Anxiety Is a Superpower
By: Shanna Peeples
Tags: Education, Anxiety, Leadership, Self-awareness, Mental Health

“What’d you learn at school today, Grace?”

“I learned that the antibacterial soap we use doesn’t work anymore and we’re making superbugs that will kill us all.”

This is a scene from the first season of Nurse Jackie illustrating the growing anxiety of Jackie’s 10-year-old daughter, Grace. Grace becomes fixated on the kind of “imminent doom” programming popular on cable channels and finds that she can’t look away from shows like Viral Armageddon and Could the Superflu Return?

She begins having panic attacks at school and later, the school counselor tells her parents that he believes Grace has generalized anxiety disorder.

I sympathize with that little girl, even though she’s fiction, because I was that little girl.

And if my life were on DVD, like my copies of Nurse Jackie, it would be possible to cue up one of the early chapters in Season Two of my life, right around the time my Titanic Texas family tilted nose down toward disaster while the littlest of us scrambled to hold onto the railings.

At 9 years old, I started taking half a 5 mg. Valium because I became convinced my heart would stop if I didn’t keep my hand over it.

I ate in alphabetical order, touched the front door three times to make sure it was locked, and chanted John 3:16 like a magic spell whenever I had intrusive thoughts about my family being murdered.

Move forward on this imaginary DVD to my 15th year for the season debut of yet another permutation of my anxiety.

“Mrs. Skinner said that Jesus is going to come back in a thunderstorm,” I told my grandmother after Sunday School. “So every time there’s a thunderstorm we should be excited because it could be Jesus coming back.”

Which is exactly how you create panic disorder in a teenager who’s been steeped in Southern Baptist End Times scenarios her whole life. And who lived smack in the middle of the Texas Panhandle’s “Tornado Alley,” guaranteeing at least a dozen operatic thunderstorms each spring.

“Oh, it doesn’t say that anywhere in the Bible,” my Meemaw said, a dismissive wave of her hand finalizing her thoughts. “The Rapture will happen at any minute and you won’t have any warning at all. Don’t worry about storms.”

Thunderstorms already made me uneasy and now the idea that they were possible harbingers of The Rapture rendered them terrifying. The very next storm caused me to cower in the covers, a pillow over my head, prayers streaming in a rush.

My grandmother found me and gave me one of her muscle relaxants.

But it didn’t work.

I still felt like my heart would burst through my chest like the monster in Alien. Seeing this distress, my mother, taking up the special bottle from her purse, tapped out a yellow pill. What looked like an arrowhead was carved into its middle.

A Valium.

Swallowing it was like pulling a bowstring. And the Valium’s arrowhead shot into the middle of the alien clutching my throat, quieting it.

Fast-forward to the school prom.

“I’m nervous about going,” I confide to my grandmother.

“Here,” she says, opening her personal medicine cabinet. She ceremoniously cranks the top of the child-proof cap off, delicately retrieving a pale blue pill. Through the machine-pressed V, I could see the lines on my palm.

“It’s a ten, break it in half and you’ll have two doses, if you need them.”

I was 17, a full set of braces freshly removed, a crinkly crown of permed hair weighing down my tiny self-image.

My date: a pen pal from New York. I’d found his address in a Star Trek fan magazine. (No really). We’d never actually met until I picked him up at the airport earlier that day.

Of course I needed both halves of that blue pill.

Go forward a bit more to my wedding.

The guy I’m about to marry is a mistake. I know it. My family knows it. Even the doctor I work for knows it. And somewhere down inside his hollow heart, my fiancé knows this is a mistake too.

“You don’t have to do this if you don’t want to,” Meemaw says, zipping up the back of the wedding dress she spent three months making.

“But all those people. I can’t do it. I have to do it,” I said, starting to feel the alien scratch the insides of my ribcage.

“Do you want one?” she says. We both know what she’s talking about.

Under my veil, I nod my head.

My dad is loaded to the gunnels with whiskey, as was his Saturday night custom. He and I lean into each other so we can make it down the aisle without looking like two ships caught in a storm at sea. I count the steps under my breath to keep my focus: one, two, one, two…

Click on the next chapter and you’ll see the montage of me clutching a paper bag over my mouth and nose to stop hyperventilating during various stressors over the next few years: the first Thanksgiving with my husband’s family, finding out I’m pregnant, deciding to divorce my husband and some other scenes that I can’t even really remember, but you get the idea.

The montage will also show that I became a borderline recluse because of the fear of public panic attacks. The montage ends with me in an E.R. being hooked up to an EKG because I’m certain I’m having a heart attack.

Fade out of montage into this bit of dialogue:

“You have a fairly severe anxiety disorder.”

Fade to black.