The Monster I Fear the Most

 

“You can’t do this. Everyone will see how weak and pathetic you are. You can’t do this. You are going to fail and they will all see you and they will know, just like you know, that you are worthless.” Said one clear, malicious and resonating voice in my head. “You can, yes you can, Domenica! You have to. You have to go in there and stop sitting here and being a big, fucking baby!”

This voice in my head was a bit less unkind but, clearly, not completely without judgment or ridicule. I shook my head as if to launch them out of my ears and into the atmosphere.

They wouldn’t stay away for long. They’d always find their way back in. They were tethered to my soul and no amount of shaking, praying or willing them to leave would work.

These voices used to battle inside my head relentlessly. As a young child I remember my thoughts waging war and controlling and confusing me. Those two loud and intrusive voices battling one another inside my fractured, fearful psyche. The thought of being a tiny girl and being crushed mentally and physically by those voices is making my chest tighten. They were ever present and demonic.
I still hear those voices.

They are much quieter and easier to shoo away now but, I still hear them. Those voices--along with a myriad of similar ceaseless voices that live in my head--all belonged to one cruel and mammoth monster…the monster of anxiety.

I didn’t know my monster had a name until about 13 years ago when my second son was diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder at age 8. I didn’t even know that the feelings of dread and despair I suffered from childhood had the name depression. Not until I was three months postpartum with that same son and was off the rails with rage, impatience and self loathing did I tell a doctor I had those feelings. I thought it was “just” postpartum depression. (Which, I had terribly with my first son but, in true “fake it till you make it” form, muddled through until I miraculously rose out of it.)

I was wracked with anxiety and depression to the point that I missed almost an entire year of grade school. It was the year my eldest sister left our family. No. Not moved out, left our family because in my family of origin, you didn’t just decide to leave. You either obeyed the family patriarch and exited with his sovereign blessing or, you did one of two other things. Escaped or got kicked out. My oldest sister hitched her magnificent, beautiful and broken self to a man that made my dad look like Ward Cleaver. This man, too, was a handsome con man. Charismatic, handsome and more toxic and erosive than any poison known to man.

She left us to “free” herself from the prison and oppression of our home. Which went about as well as Carrie’s reign as prom Queen. She moved out while the rest of us were at my younger cousin’s baptism. While it wasn’t the party of the century, my parents at least stayed civil with one another while we were out (something they barely did at home) and we got to see family and eat cake. When we got home, it wasn’t the normal gloom and doom of our daily life we returned to. It was a massacre to our whole fucked up family.
She was gone. The oldest child of the lot…the first fruit of my mothers loins (her words, not mine). It was like the golden goose of the gaggle let itself out of the cage and left us ugly, captainless ducklings to fend for ourselves in a den of wolves.

My father bellowed and roared in fury and betrayal. My mother tore the note off the dresser mirror that my sister and her new nightmare had moved into our small living room and she shook and wailed in torment. 

I was six years old. The days and weeks before this had not been good, but they were nothing compared to the all encompassing misery that followed. My home was never quite happy, for sure, but this was the pinnacle of our gloom.

My mom was a lunch lady at the elementary school I attended. She worked three jobs (at least) at that time and my older siblings all left for school much earlier than I. My mom was also a crossing guard at one of the local schools so she was out of the house early and I was left alone with my depressed, angry and contentious dad. I would make and eat my breakfast and get myself ready in the company of his brooding, morose and disregulated self. 

Everyone would be out the door and free from the doom of our unhappy home, except me. I woke up most days excited and hopeful…fuck, I was six and had a bubbly spirit and internal penchant for joy…once all the other people charged away to their destinations, I was alone with a man who had a lot of things to say. Awful, horrible, damaging things and, mostly about my mother. I was his unlucky audience of one and the things he slung at me began to upset and confuse me.

When I would get to school, I would cry. I was fearful and often inconsolable. Teachers were worried, my fellow first graders showing care and concern that at the time I could not appreciate or accept.

