When Anxiety Calls Shotgun, You Hit the Brakes

— I used to be driven by ambition, now I’m just trying to avoid a full-blown existential crisis.

As a former overachiever, I feel obligated to talk about this. By this, I mean the steep decline from ambitious and thriving to barely functioning half a day out of 7 in a week, sometimes even in a month.

Those who have known me personally in any capacity are well acquainted with the self-sabotaging side of me — the side that makes it a point to ignore all healthy coping mechanisms and opts for the most toxic strategies, and regularly ignore any efforts to take care of my mental and emotional well-being. Not my proudest moment or a ringing endorsement of my sanity, mind you, but I’m aware of it, and I did what I never thought I ever would: I took a break.

I didn’t think such a trivial thing as taking a sanity check was for me or that I’d ever take a mental health break. Pretty sure my desi-to-the-bone, regularly-ignoring-their-mental-health, living-in-denial parents didn’t think I would either. I’d bet all my nonexistent wealth it shocked them into disappointment for a minute. In all fairness, I went from having goals and being driven by ambition to barely keeping my head above the water. I went from chasing dreams to chasing away daily panic attacks and an overwhelming sense of dread. Standard gifted kid syndrome, right?

Jokes aside, the journey from a Type-A overachiever to slowly realising that your desire to succeed comes from anxiety and a fear of failure and abandonment rather than ambition is difficult — sort of like trying to fit a square peg into a round hole while blindfolded and wearing gloves. Just when you think you’ve got it figured out, you realise you’ve been poking yourself in the eye with the peg the whole time. In other words, it’s frustrating and confusing and very irritating in the long haul. It can be even worse when you don’t really know where the anxiety comes from and why it makes a nesting hole in your life anyways.

Thankfully, in my case, I knew a basic gist of where it came from — with no particular commendation to my ‘stellar’ childhood and the long string of domestic violence I witnessed and went through in various ways, I knew way ahead of time that I was plagued with grief bigger than my body could hold and a sense of displacement that I don’t wish upon anyone. Add a couple of broken friendships to the mix, being abandoned multiple times by multiple very important people, and never really learning how to communicate, process, and resolve things — you have yourself a type-A overachiever using work as a distraction.

Really, who really needs stability and a healthy balance of communication and self-care when you have crippling anxiety to keep you driving in life, right? Well, wrong. Realised that a decade too late, in fact. This is where I’d like to blame the desi mindset of driving kids to gold medals and A+ grades rather than teaching them to work through life and the problems it throws at them with healthy techniques.

The point being — I took a break. Not because I wanted to but because if I hadn’t, I’m sure I’d be six feet under by now. While not my favorite way of getting flowers, I’d be surrounded by them as compensation for people not looking through the glass door clearly and seeing the cracks. I took a break because my motivation to get up and work was replaced by an overwhelming sense of loss, and my will to live was cloaked by an immense desire to die.

There was nothing wrong, so to speak. I had a stable job, my family was fairly functional and healthy despite the past, good friends, stability, and in many ways, happiness. I was finally at a point in life where there was nothing logically wrong. But I couldn’t feel any of the good parts anymore. It was like somebody turned off the lights in my brain and forgot to turn them back on again, and for me to find the switch to do that myself, taking a break and taking time became crucial.

I was exhausted, constantly demotivated, anxious over everything, crying myself to sleep every night, breaking down over not being able to choose a breakfast option, feeling alone without reason, and hating myself for all of it more and more every single day. I’d be lying if I said I’ve gotten better at all of it. The first thing I was told when taking the break and deciding to work on myself was that it would take a lot of time to get better and healthier and that I’d get worse before I got better, which turned out to be truer than I’d have liked. It’s not really pretty having your entire being spiral into nothingness and a pile of grief over not being able to plug your phone to charge the right way. But it happened. More times than I’d like to admit, but it did.

There are other aspects to wanting to get better — I wanted to be able to feel the happiness I am super grateful to have, to be able to recognise healthy relationships and connections, to be able to hold on to them, to be able to work towards goals I truly wanted, to be able to feel at peace, to be able to truly enjoy the life I am grateful to be given and to truly be able to hold on to things that matter to me.

For the longest time, I was operating under the mindset that I don’t really need to process anything that happens to me; I don’t really need to communicate and resolve as long as I’m functioning and going through my day, my ambition, my goals and doing great. Truth is, if you don’t take a break yourself, your body will demand you to in the worst of ways. Particularly your brain. I went from taking steps to conquer the world every day to having my hands shake when I draw. Nothing like the bitter taste of failure that coats your tongue on the tiniest of things and the overwhelming anxiety that follows.

At this point, I’m sure you’re wondering if there’s a moral to all of this. Or if I’m even getting to a point. Of course, there isn’t just yet. It’s an ongoing journey I hope to document for more of us who go through this silently. I’d like you to take this one as a reminder to put yourself first for a second and truly take care of yourself. Here, I’d like you to see what it’s truly like behind the scenes. The journey itself is long, but I’ve been told it’s worth it in the end. As much as I’m trying to believe that, I’ll try to make you believe it also. Is going through all of this absolutely awful? Of course, it is. Probably more than I’ve been able to explain but if you can relate to any of this, take it as a sign to not take it lightly and do something about it. For yourself, for once.