I am not quite sure what to write about. My “assignment” is to write about some sort of shadow that follows me around, or something that I am ashamed of. I am not ashamed of anything I’ve done because it ultimately made me who I am today. There is one particular shadow in my life that I have since overcome, but I will write about how I came to overcome it. When I was in middle school, I noticed a change in myself. I became really shy and quiet. I used to be very loud, talkative, and outgoing in Elementary school so what happened? I started to isolate myself from others. I tried to keep my distance from everyone at school, and even at home (except for my mom). I didn’t have many friends, and I was bullied a lot for being the “quiet, smart girl”. At first, I thought that maybe being in a different school in a way scared me. I just couldn’t seem to find my place in the world. Then I started to notice strange behaviors. I started to wash my hands so much that they were cracked and dry. I took almost three showers a day. I considered my clothes dirty after only wearing them for an hour. I started to get scared when other people sneezed, coughed, or didn’t wash their hands. I started to panic in certain situations where I felt that I wasn’t “clean”. These panic attacks were the worst. I would just start crying hysterically. I felt such an immense wave of panic and fear that I didn’t know what to do. It was so hard to calm down. My heart would beat out of my chest, I couldn’t get enough air in my lungs, my mind was overloading with

so many panicky, scared, unreasonable thoughts. The only way to describe it is that I felt like I was drowning. My mom often tried to calm me down, but it was really hard on her. I had irrational thoughts about a lot of things. I remember one time getting so angry because my brother took off his swim trunks in the pool. I wouldn’t get back in the pool until he put them back on, because in my mind, he was “contaminating” the pool with his pecker (mind you he was only about 6 years old and I was 11). Another situation in which I acted irrationally was when I thought my bedroom wasn’t clean. We moved when I was in fourth grade. My bedroom had once belonged to a 16 year old teen mom that shared the room with her on and off boyfriend/father of her child. The room was painted a dirty tannish/pinkish with a black trim border. The once tan turning yellow carpets were stained and there were holes in the door from where (I guess the girl) someone kicked or punched the door. I wouldn’t sleep in my room about two years after already being in this new house because I thought it was dirty. I was having a panic attack and my mom asked me why it was too dirty for me to sleep in. I remember whispering that I was afraid that there were “sex germs” on the wall. So I slept in my parents’ bed while my aunt and grand mom started to redo my room. They painted the walls a light pink, put white wainscoting at the bottom half of the walls, replaced the black trim with white trim, replaced the holey door, and they put a new light tan carpet in. Now my room was my “clean”.

Unfortunately, this was not the end of my struggles. I would get so worked up about my hands being clean that I started to use cleaning products on my hands (such as Lysol) and wash them under water that was so hot that I would burn my hands. My three showers a day were at least an hour and a half long. I refused to use the bathroom at school, so I wouldn’t drink anything while I was at school. I had to carry hand sanitizer with me everywhere, I used it before and after each class, and whenever I touched anything that I considered to be “contaminated”. My mom recognized this behavior as a type of anxiety disorder with OCD (obsessive compulsive disorder) because she has lived with her anxiety disorder all of her life. She was upset that she passed her “defective gene” to me but she did whatever was in her power to help me feel better. I went to counseling for a little while. While the counselor taught me techniques to calm my mind before/during a panic attack, I didn’t like going. I sometimes felt that the counselor was “dirty” and that by breathing the same air as her, I would then become “dirty” too.

My anxiety about germs controlled my whole life. It was all I could think about. I just couldn’t escape

germs that were all around me. I felt a sense of impending doom, like if I caught a certain germ than the world would end. Everything that I considered “dirty” was “contaminated”. I felt like the germs were out to get me. I didn’t like being around anyone because just breathing the same air as someone that I deemed “contaminated” would make me contaminated. Obviously this behavior was unhealthy, but I was trapped in my own mind. I felt

like I was a slave to my worries inside my own head. It was this point in my life that I really trusted in God to help me. The only time I ever felt peace was when I prayed and read the Bible. I couldn’t understand why I was so different from everyone else. Why was everyone so dirty? Why did they not realize that they were dirty?

My antisocial behavior and naturally inclined intelligence made me the perfect target for bullies. This made my anxiety is worse. Now I had to not only worry about germs but I had to worry about other people picking on me too. My mom, dad, and Aunt Linda took me to a psychiatrist. I remember waiting an hour and a half in this nasty, dirty waiting room because the doctor was running behind. Dr. G was his name. I felt really uncomfortable because I deemed him as contaminated. He was an overweight, hairy, older, Indian man with a very thick accent. I was scared and my mom did a lot of the talking. He prescribed me 25 mg of Zoloft, or my happy pills as I like to call them. My mom explained to me that our anxiety disorders are genetic which means that he brain doesn’t produce enough of a certain chemical called, Serotonin which is secreted in times of panic to help calm yourself down. Essentially, I had no natural way of calming myself down so I irrationally worried which led to panic. The medicine, Zoloft, was a way of putting this chemical back into my system. I eventually found the right dosage that made me feel better. Feeling better is a relative term that I use, but it really helps me function in everyday life. I still irrationally worry and occasionally suffer from panic attacks, but not nearly as bad as they were before the medicine. The medicine helps me function in everyday so that I can actually talk to other people, have friends, use public restrooms (sometimes), and my hands no longer look like they went through a cheese grater. My worries still follow me around, as a shadow, but I am able to better control them. I still carry around hand sanitizer, I have to put my sleeve around my hand when opening doors, I always wash my hands whenever I get home (because my house is considered “clean” in my mind), and I always cringe when someone in class sneezes or coughs (these are just a few of my many obsessive habits), but I am able to live my life.

