From Freaktown To Normville

So to continue the journey I find myself on, I had an intake interview connected to the prescription my doctor gave me to deal with the baseline anxiety behind the panic attacks I've been having.

I'm relieved to say I qualify for therapy.

It was an interesting process. The person doing the interview sounded young which I find reassuring nowadays. I have three Millennials of my own and they're definitely more attuned and empathetic to the effects of life on our psyches than we tail-end Boomers.

Cripes, no sooner did "parenting" become a verb than a Boomer put "helicopter" in front of it.

(Sorry GenXers, I keep forgetting you're there.)

There's resiliency, and then there's a stubborn failure to recognize we're freaks and should avail ourselves of help from others qualified to give it so we can experience life as norms.

(For context, please see Marge Simpson in The Simpsons "Freaks Vs Norms" episode.)

Here's irony for you, I've gone for help before, but it was on behalf of others. Or so I thought. But listening to myself throw in everything I could think of during the intake interview, so desperate am I to get to the bottom of these panic attacks, was eye opening. Hard even for me not to draw a line from purging to be slim, in spite of being vomit-phobic when actually nauseous, in my teenage years, to panic attacks accompanied by nausea requiring I purge to feel better in my 60s.

Yikes, eh? I guess there's a reason I include having had an eating disorder in the story I tell about myself. And yet it only came up as a "by the way" towards the end of the interview, at which point I thought I should probably mention beer and pot use on and off over the decades.

Why? Why would a health nut like me play with the fire of known carcinogens? My father died of cancer when I was four ffs. Carcinogens have been on my wick ever since. I was critiquing the Canada Food Guide in grade school, reading diet books focussed on fibre, doing yoga, jogging, worried sick about my younger sister eating too much sugar, directing Gram to go easy on the white, double up on the brown, more vegetables, less meat, on and on and on I went.

I started making ratatouille, bran muffins (just a bit of honey for sweetener), glass of water with every bite.

Now for the first time in my life I'm on prescription medication that puts a distance, a distance I imagine normal people are born with, feel naturally, between me and everybody and everything else.

Life, as it were. A little distance between me and life. And if a lion jumps out from behind a bush and eats me, well, I suppose it's my own fault my fight or flight response didn't kick in.

But at least I won't have spent hours nauseous and lying on the bathroom floor before I'm eaten.

I won't cite specifics here but suffice it to say a recent situation that would've had my fight or flight response revved up to 11 prior-to-medication (I know this because p-t-m me keeps trying to do it) has been relegated to: "At ease, soldier, situation normal. Also, others are on it, anyway. Your job is actually done here so go have some lunch or something."

Anyway, I'm blogging about this because I realize now I had the same fear of prescription medication to treat my own mental health condition as so many other people in need of it do. Or maybe it was a blindspot. Certainly I had no trouble advocating it for others. But when it came to myself I finally had to make myself go back to the doctor and say it for me: "I need help".

Because I did and I do. Never mind everybody else right now. I have to put my own oxygen mask on first.