Let me set the scene of my most vivid childhood memory:
I am five, and at the park with my family. My siblings are playing near a miniature bridge that’s overlooking a lake. My baby brother Tom is just beginning to walk and while my parents prepare our lunches, he takes a particular interest in the ducks. He toddles up to the bridge and peers over the edge, cooing at the water and at all the animals the light unearths.
It should be a gentle, pastel-coloured childhood memory. Nothing untoward happened, and judging by my mum’s ‘vague recollection’ of the day, it was a perfectly lovely family lunch in the park. Only, when I think back to my little brother in his overalls, giggling at the ducks, I feel sick. Because that day wasn’t a pleasant or calming outing for me. Actually, it was a day when I felt desperation and panic. I saw my gorgeous little brother, with his blond hair and button nose, approach the bridge again and again. I saw his eyes widen at the birds, his tiny hand stretch out to offer them clumps of bread. I saw how fascinated he was by his reflection in the water, how he tilted his little body towards it. I saw something that neither of my parents did: Tom was going to topple over the edge.
He was going to die. He was going to die and I was convinced nobody else saw that possibility – that probability – except me.
I watched Tom like a hawk that day. I felt my heart batter in my chest whenever I lost sight of him, even just for a second. Wherever he went, I went, for the entire afternoon, furious that my parents could eat ham and cheese sandwiches two metres away when catastrophe was all but certain.
Only, it wasn’t. The day went on, we ate our sandwiches, we packed up, and climbed into our hulking grey-blue Toyota Tarago. Tom was fine. He remains more than fine to this day; I’m happy to report he grew into a six-foot-seven man with a slightly weaker interest in pond flora and fauna.
The panic, though? That stuck around.
As I grew older, my fear only grew, too.
I’ve always been a ‘worrier’. As a kid, adults regularly told me so.
‘You’re such a worrywart,’ they’d laugh, rubbing my hair, patting my shoulders, kissing my forehead. ‘You’re always fretting about something!’
Worrying is such a familiar state of being to me that it feels enmeshed with being alive. Concerns and qualms eke their way into almost every conversation I have, slithering out indiscriminately, as if there’s no topic that’s quarantined from a little panic, a dollop of stress.
My mum has always mused that I am the way I am because of her. Mum fell pregnant with me when she was still navigating the all-consuming loss of my sister, Jennifer, who was born sleeping. Mum was so grief-stricken when I was in her belly – so terrified that she would lose me, too – that she recalls her pregnancy with me as the most worrying time of her life. There wasn’t a morning she woke without anxiety. Not until she held my skinny, wriggly body in her arms did she allow herself to take a deep breath and consider her future with a second child. She tells me this story over cups of tea whenever I’m having a particularly anxious day, as if she’s apologising for something that was entirely outside of her control.
‘You’re that way because of me,’ she says, convinced that her anxiety had travelled through the placenta.
My dad has always described me as ‘sensitive’. I feel a lot, and often. ‘You wear your heart on your sleeve, sweetheart,’ he would tell me when I was a child. ‘It’s beautiful.’
My siblings mostly giggle when I choose to fret about something particularly niche, like the possibility that I have emphysema, despite being in my twenties . . . with zero smoking history.
My friends call me a ‘stress head’. I was that annoying student in the corridor after a psychology exam asking things like, ‘WHAT DID YOU GET FOR QUESTION ELEVEN?’ I’d then proceed to toss in my bed at night, reflecting on question eleven and how I totally fucked it up in every conceivable way and how it would singlehandedly unravel my life. Upon receiving my results a few weeks later, I’d be genuinely surprised – I’d performed well, particularly on question eleven. Then I’d have a maths test the next morning, develop a deep panic over question twenty-three and repeat the same inglorious cycle. My friends would groan and say that this time would be just like the last, and that I was overreacting, to which I’d positively insist that, No, this time I was serious, and I was going to fail school, drop out and become someone involved in a neighbourly dispute on A Current Affair.
This kind of anxiousness was manageable, though. I was a little irritating to be near after a test, sure, but on the whole I was a normal teenager. Only, as I grew older – and had negative experiences that deviated from my idyllic middle-class upbringing in the suburbs – my anxiety bubbled up and spilled over, staining everything in my existence a pale red.