My anxiety disorder at first was the slave driver in my head that controlled everything I did. When I went on the medicine my anxiety became the monster under my bed. I knew it was there and I was afraid of it, but I was too embarrassed and ashamed to tell anyone (besides my immediate family) about it. I felt like a freak of nature, a crazy person, a lunatic, a psycho who needed to be in a mental hospital. Eventually, as I grew older, I learned that my anxiety is a part of who I am, and I should not be ashamed of it. It grew into my shadow that follows me around. Sometimes I can control the shadow from appearing because the sun is shining and everything is happy. But sometimes, my shadow overtakes my world and everything becomes cloudy and rainy. I am not afraid to tell people about my anxiety disorder, but sometimes I am afraid to talk about how extreme my behavior can be because of it. To this day, I sometimes still feel like I’m crazy, but in these times I need to step back and realize that God made me who I am for a reason. I feel that I am more accepting of others because I know everyone has hard times, just like me. I know a lot about different psychological disorders because my own anxiety disorder has made me curious. Who knows maybe one day I will become a counselor? Everyone is given

different struggles in life. This struggle has certainly caused quite uproar in my life, but without it, I would not be who I am today. I feel that this shadow has made me more compassionate.

I felt as if I was drowning.

I couldn’t get enough air,

I couldn’t breathe.

No one was there to save me.

No one to throw me a life raft.

No lighthouse to guide me.

I was a prisoner in my own mind.

So many thoughts would beat me down daily.

My strange behaviors held me hostage.

No matter how loud I screamed,

No how hard I pounded against the bars,

I was still trapped.

Still forced to face the cruel and unusual punishment.

There was no escape.

There was no light at the end of the tunnel.

There was no hope.

I was trapped inside my own head.

I was a victim of my own demise.

Panic, anxiety, worry.

All just words.

But those three words hold me captive.

The general guidelines I placed for myself for this poem was to

make it less about the facts of my anxiety disorder and how I dealt with

it, but rather how having anxiety made me felt. I specifically chose how

I felt whenever I had a panic attack. It’s hard to explain a panic attack to

someone who’s never experienced one before. After doing some

research and looking back, I thought the perfect metaphor would be to

describe a panic attack would be like drowning. After more thought, I

realized that anxiety in general dictates everything I do, such as how I

live my everyday life. I compared this to being imprisoned. The short

lines in this poem are an attempt to capture the panic and fear that I felt

during panic attacks or even suffering from anxiety in general. Everyone

has had a moment where they have experienced a deep and scary

moment filled with panic and fear. These moments can be from almost

drowning to being in a car accident. I tried to capture this feeling in my

moment because that’s how I felt living with anxiety, especially when I

had a panic attack. This sort of “human truth” was an attempt to deepen

the relationship between me and my audience. This visual/feeling helps

the reader relate to my own feelings. I started writing this poem by using

a sort of narrative arc with the ideas I research above in mind. I wrote

down whatever came to mind as I thought back about my experiences

with anxiety and panic attacks. I was eventually able to narrow and craft

these sentences into categories: drowning related and prison related.

Once I fixed up my sentences, I worked on the order which I would

present the sentences. After playing around with the order, I was able to

shorten the sentences to better portray the feeling of panic. Overall, this

exercise helped me realize what I really wanted to capture in my shadow

narrative: that having an anxiety disorder is crippling because of the fear

it casts.

Anxiety may cause:

Irrational thoughts

Paranoia

Fear

Panic

Incessant worrying

Strange antisocial behaviors

Exaggerated behaviors

Obsessive compulsive behaviors

This rhetorical change of my shadow narrative takes form of a

caution sign. Caution signs often warn people of what danger my lie

ahead. This particular caution sign, warns people some of what anxiety

can cause. This particular caution signs details some of the behaviors I

experienced when I developed my anxiety disorder. My guidelines for

this piece of writing were simple: take my experiences from anxiety and

transform them into symptoms on a caution sign. Mostly everyone has

seen a caution sign before, so this form of writing is familiar. I just took

a different perspective of the normal caution sign. Caution signs warn

passers of danger that was up ahead. When my anxiety was out of

control, it would have helped the people around me to see a caution sign

first. My emotions and thoughts were out of control which made me

exhibit some strange behaviors. I decided to turn my shadow narrative

into a caution sign because of how others felt around me. I was in some

ways a ticking time bomb. Any little thing could send me into a panic

attack. I wrote in my shadow narrative about having a panic attack

because my brother took off his bathing suit and jumped in the pool

(when he was only five years old). Rather than going through every little

experience that I’ve had with anxiety, I highlighted some of the main

memories in my mind. I wrote these memories down and then sorted

them into categories. Once in categories, I was better equipped to put

turn the memories into a sort of symptom to be written on the caution

sign. For example, when my anxiety disorder developed, I was deathly

afraid of germs. This caused me to overly wash my hands, which turned

into a form of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. For this, I simply wrote

“obsessive compulsive behaviors” instead of all the obsessive behaviors

I partook in. If I went through and listed every little thing that I did that

could fall under these symptoms, well, I’d still be writing.