When I would see my mom, I'd feel this anvil of emotion drop from the top of my head through my chest and stomach. The weight was incomprehensibly heavy. My little heart would pump frantically into a frenzied rhythm. My breath would catch and stick in my throat and my stomach would ache and roll. 
Sometimes I would hyperventilate. Other times, I'd vomit. A few times, my little body would be so taxed by the monster feasting on its nervous system that I'd melt, limp and lifeless, onto the floor.

I would be ferried home, where a simmering hell awaited.  The night would bring screaming matches and sometimes physical outbursts. The war waged every night with my older siblings trying to do homework in this savage, merciless battleground. I would try to play with my garage sale Barbie dolls and baby dolls. If I had fresh batteries, I could even play a book on record of Sleeping Beauty and turn the pages at the sound of the magical twinkling.

I tried to escape the monster. I tried to not be sad. I tried to be a little joke machine and family clown. I tried to do things for my folks that I thought might make them like each other. I mostly tried not to sink deeper into the arms of a beast I didn't even know had a hold of me.
This anxiety that gripped me devolved into a depression that essentially stole my first grade year from me. I honestly don't know how we got through it, but the anxiety and depression (again, I did not know that's what I suffered from) remained inside me. It has never left me for good.

I went through years and years of my life with invasive, obsessive thoughts. I ate myself into morbid obesity. I dreaded being home. I dreaded leaving home. I dreaded life.
I didn’t go on antidepressants until my postpartum episode. Again, I didn't even know then (at 30 years of age) that I also suffered anxiety. I look back on all of this and am surprised I never made a plan to kill myself. I honestly never did. Despite all this, I had some lingering hope inside me that, although often suppressed, eventually saved my life.
I never made a plan to kill myself. That's not to say that I didn't want to die. I wholeheartedly did. Especially in my teenage years.

Things came to a scary head in my 19th year of life. In addition to being morbidly obese, I’d never had a predictable menstrual cycle and had an abundance of facial and torso body hair that most naturally born females weren’t jinxed with. I had chalked my hairiness up to being Italian and to the general curse of my whole existence.
In early October, I began what I assumed was my period. Whenever I did get it, it was heavy. Disgustingly, painfully, abysmally heavy. Typically my cycle was four to five days of heavy bleeding followed by up to five more days of flow. This cycle ran heavy and hard and seemed to show no end in sight. 

My parents weren’t a source of comfort so I didn’t burden them with my plight. I soaked pad after pad. Destroyed underwear, pants, sheets and mattress covers. I handled this ghastly matter the same as I did everything else. I faced it for what it was. Something out of my control and something I was doomed to endure.
By week five of bleeding incessantly and in great volume, an older friend who was also my co worker took me aside and said I looked like the walking dead. She’d worked in medical labs before and was in general an intelligent person. She said my skin looked gray. The circles under my eyes were like bruises. She said she was afraid I was going to die. I hugged her and told her I was fine. I thanked her. She was calm and careful with me. She and her husband did not have children of her own but she joked that I was the daughter she never knew she wanted. 
That night I returned home, unfazed and continued to bleed profusely. I went to school, I went to work, I did my homework, I did not worry about my condition.

I never made a plan to die. I realized years later that a plan had seemed to find me and I was letting it play out.
Thank God for my dear, sweet, brave and amazing friend. She came to my home the following morning and confronted me in love and kindness, speaking to my father, telling him he could take me to the emergency room that morning or she would. I called my own doctor immediately and made an appointment for that morning.

I did not drive. (I had tried to learn how to drive and almost had an accident and then, poof! I decided I would never drive. My Dad and Mom, only knowing the safety of codependence, just drove me everywhere. To be fair, for someone as suspicious and controlling as my Dad, it worked out great.) My father, faced with my condition and my friend’s ultimatum, drove me to my primary care doctor. He took one look at me, assessed my symptoms and called his colleague, a gynecologist and told my Dad to drive me over to her stat. “This is not good at all,” he said to me and my father.
She--same as the PCP--gave us a grim greeting. She laid blue pads on the examination bed and on the floor and blood ran from my body like an oil slick. She lamented as she tried to examine me, “How have you lived with this for six weeks? Dear God, your heart will explode if you lose any more blood. God, oh my God!” She helped me up and told my father to get his car and get me to the hospital. “It will be faster than getting an ambulance here, go now and get her to the ER. I will be up there shortly to perform a D and C.”