When I hit my twenties, it wasn’t just a matter of stressing about uni results, or wanting to excel at work. It wasn’t just perfectionism, or protectiveness over the people I love. It became something darker, something debilitating. The metamorphosis of a personality trait that had long defined me didn’t produce a butterfly. It produced a snake that had wrapped itself around my neck.
I first realised something was wrong with my mind when travelling to work became exhausting. I was twenty-three, the weekend editor at Mamamia at the time, and my trip into the office was a straightforward one. I’d catch a tram into the city, then I’d walk through Melbourne Central Shopping Centre and into work. It was an easy commute, during which I could basically chill out and listen to a podcast.
And yet, as if overnight, I found I couldn’t walk down my own street without checking over my shoulder every few steps, convinced that a mysterious man would be lingering nearby. I crossed the road cautiously, concerned that a speeding car might wipe me out if I wasn’t careful. I flinched when a stranger brushed past me as they made their way to the Myki readers. The odd characters that make St Kilda what it is – the colourful people of the city I love – now terrified me. I met their eyes with damp, sweaty fear. If someone with a backpack walked onto the tram, my stomach turned into a blender. They’re a terrorist, my mind decided. That man is a terrorist and he has a bomb in that backpack. A podcast episode was now a distraction, something that could pull my attention away from the likely terrorist sitting four seats down. And if that guy isn’t a terrorist, then I bet the one down the other end of the carriage staring back at me certainly is.
The urge to take flight became so strong that I would swap trams upon seeing anyone who looked remotely dodgy. I would get off at the next stop, only to realise another dodgy guy would be on this tram, too, and now I’d be ten minutes late to work. The task of walking through the shopping centre was another mission entirely; I jogged through the crowds, ducking and dodging passers-by as if a bomb would detonate us all to smithereens at any moment.
Every day for six weeks, I felt like I was under siege. It was 2017 and the world seemed cold in the shadow of the May bombings at Ariana Grande’s Manchester concert. In the preceding weeks I had covered the story at length. If I wasn’t commissioning articles about what happened to those young people – most of them girls – I was collating lists of the victims, trying to squeeze their stories into sentences, cropping their smiley Instagram selfies to fit the website’s desired dimensions. I was waiting for the next name, the next family statement, the next human horror story to unfold. I was researching the bomber’s upbringing and wondering how a human being could be so corrupt and vile.
Then, in June, the London Bridge attack seized the news cycle. I was again tasked with editorial coverage; it was my job to know the blow-by-blow account of what those three men did with that van and their knives. I studied the second-by-second accounts of what happened to the eight victims. Every horrific detail seeped into my brain. The chances of being killed by a machete blade or nail bomb didn’t seem minuscule anymore. It seemed inevitable. I could no longer imagine a world in which I or someone I loved wouldn’t become the victim of a terrorist attack.
The more terror became entwined with my work, the more I gravitated towards true crime content in my downtime. I wanted to know how serial killers set about raping and murdering women. I wanted to understand the minds of evil psychopaths who drove their cars into groups of people. I wanted to familiarise myself with the behavioural patterns, the rationales, the mental processes of wanting to kill someone. The more I knew about what happened to victims, I figured, the more I could protect myself and the people I love. It was the last thing my anxiety-addled mind needed, but it also felt like self-preservation.
Most days, upon arriving at the office I would crumple into a soggy mess of sweat, snot and tears. After one particularly unsettling tram ride, the anxiety was so ferocious I couldn’t even look at my laptop screen. I was so positively filled with fear that I could not stop crying; I moved myself to a table by the kitchen and let the tears stream down my face for two hours, pausing only to accept a fresh cup of tea from Zara, who had grown concerned after noticing the racket of keyboard tapping and phones ringing was punctuated by my sniffles and sobs.
