FIRST PERSON Months beofre her 40th birthday, Emilie McMeeakn began suffering crippling anxiety – so what triggered such aertrifying change?
Months before her 40th birthday, began experiencing terrifying anxiety attacks that threatened to upend her happy, settled world. So what had triggered such a dramatic change?
Two years ago, while my husband was away for work, in the late, quiet darkness of the house as my daughters slept, a thought crept unannounced into my head: ‘You are a terrible mother.’ And instead of letting go of that notion, as with the 49,999 others fired out through the neural process every day, my brain responded with alacrity, hooked on to what was clearly a deep-set fear, and wouldn’t let it go.
It became a monstrous mantra, ‘You are a terrible mother’, repeated by hundreds of anonymous voices, over and over again, until, after three weeks, it reached a crippling crescendo. I sat in a bathroom cubicle at work while terror swept over me, my hands spread out against the walls, heart banging, mouth dry, silently begging for whatever it was to subside. Inside I was screaming, ‘I am going crazy. I have slipped through the cracks. And I don’t know how to get out. This is never going to end. This is never going to end.’
Where does your mind go at 3am when you can’t sleep? I ask you because I know where mine goes – back to that bathroom and those anxiety attacks, six months before I turned 40. Those anxiety attacks that threatened to completely derail my life – and have left a tiny thread of fear inside me, to be pulled tight at any minute.
This is the age of anxiety – we are all raging with it, aren’t we? It is estimated that one in nine individuals in Ireland will suffer a primary anxiety disorder in their lifetime – with women almost twice as likely to be diagnosed as men. And there are surely many more who suffer in silence, shamed by their fears, their worries, panicked and alone. Because it feels so shameful, that constant agonising, nameless, heart-pounding dread.
Anxiety disorders are classified into several specific types – from chronic generalised anxiety disorder, characterised by excessive, long-lasting anxiety and worry about nonspecific life events, to social anxiety disorder, which focuses on a fear of being negatively judged by others or a fear of public embarrassment. I am sure I have both. Sometimes at the same time.
I have been a journalist for nearly 20 years. I live with my husband and two daughters, who are seven and five. We might be getting a dog – you get the picture – and we are happy. I am hyperconnected, engaged with the world. And I can laugh at most things, through most things – half of me always wants to laugh, even when things go wrong, that’s my culture.
But it is amazing how quickly you can go from laughing things off to knocking on the asylum door. That’s when you realise that there are thick roots to this anxiousness, and if you don’t deal with it, the emotional muscle memory becomes inflexible.
It can feel as though you’ve hired the world’s worst architect to build your life. Bits start falling off what was supposed to be a solid structure, as slowly life/circumstance/whatever removes a brick at a time until you are perilously close to collapse.
So what did my building blueprint look like? A quick survey tells me I had a complicated ➤