My mom once told me that I was always an uptight little thing. As an infant I would only sleep in my port-a-crib. According to Dad I would wake up, look around, and if I was in the crib or in their arms I was fine. If not I would scream bloody murder. They took the crib everywhere.
Mom tried to put me in daycare. One of my earliest memories is standing in a bathroom wearing my favorite dress. It was white, printed with red strawberries, and covered in vomit. I threw up everyday until they refused to take me back. My first day of kindergarten my aunt dragged me in literally kicking and screaming, still clutching one of her sofa pillows. It was seventies green and scratchy.
When I was eleven and mom was pregnant with my youngest brother, she sent my oldest brother, ten, and myself, to sleep away camp for a week. I still call it Camp Ruthless. Every single day I cried.
In high school I asked to be sent to a ten day art camp. At the camp I learned to my horror that everyone had to take a performing art. I developed a stress headache so severe it made my teeth ache. My parents came and got me two days later.
Then there was grad school. For college I went to my BYU, but I got into grad school in another state. Alone in my dorm room with the strange young woman (a perfectly lovely girl) who would be my intimate partner in many ways for the next several months I lost it. Had complete hysterics. I was home in less than forty-eight hours.
Cats become very attached to places. There are stories of cats returning to their human’s old homes and apartments over and over again. I read once of a woman bringing her cat to watch their old house being knocked down. After that he stopped sneaking back to the old place, but he was never the same.
I was a cat.
My space was sacrosanct. The only one in the house with my own room I kept it neat and the door closed. All of my books, at one point there were well over two hundred, were separated by category and placed in alphabetical order by author. Every week I cleaned the entire space, taking things off shelves for dusting. Moving furniture around to vacuum. For about a month in middle school I went through a period of rebellious sloppiness. That was all I could stand. My room was my oasis of calm in a small house overfilled with six people.
When home alone I would clean the house and reorganize the furniture. On the rare occassion I felt lonely at home I simply opened a book. I was far more likely to feel lonely at school, surrounded by my peers. Being out of my safe spaces the light was too bright, noises too loud, it was all just too much. In a fall that seems almost inevitable in retrospect, I slipped into a major depressive episode that lasted about four years.
No one noticed.
Not even me. It was only after the fact that I could see how shrouded I had been. How deeply I had fallen. I would come home and I would sleep. I would wake up, eat and do homework, then go back to sleep. Easily twelve hours a day would be experienced solely through dreams and I was still always tired.
It was psych class and we were reading about suicide. Some people who attempt suicide do so in a way that, if routines are followed, they will be found before death takes full hold. Take the sleeping pills or start the car in the closed garage fifteen minutes before their spouse is due home. It leaves the consequences up to fate. Maybe they will be discovered or maybe traffic will be bad that day. I distinctly remember thinking that if I took a handful of pills I would definitely die because by that point my family was used to me sleeping all the time.
I didn’t actually want to die. Death was so permanent. I just wanted to sleep. Preferably for years. The Rip Van Winkle story was a fantasy rather than a warning. The idea of a coma was welcoming. The here and now was not a place I wanted to be.
Anxiety is about control, or more accurately, lack thereof. My anxiety stemmed from not feeling in control of my life. Part of it was health. As a kid I suffered from chronic constipation and migraine headaches. Part of it was hereditary.
My mother went to a university lab school from kindergarten through twelfth grade. The school was a brief walk from her house. She went to university on the same campus. Sophomore year her parents decided that she should be more independent and arranged for her to live on campus. She could practically see her house from the dorm. All she had to do was sleep there. Instead she cried every day until her parents allowed her to come home, where she would live until she married my dad.
So, how could a person like me end up living in seven cities across three states and three continents? As with my mother, it started with a boy.