the worst I ever felt

On anxiety & self-care

It was 1995. I was in my mid twenties, living in Park Slope, Brooklyn, and working in Manhattan as a set-up artist for a photo studio that shot jewelry catalogs. I was deeply unhappy; there were many roots to the unhappiness that all came together like a ball of twine at my solar plexus.

My whole life, I had thought of myself as a lower-energy person. I didn’t seem to have the strength or stamina that other people my age had. But what began to happen to me in the mid-nineties, while I was in my mid-twenties, was a crippling fatigue. It wasn’t just that I was tired or frustrated by a crowded subway train or preferred staying in to going out. I was relentlessly exhausted. Daily life began to feel insurmountable.

I’m writing about anxiety - mine, yours, the world’s. Several times here and other places, I’ve mentioned a time in my life that I think of as “the worst I’ve ever felt.” This is the story of that time.

I struggle with medical trauma. Making an appointment to see a doctor is not a small deal for me. It’s a very, very big deal. But I was desperate for help, so on a visit home, I made an appointment to see a doctor that a friend of my mother recommended.

She listened to my heart and looked at my chart, and asked me why I was there. I told her about the fatigue.

“Are you anxious?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” I said.

She wrote a prescription and handed it to me.

I was taken aback. I had not come to see a doctor because I was seeking a medication, but on the way back to my parents’ house, I thought about anxiety and how my mother’s anxiety had shaped her life and my own. The prescription I’d been given was for Buspar.

Against my better judgment, I filled the prescription and went back to New York, but Buspar didn’t help. I continued to sink into the despair of depletion. My fatigue grew worse, only now I experienced it along with side effects from the medication. Buspar felt like little pieces of metal running through my bloodstream. My head felt disconnected from the rest of my body.

I stopped taking it.

There were days when I could not muster the strength to walk three blocks to the grocery store or even one block to the corner store. There were days when I couldn’t stop crying. I spent entire Saturdays lying on the floor. Something was wrong with me, and I had no idea what to do about it.

Then, I saw an ad in the back of a neighborhood newspaper for a holistic medical practice. The doctor was a woman. She had a beautiful name (I’m not going to use her real name here, but trust me, it’s beautiful) and she looked kind and competent.

Holistic medicine makes sense to me in a way that treating symptoms does not. So, I made an appointment. I was asked to keep a diary of everything I ate for the next week and bring it with me. (I did this even though it triggered my deep shame.)

Her office was in Midwood, a thriving, mostly Orthodox Jewish neighborhood. It was an easy train ride from Park Slope, and I was surprised when I turned off of the busy business throughfare into the residential neighborhood. The houses were large and had sprawling lawns and trees, and cars in driveways. Midwood looked like home and felt like a respite. The office was located in a sunny addition behind a lovely white house. I was greeted at the front desk by a receptionist and given a stack of paperwork to fill out, which I did while seated by a window, dappled sunlight dancing across me.

Dr. Pom*, wearing a floral tichel, invited me back into the examination room. First, we sat in her cozy office, where she looked at my food diary and the paperwork I’d just completed and asked me detailed questions, not only about how I’d been feeling, but my life itself.

I trusted her immediately. I felt safe with her, which is not how I normally feel in medical settings. I told her that I had seen a doctor who had prescribed Buspar. Her mouth twitched. “That didn’t help, did it?” she said.

Relief flooded through me. “No, it didn’t.”

The physical examination that followed was incredibly thorough. Stethoscope at my chest she asked, “Has anyone ever told you you have a heart murmur?”

“No.”

“Well. You do,” she said, “but it’s nothing to worry about.”

I left there with a thick packet of information. Dr. Pom wanted me to start walking - not the stop/start walking of city life - but exercise walking, every day. She also wanted me to start recording my basal body temperature to map my fertility, and she wanted me to eliminate flour and sugar from my diet.

I told my co-worker this, and she blanched. “How can you not eat bread? It’s the staff of life!”

Unfortunately, I agreed with her. I was grateful for Dr. Pom’s wisdom, but I was also overwhelmed by it. Giving up flour and sugar seemed insurmountable to me. I made attempts. I went to the health food store and bought a loaf of wet sprouted bread. I stopped getting my favorite workday lunch - a bagel and cream cheese with iced coffee. And I continued to go to my appointments in Midwood, which felt like deep self-care (at a time when no one used the term self-care).

I should mention that Dr. Pom is also a writer. She writes essays, fiction, and poetry. Along with the nutrition and lifestyle changes, she recommended poems and essays to me, and this was confirmation that I was in the right place and had found the right person to help me understand the situation I was in.

Dr. Pom asked me if I would be interested in a treatment that was not yet approved by the FDA - I believe it was a compound of B12 - but I can’t be sure. Whatever it was, I eagerly signed the waiver, and I began a protocol of visiting her once a week for an injection in my hip.

Even all these years later, I get tears in my eyes when I remember how quickly and dramatically that shot changed my life. I remember arriving at the office, exchanging conversation with the receptionist, who was so kind and funny. I remember the light and the hope and the sensation of regaining control.

I had been living as a paper-thin thin grey cardboard cutout, but now I was being slowly pumped with color. A fog began to roll away from me. I started to feel like a self again, like a human.

I don’t know if it was approved by the FDA, but I sure hope it was. I’d like to have a dose of it right now.

Revisiting this memory has illuminated for me how intertwined I believe anxiety and self-care to be, and how intertwined I believe self-care and self-actualization to be. Not always, but sometimes, anxiety happens when we hold ourselves away from ourselves, when we refuse the wisdom of our hearts, or hand our personal power over to someone or something else.

For some people, Buspar would have been just the ticket. It would have helped. But it didn’t help me, and I knew it wouldn’t. Life is not one-size-fits-all.

Anxiety is layered and complex, and I intend to examine mine, unwind it in the light, and make sense of it because just as I wanted to feel better all those years ago, I’d like to feel better now. And I’d like for you to feel better, too.

Maybe if we tell our anxiety stories, we can tame them.

*Fictional, but cute, name