The way I described my panic attacks to Zara that day – and the way I’ve found most helpful ever since – is that they’re like a gushing tap. It takes a daily conscious effort to tighten the valves of an anxious and unreasonable mind. You’ve let drips out here and there, but suddenly the pressure has risen so much it feels like a tsunami is brewing. You can try to rationalise with the least rational part of your brain – try to convince yourself that everything is fine, that you’re going to be okay, that this is just anxiety again. But then the tap bursts open, and the water is gushing out, and you can’t lift your head above the water, let alone try to swim against the current. The negative self-talk is cascading. That logical part of you is still there, somewhere, but the force of the water is too great for you to find her. She’s drowned out by the screams of your odious fears. You’re annoying, nobody likes you, you can’t breathe, you’re ugly, you’re stupid, you’re going to die. You know that there’s nothing you can do, and so you acquiesce. You turn onto your back and let the toxic water come and come and come, as you try to float your way through. You let the self-hatred wash over you, wet your hair, drip from your eyelashes, pool in your bellybutton. You let it flood into every nook and cranny of your weak body. You are at your lowest ebb. You have unlocked your most broken self, but you are still alive. Your chest is still billowing with new oxygen, new life, new moments, new thoughts.
It might take thirty minutes, it might take a full day, but eventually you realise that your inner self is a stronger swimmer than you gave her credit for, because she’s managed to wrangle the tap and force those valves shut again.
The sun comes out.
You’re in the clear again.
What surprised me most in the early days of my anxiety disorder is that my panic attacks were characterised by feelings of self-hatred, not nervousness. Mid-panic attack, I hated myself so viscerally that telling you about it now makes me wince in pain. In my worst moments, I said things to myself that I never want to repeat. The hatred became so intense that it made me want to flee my own body. I wanted to escape, although to where I was never quite sure. The tidal wave of self-hatred saw me break things methodically, maniacally. I’ve smashed plastic coathangers, one by one, against my wooden bed frame. I’ve thrown glasses on the floor, just for the release of seeing something shatter. I’ve screamed into pillows and down hallways, desperate to let all the brokenness out of my throat. I despise myself in these moments. I convince myself that the world despises me, too.
Sometimes my anxiety disorder makes me feel injured. I feel like I’ve failed some prefatory life test, that I am incapable of navigating the everyday hurdles that others bound over without drawing breath. When my mind isn’t terrified of strange men murdering me, it’s terrified that perhaps other people are busy living while I am holding my head in my hands because the world suddenly appears as if it’s made of Aeroplane Jelly.
I wish my skin was a little thicker. I wish I didn’t need thirty minutes to compose myself before opening daunting emails in my inbox. I wish I didn’t go through stages of becoming convinced that I have emphysema, or alopecia, or leukaemia. I wish I could approach life with the gung-ho zest of someone who faces her fears with a smile. I wish I could wish the anxiety away.
My anxiety has on occasion been a source of tension in my relationship. It has held me back from social events, difficult conversations, confronting news reports and packed trams. It has held me back from the grit that makes life ugly and real.
But I don’t hate my anxiety, either. As much as it torments my mind now and then, it also makes me who I am. It makes me decent at my job because I care deeply about the work I produce. It makes me passionate about the world I live in, because I want to help others where I can and give back in some small way. It makes me a good girlfriend, sister, daughter and friend because I am attentive to how my loved ones are doing.
I love a lot and I love deeply. I say so at the end of every phone call, happy birthday message and long day. If I love somebody, I don’t want them to ever spend a second doubting it. Sometimes I’ll tell Mitch five times in an hour, until he looks up from his dinner plate and says, ‘Yes, Mich, I think you might have told me that already. And I love you too.’
The beauty of my job is that Zara and I get to meet so many incredible women for our ‘In Conversation’ episodes and call it Thursday. The businesswomen, authors and media personalities we sit down with are leaders and game-changers. While their walks of life can be worlds apart, each possesses unwavering drive: a trait that threads their stories together in a tapestry of female kickarsery.
Ironically, many are bound together by another thread, too: anxiety. It turns out that when you spend an hour with some of Australia’s most influential women, you learn many of them are trying to tranquilise a monster that’s squatting in the kinetic contours of their brains. It seems so incongruous, but being wildly likeable and talented while having a mental illness that convinces you that you’re hated and hopeless is the case for so many. If anything, the Shameless interviewees have shown us that the higher you climb, the more agitated the monsters of self-doubt and fear can get.
