Monsters and Modern Medicine

A personal essay by Hannah Gladwell

Anxiety wasn't the monster under my bed. It was the monster in my head.

Photo of author by Martin Wyall

I was lying in bed a few weeks ago when a dull but persistent ache blossomed in my chest. It began in some unnamed crevice of my anatomy, pulsing with my heartbeat. An isolated symptom and nothing to be concerned about, certainly; nothing but the creaks and groans of a body lived in.

Of course, my mind does not deal in logic. 

Bolts of pain in my chest. Bolts of fear in my brain.

It’s happening, I thought. This is it. I am a goner. Death is coming to claim me as its victim at last. How will my mom know I want peonies at my funeral? Within minutes and with the help of modern technology (read: WebMD), I had diagnosed myself, at 21 years old, with heart failure. I began making arrangements for my looming departure from this mortal sojourn. 

The pain was gone the next morning, and I forgot completely about it. I learned two things from this experience: 1) WebMD is not my friend, and 2) I should probably let my mom know I want peonies at my funeral.

The significance of this incident lies not in the isolation of it. On the contrary, the significance of this incident lies in the fact that it is completely insignificant. It is merely an echo, a pattern in an entire network of mental illness symptoms. 

Over the years, I have convinced myself of a myriad of diseases lurking beneath my skin—epilepsy when I was eight, meningitis when I was 13, brain cancer last week. These have all been relatively unfounded assumptions based on mild, sporadic, and ultimately meaningless symptoms. I twist the occasional headache or fatigue into terminal illness. My own mortality has never been a foreign concept to me; I often manage to convince myself that I am dying in one way or another.

I knew the phrases “chemical imbalance,” “Fluoxetine,” and “hypochondria” before I lost all my baby teeth. The deepest, darkest corners of the human brain were familiar and comfortable to me before my parents gave me the sex talk. When other kids were playing dress-up and make-believe, I was learning to take my little green SSRI every morning. I was instructed to never tell any of my classmates about it, lest I become the subject of ridicule and questioning. How would other happy-go-lucky, carefree seven-year-olds even begin to grasp the complexities of mental illness?

My dad is a physician. Growing up, medical terminology had a place set at the dinner table. For better or for worse, I consumed it. On one hand, his medical background allowed him to catch on quickly to what was happening in my brain. I will forever be grateful that he responded to my symptoms and sought treatment for me so early on when the anxiety was just beginning to place its roots in my behaviors. On the other hand, I was far too aware of obscure illnesses for an eight year old, which only further fueled my anxieties. 

Hypochondria has been just a single manifestation of my anxiety disorder. I have had performance anxiety, relationship anxiety, social anxiety, you name it. If it has “anxiety” in the name, I have probably had it. It has been 13 years now of a near-constant war being waged in my own head. All logic, truth, and rationale arm themselves against a barrage of “what ifs,” and interestingly enough, the good guys don’t always win. I have often found myself at the mercy of my own thoughts. I have watched in wild horror as anxiety guts my relationships and my sanity, leaving the blood on my hands and the carnage on my conscience. 

It’s not me, but it is me. “It’s not me,” I told my ex-boyfriend last summer when he decided I was too much for him to handle. “It’s not me,” I told my therapist when I tried to explain the mess in my head. “It’s not me,” I told myself when intrusive thoughts masked themselves with my voice. And yet it is me. Who else would it be?

Photo by Rene Bohmer on Unsplash

It is a parasite, really. That is the best way I have found to explain it to those who have not felt it. It’s
not me, but it latches onto me, spreading its roots and its poison until I and It are indistinguishable. I am the host. It eats away at me. Less of me, more of It. It works quietly in my peripheral vision. I see Its shadow, I know something's not right, but I can’t quite bring It into focus. It creeps just outside of my consciousness, leaving no visible bumps or marks, just a black hole in the mind. Just a lack of something. 

A mind plagued by anxiety is, as one would expect, not a pleasant place to be. Of course, it is not a constant state of unpleasantness. Some days I function perfectly normally. Other days the clouds roll in and I am plunged into darkness. It reeks of rotten, half-digested thought. Wind howls in my ears and something is lodged in my throat and I have never felt so alone in a room so loud. It is just light enough to see the shadows lurking, just dark enough to be unable to make them out. When the lights come back on, I find that the monster in the corner was just a coat rack.

I think my subconscious knew something was wrong far before I became aware of it. Misfires in the brain sent out distress signals to healthy skin and bone, desperately trying to assign the feeling of “wrongness” to something, anything. In truth, what I thought were failures in my body were faulty mechanisms in my own mind and ways of thinking. The paranoia wasn’t about the illness; it was the illness.

Mental illness delves into the realm of the abstract, and that is a large part of the problem. It does not have the biting reality of other ailments, just a sense of unease. I can’t point to where it hurts, or rate my pain on a scale of 1-10 like they do in the emergency room. No amount of poking and prodding in an exam room will reveal any abnormalities. It’s not explainable—it’s just there.

The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath is a pioneering, revolutionary piece of literature, allowing a clear window into a mind plagued by mental illness. “If only something were wrong with my body it would be fine, I would rather have anything wrong with my body than something wrong with my head,” Plath writes. Physical illness feels a lot more concrete than mental illness, and a lot more real. If the symptoms of mental illness were more perceptible, perhaps it wouldn’t feel so lonely. If I had a rash, or a tumor, or any other number of symptoms, at least there could be a witness to it. But no X-ray will yield an image of the malfunctions in my thought processes. If I took apart my body and examined the parts, I would find nothing. I’m left unsure if I’m even a credible witness. 

As a student of literature, I hear a lot about unreliable narrators—Holden Caulfield, Mrs. de Winter, Nick Carraway. I sometimes wonder if I’m an unreliable narrator in my own story. Am I a rational observer, or are my perceptions and biases colored by anxiety? Is the anxiety even real? Funnily enough, I Googled a list of unreliable narrators to reference in this paragraph, and Esther Greenwood, the main character from The Bell Jar, was one of them. It’s not very reassuring to find one of the first honest representations of mental illness plastered across literary blogs as the poster child for unreliable narration. If I can’t trust my own head, what can I trust? 

Photo of author by Justin Fague

The world has made bounding strides in legitimizing and validating mental illness in the past few decades. I think that is the salve to the poison, the poison to the parasite. Mental illness’ power is a lot of the time in its isolation. When we leave it to fester, it makes a home out of brain matter. But when we normalize it, when we draw the mentally ill out of the labyrinths in their brains and into the reality of modern research and medicine, we can begin stripping the illness of its power. When we create dialogue, we create avenues for healing.

I have a long way to go with my own mental health. I have been in and out of therapy, I have been on and off of different medications. If I have learned anything, it is that this is a process. It’s not a matter of curing my anxiety. It’s a matter of learning to live a happy and healthy life in spite of it. My life is not defined by the creeping pest in my brain—it is defined by the moments when the clouds break and I am, for a moment, filled with vibrant color and  glorious light.