Under the Surface

So I’ve been thinking—

What if I didn’t just stuff my words into a pretty package that is as sweet to digest as what the world is accustomed to from me? I write draft after draft, leaving my truest thoughts hanging on a page that will never be seen. The authors I admire vulnerably lay truth at our feet, often clearing a path that allows many of us to feel less alone, less invisible, and far more connected. 

It’s not that life is bad, that I’m not ok, or that my positive personality is a facade. Life is beautiful. I’m beyond blessed. I find hope and positivity to be my default modes. But the unfiltered truth remains: My smile and enthusiastic demeanor are at times a mask because—like every single one of you—I’m human. 

Friends, we are human. Life can build us up and break us down all in the same moment. It can bring us to our knees in excruciating pain or lift us off our feet in pure joy. It’s messy and beautiful and difficult and awe-inducing. To act otherwise is to deny the complexities of it all.  

The last few months have been a hidden battle. Sleep has never been a friend of mine, and I thought I’d leave my troubles behind as I grew older, but my body would not comply. After a trip to the doctor in my teens where I was told to “just relax and sleep” and subsequent decades trying to solve everything on my own, my exhaustion felt like too much to carry alone. After cajoling from my best friend, I saw a doctor who started me on medicine to try and help me find the rest I desperately needed. That’s not the reason for the post though. It’s the question she asked me each time I visited her. “Do you have anxiety?”

Of course not. Not me. Only when I have to be somewhere, and time is not completely in my control. I assured her I was just fine, but upon some self reflection and looks of “Girl, quit playing” from close friends, I began to look back at my life and my actions.

Maybe there was a reason why I felt I needed to run out of my apartment at a moment’s notice and drive down country roads so that I could calm my insides. Maybe there was a reason why I was ready to pop any time I had to be somewhere and couldn’t leave insanely early. Maybe there was a reason I’d “burrito,” which is my term for when I’d immediately get in bed and wrap my head in blankets to block out any light, somehow thinking if the world couldn’t see me, I couldn’t feel it. Maybe there was a reason my insides and mind felt like a three ring circus more often than I realized. Maybe there was a reason life felt safer when I was performing rather than relaxing. Maybe there was a reason I couldn’t sleep. 

I have carefully caught student after student who has courageously told me about battles with anxiety, but I was blind to see that it was lurking nearby me almost daily. To stand in front of a classroom answering the endless calls of “Miss Parker, I need you!” when the alarms are blaring in my mind and my chest is tightening and my stomach is doing flips can feel debilitating. I can’t run. I can’t hide. I can’t cry. I can only try to breathe and say, “I’ll be right there,” with my trademark smile. 

After four or five visits, I looked at my doctor and said, “I have anxiety.” The journey to quell it then began. 

I’m not the only one, so why is it so hard to say? It’s often labeled as weak or fake or a crutch, but those who battle it know it is anything but those things. It’s hard to speak it in a society that presents perfect lives at every turn. It wants us to keep quiet and succumb to it, but that’s not going to be my story, and it doesn’t have to be yours or anyone else’s. 

So I’ve been thinking—

Can we be a society and friends who encourage other to open up and to seek advice and help? Besides my doctor, of course, the biggest blessing in this has been the safety of friendship that allows me to dump the feelings and frustrations and thoughts. Never once have I been told I’m overreacting or that it’s not true. I’ve been met with grace and empathy every time, and it has become the place I reach to first when I feel the anxiety start to pump through my body. 

Help. 

It’s the word we love to give and recoil from when it’s time to ask for it. It’s the one thing that continually pulls me out of the moments when nothing feels quite right. 

Find your people. Find those who see you and love you because of it all; we don’t have to do this alone. Find those who will hear you and seek to understand not fix. Find those who—to quote Brene Brown—have earned the right to hear your story, which is often not for everyone. 

So there it is. That’s my unfiltered vomit of words that isn’t packaged in my usual ball of light, but it makes me human—not perfect. ❤️