He drove furiously to the ER. He was panicked and blindsided by all this. He was a man of a certain age, raised in a patriarchal, misogynistic time and he tempered his concern and love with brutish accusations that I’d been “whoring around” to “end up like this”. God forbid his obedient, morbidly obese, hairy as fuck daughter who went to school full time, worked 30 to 36 hours a week at the public library and hung out with her friends at his house was ill.
I was the villainess with this vagina. I must certainly have misused my feminine flower to render myself so ill. He suggested so easily that whatever illness had befallen me, I had earned it by being the worst thing a woman could be…sexual.

WRONG! I screamed at him with what little energy I could muster. “What the fuck is wrong with you? This isn’t something I did to me. This is happening to me. I am sick. For fucks sake, old man. I am your child!” Did he practice the pause and relent?

No. This mother fucker doubled down. I hollowly threatened to throw myself out of his 1988 Chevrolet Caprice Classic on Five Mile Road. I told him that when the police arrived to see me broken and bleeding on the road, he’d look really bad. That shut him up.

I arrived at the hospital to receive more abuse. The ER attending that did my vaginal examination accused me of being promiscuous. I assured him I was a virgin. “19 and a virgin and bleeding like this? Doubt it, sweetheart.” He proceeded to force a large metal speculum into my vagina. I shrieked in pain. He muttered, “I can’t see shit, there’s too much blood.” I did not know then that he had assaulted me. I just lay on the table crying. I deserved this. This is how my life is, I thought. It will be this way and I will deal with it.

The rest of the night was a blur. Family rushed in. I needed a blood transfusion before they could do the D and C. Two of my sisters pushed their sleeves up without second thoughts and the doctor said “AIDS”. It was 1991. There wasn’t time to do HIV tests.
Five liters of blood and one D and C later, I woke up. It wasn’t until May of 1992, eight weeks after I had a laparatomy wherein the doctor removed numerous cysts from both of my ovaries--one the size of a grapefruit which contained the remnants of my twin--and diagnosed me with Polycystic Ovarian Disease, that I truly woke the fuck up.

The anxiety that plagued me prior to this episode rooted in me during my eight week recovery in my parents home. I was eating to fortify my body post op and I was miserable and faced with the fact that I’d almost let myself die. 
If it weren’t for my friend who saw the writing on the wall, I would be dead. Thanks also to the doctors (not the ER prick motherfucker) and my sisters offering their blood up immediately. It really opened my eyes. This is what I ruminated on in those two months of sitting in my hell house and healing.

I made a plan then and stuck to it. I lost weight, ate better, exercised and started to feed my mind and soul beautiful words in the form of personal mantras. That plan kept me together for a long time. 

I was 20 years old then. I would remain undiagnosed with the monster of depression for yet another 10 full years. I wouldn’t know that the monster that stole my desire to drive (amongst other treasures of living) until my second son was diagnosed and I realized, “Oh, hey man! He got that shit straight from me.” 
I think the reason I regard anxiety as the bigger monster is because depression was just always a way of life for me and seemed to ebb and flow as such. The anxiety, with all the bullshit bells and whistles it brings along with it--obsessive thoughts, compulsive behaviors, panic attacks, trembling, worry, restlessness, impending, inevitable doom--would come out of that somewhat comfortable blanket of depression and toss me into a spinning tornado of imbalance.
The other factor that came into play was seeing and understanding that this monster had taken hold of my beautiful, sweet baby boy. Seeing him like that, with his fears and worries so clearly hurting him, made me get him help. I loved him the way I wished I had been loved. (Not perfectly, by any means, I am not petitioning for mother of the year.) I hurt with him and I didn’t want him to hurt that much.

I have tried to wean myself off of my depression medication. Both times were trainwrecks. I am lucky in that the medication I take curbs my anxiety as well, so while I still have moments and miseries, they aren’t the beast that used to control me.
I know what that monster looks like now, and I have methods in place to wage a fair fight with that fucker.
No matter what, that will be the monster I fear the most.