When we asked bestselling author and comedian Tanya Hennessy to reflect on how her steep career trajectory affected her anxiety, she said, ‘[The self-doubt] absolutely got louder. It’s still really loud. I still see a psych. I see a kinesiologist. You name someone with a crystal and I’ll be having a chat with them . . . I talk to my friends a lot about it, but making stuff makes me happy and that’s what I come back to every time. Just keep making stuff.’
For radio host Ash London, who experienced an anxiety disorder in her late twenties, the trappings of a career in the public eye can also include a level of pressure and scrutiny that isn’t healthy for the mind.
‘I get heart palpitations if I feel like something I’ve said might be taken out of context,’ Ash said. ‘I will ruminate over it for days . . . I hate flying and I find it really hard to get on a plane. I fly a lot, and every second that I’m on a flight I’m anxious. [My anxiety] rears its ugly, disgusting, despicable head up in many ways, but I see a psychologist. I’m doing all the things I have to do to keep my head above the water . . . there are just moments when I feel things are slipping out of my control.’
For author and former lawyer Georgie Dent, who wrote her book Breaking Badly about having a breakdown in her twenties, there is no clear distinction between her personality and her mental illness: both things bleed into each other.
‘One psychologist once said to me, “You’ve got to think about all of the parts of your personality that make you you.” It’s recognising what the toxic components of my anxiety are, putting those things in check and saying, “I am an anxious person. I’ll always be an anxious person. And I’m okay with accepting those parts of my personality.”’
Therein lies the conundrum: if I’ve always been an anxious person, how can I know where the illness ends and my personality begins? To eliminate the anxious parts of myself would be to change the make-up of who I am.
This doesn’t mean I’ll tell my psychologist her work is done and stop going to therapy. This is still an illness that needs to be managed. To stop attending my sessions would be akin to binning my asthma inhalers, or refusing to take antibiotics for an infection. Since seeing my psychologist, I’ve gone from being so terrified of life that I wouldn’t wear heels in public because they might inhibit me from running away from a suicide bomber, to living relatively free from doom and gloom. I have barely listened to a true-crime podcast or watched a murder mystery in the past three years. I no longer fill my brain with gruesome content as a means of self-preservation. I can sit on a packed tram without worrying that it’s going to blow up.
There are bad days, of course, but now they are merely the pepper on what is a pretty amazing life. I see my psychologist every six weeks, and the routine we have set together seems to be working. Anxiety does pop up in some form every week, if not every day, but it’s not the kind that makes me feel like I’m drowning. It’s a trickle of water, one that reminds me that this is just how I am. I am sensitive. I am prone to feelings of apprehension and stress. I am malleable and fallible. But there is strength in admitting that you’re not okay and seeking help to get better. There is strength in observing the world around you. There is strength in feeling things and feeling them fully. There is strength in being diligent, thoughtful, passionate, emotional. There is strength in anxiety, because it shows just how much you care.
Is my anxiety an illness? Yes. But in some ways it is also my unique superpower, one that allows me to pour love into the humans and things around me. Sometimes it’s a superpower that hurts me. It’s one that has inflicted pain and torment. But it’s also one that makes me, well, me.
Society loves trying to define the boundaries of what is and isn’t mental illness. We invent diagnostic tools, we pore over medical manuals with a fine-toothed comb, we tweak labels and words and phrases so that the boundaries of what constitutes a personality trait and what constitutes sickness are kept as clearly defined as possible. We want to be able to point to mental illness like it’s a tangible thing; like we can hold it and mould it however we see fit. Like either it is there, or it isn’t. But, sometimes, trying to cage mental illness is like trying to cage smoke. The anxiety monsters of my brain can’t be stunned with tranquiliser guns because they are amorphous.
I’ve learned that I can’t kill the monsters. But I can coax and tame them instead. And once they’re tame? I embrace them as my neighbours. Neighbours that might always be there, but who make my mind a colourful apartment building – a place I’ve grown to love for all the cracks in the walls and the incandescent glow that shines through them.