Masked Misfit

Tag: mental-health

  • Imaginary Friend

    We have a card deck of conversation starters for kids that we sometimes use when we sit down to dinner. Last night, one of the questions was about having an imaginary friend. It was something I hadn’t thought about in a while.

    Yes, I had an imaginary friend when I was a kid. No, they weren’t like a wise talking animal or cool creature I made up with my mind that popped up occasionally. As I explained to my kids last night that having an imaginary friend was a pretty normal thing, I also had to think that my particular imaginary friend was not normal.

    You see, my imaginary friend was me. Not like a cute thing where I was just really good at working things out with myself. I imagined a literal, tiny version of myself that lived inside my head. When I needed to talk to them, I would tilt my head and catch them out of my ear in my hand. We’d have a little chat and then I’d gently bring them back up to my ear so they could go back into my brain.

    Occasionally, I would even just let little tiny me take over and dissociate from my own life. It was our little secret. Normally when I did “take them out” of my head, I would do it in the bathroom because that way I wouldn’t get caught. I didn’t know why getting caught was bad, but it definitely seemed like something that I didn’t want to happen.

    Now I don’t remember exactly how old I was when I had this friend. Probably older than most kids with imaginary friends, somewhere between 6 and 10. But I CAN tell you that it was definitely well before the movie Being John Malkovich came out. When I saw that movie, I felt oddly seen.

    So yeah, now you know about my imaginary friend… me.

  • Algebraic Formula for Panic Attacks

    It was high school algebra, and I was sitting silently in my seat. I started to feel a familiar feeling that sometimes crept up on me and made me feel sick or like I was going to explode and die. By this point, I knew this feeling wasn’t normal. It was something I had grown up with, but not something my family understood. My parents didn’t know what panic attacks were. My brothers thought I was being overly dramatic. Hysterical even! 

    I knew this was another thing about me to hide. This particular day, I felt my breathing tighten and I started sweating in my seat, but I just looked straight ahead, and I vividly remember thinking these thoughts while I stared into the head of the person sitting in the desk in front of me.

    – something is very wrong with me.

    – I am not normal.

    – no one else is feeling like this.

    – look at this person in front of me, just sitting there, like a normal person, not about to die like I am.

    – Why do they get to just think normal thoughts?

    – No one knows I’m like this.

    – why am I like this?

    – why am I like this?

    – WHY AM I LIKE THIS?

    The only thing that helped was physically moving, but unfortunately we were not allowed to just get up and walk out of class so we could roam the halls trying to get our breath back into our bodies. Instead I sat there and held it in, preferring to risk spontaneously combusting than to try to make anyone understand that there was something seriously wrong with me. I clenched and unclenched my fists. I tried to breathe, but not too loudly. I told myself I wasn’t going to throw up even though I was definitely going to throw up. 

    Eventually the feeling faded or the class ended or maybe I did die and this is just a different life I stepped into. Maybe every time I had a panic attack, I died and started again.

    When they happened at home, my mom used to walk with me. I would tell her I couldn’t breathe. And she would say I definitely could breathe, because I needed to breathe to tell her I couldn’t breathe. Which would make me feel one atomic sub particle better. She would take me outside for fresh air and because I thought I was going to throw up every single time, so being outside felt better just in case. We would walk in circles in the front yard and she would talk to me about random things to help distract me. I would tell her “I can’t, I can’t, I can’t.” And she would say “you can, you can, you can.” She was my little blue engine that carried me over the hill.

    When I was 17, I finally saw my first therapist. I don’t remember what event actually prompted the first visit. I just remember the relief at finally understanding what the actual fuck was wrong with me. Oh, panic attacks. Yeah, that’s a thing. Not a crazy person thing, just a normal thing that happens to some people. It was also something I could learn coping mechanisms for and there was medication I could take when the coping mechanisms didn’t work. 

    I’ve had panic attacks for as long as I can remember, and at 17 I found out what they were. I tried hypnotherapy, and while I don’t think I’m the type of person who can be hypnotized (panic is partly about control), I did learn a lot from that. If you’ve never had hypnotherapy, it often starts with walking down a set of stairs and to a door and through the door is a happy place. My happy place was walking the trail near our house with my mother. 

    When I hit my 30s, my panic attacks mostly receded. Now they are pretty rare, though I still have anxiety and excessive intrusive thoughts and the occasional melancholy. When I do start to feel pressure build, I still think about that trail and my mom talking me down. When I get into full blown anxiety, she’s the one I call crying because I know her soothing will bring me back to earth. Honestly, without my mom I’m not sure I would have made it through high school.

  • Fart Clouds and Mind Reading

    As a child, I internalized so much that I was often afraid that others were able to see me internally as well. Not realizing that most people are mostly thinking about themselves, I thought that everyone was looking at me and seeing the real me peeking out. As much as I tried to blend in, I knew that somehow people could see how much of a freak I really was, that something was inherently wrong with me and it was only a matter of time before it showed up in embarrassing ways.

    One of the things I was really really afraid of was accidentally farting in public. I imagined that there were other kids walking around in the world who would be able to know I farted. In my head they could see fart clouds in the air like water that changes color when someone pees in the pool (is that a real thing by the way? I remember it being such a big threat as a kid, but I never saw it in action). I think I might have held my butt closed so tight to avoid the potential of farting that I made my guts messed up. I’m still dealing with gut issues to this day! And if I thought farting was bad, God forbid I ever had to poop when I was anywhere but in my own home (this is still an issue for me as an grown-ass adult who knows everyone poops). Anyway, how these other children acquired this fart-detecting superpower, I did not know, but there was something in me that truly believed it was there.

    Aside from sensing farts, I also constantly worried about people reading my mind. I tried so hard to fit in, but I knew inside I was different. And I knew that eventually someone was going to figure that out, perhaps through some good old mind reading. Sometimes, I even thought that literally everyone else could read minds except for me. Like they all just knew what everyone was thinking all the time and communicated secretly with each other, but for some reason I got left out of that circle. Sometimes I thought that the whole world was set up just to embarrass me. Imagine how vindicated I felt when The Truman Show came out. I literally thought maybe that was my life as a child! Now what was so interesting about me that everyone needed to watch me? I couldn’t quite figure that out, but it was obviously some humanity cue that I was missing. I felt things so deeply that others were able to brush off.

    So at certain point I convinced myself that at lease some people were capable of reading my mind. Again, this would be my peers. I did not concern myself with adults at the time for some reason, but I knew there were kids out there just taking my thoughts and turning them into laughs. Those JERKS! Sometimes, just walking around school, I would loudly think to myself “If you are reading my mind right now, STOP!” As though if they knew that I knew it was happening, it would prevent it.

    Where did this type of anxiety come from? Absolutely no idea, but it haunted me for a long time. Sometimes I still think someone might be reading my mind, particularly if a random inappropriate thought pops into my head for a second. I’ll think “I can’t think that, someone will know!” And push it away.

    Anyway, anyone else have this kind of paranoia as a child? No? Just me? Cool. 🙂