My Tryst with Anxiety

I was 16 years old when I was sitting in my father's office, I had had one of those teenage breakups. I was staring at Facebook; I had received a friend request from the ex-boyfriend. I suddenly started feeling my heart race. The lights began to blur. My breath started feeling shallow. I was alone in the cabin, and I just fell to the ground. What was happening? Was I dying? I had never experienced something like this before. Little did I know that I was experiencing my first panic attack. And the problem with panic is the memory of it. The fear of panic becomes scarier than the panic itself.

A year or two later, the panic attacks came again. I started googling the symptoms. What was this? Was I going mad? My mind had started racing with thoughts. Every time I tried to sort out one thought, another one came. And then I came across this blog. It was called At Last A Life by Paul David. 12 years later, I still remember that blog, because it changed my life. There, he had written about everything I was feeling. What I was feeling was called Anxiety. It happened to a lot of people. I was not alone. A weight lifted off my chest. He had written about his decade-long battle with anxiety and how he had come out of it. I read that and for the first time I felt like maybe I would be okay too. I went to a doctor, and he said it was called Generalized Anxiety Disorder. He gave me some pills and I was on my way. I thought that was the end of it. I had the medicines; I had the diagnosis. Little did I know that it was just the beginning of my journey toward emotional healing.

The thing about anxiety is that when you are in the thick of it, you don't realize it. You don't realize the thoughts are anxious. You don't realize that it's not real. You catastrophize and make scenarios in your head that never come true. My biggest fear was telling the world I had it. What if they thought I was mad? What if I was damaged goods? I started pretending to be okay. At home, in my relationships, at work. Everywhere. I also took the less walked path of quitting my education and choosing a career in the movies. Life was bleak.

And then my father turned me towards spiritual healing. He told me he had suffered with anxiety and panic attacks too. He made his biggest hit, Raaz, while fighting panic attacks. And that gave me courage. I started reading books. I did not stop the medicines, but I started looking for the right people to help me. The right doctor. The right therapist. The right spiritual mentor. It took me years, but I found it. And what spirituality taught me was that we all come to this planet with lessons we have decided to learn. I had clearly chosen a lesson of fear. Anxiety is nothing but the fear of the future, and it gives you a need to control outcomes. You fear loss of love, so you control the relationship. You fear failure so you start trying to control success. You fear pain, so you try to never feel it. Fear can be debilitating till one day I saw it for what it was. Just fear.

And the day I started getting better? The day I faced each of those fears. I feared traveling alone, and so I started travelling alone. I feared a heartbreak because I never believed that I could heal. But I did have it, and I did heal and that gave me even more courage. I met my husband and despite fear gave love a chance again. I conquered fear yet again. I feared failure at the movies and so I started looking failure in the eye and said – bring it on!

As I conquered fear after fear, I had my father who kept giving me this one mantra – Anxious thoughts and rational thoughts cannot co-exist. If your mind is catastrophizing, you are anxious and that's when I would shut off and work with a tunnel vision — a practice very close to mindfulness.

When I started working with The Atmann Project, I wanted everyone out there suffering from what I had suffered from to get the help I got. Because you're not going mad, you're not the only one, you don't need fixing. When you have a condition in your body, society asks you to go to the doctor. But if you are not feeling well mentally, they ask you to suck it up. I want to tell you, that you don't need to suck it up. Cry, shake, fall, get back up and repeat. Keep going. Because you can heal. If I did, you can. Through guided meditation, mindful living, and spiritual meditation, you can truly discover inner peace.