. The swallow reflex is gone. The one and only reason I know that this is related to anxiety is because I posted about it on Facebook when it first started happening and a guy that I was in the cult with me told me he had the same thing. That it was linked to anxiety and it was a psychosomatic response. It was all in my head. There’s nothing really wrong with me. My brain is just freaking the fuck out. Which, in turn, freaks me the fuck out. I could choke. I could die. Because my brain has decided we can’t swallow our food right now.
I talked to my doctor immediately and she put me on an anti-anxiety med that I had an allergic reaction to within a week. My back broke out in an itchy rash, which gave me even more anxiety, because, remember the cult? I developed a thing about itching there when we brought bed bugs back from a New York hostel. Turns out I am very allergic to them. lol
If you have experiences with anxiety that you’d like to share, please post them in the comments or use the contact page if you’re rather not share them publicly. There’s one more part to my journey with anxiety. Thank you for reading my story.