We Are Our Shadows

The same year the Dalai Lama won the Nobel Peace Prize, 1989, I had my first panic attack. It was my freshman year in college and in the midst of hip-hop, frozen yogurt and scrunchies, I was celebrating independence from my parents for the first time but struggling academically. I had never defined myself as anxious, nervous or worried. Instead I was the girl who doesn't worry about anything. That's how my family had always described me, and I played the part well. As I stood in the emergency room breathing into a bag, doctors urging me to go on medication for my anxiety, I began to question my own sanity. These panic attacks left me afraid to let anything or anyone touch me for fear I might succumb to more hallucinations. Had I finally become my mother, after being determined for so many years to be her opposite? I shared with the doctors a history thick with mental illness in my family, and I privately realized I was traveling down a similar path. My mother had attempted suicide twice before I was born and again just after my birth. Her own mother struggled with sadness and depression and her maternal grandfather had hanged himself in his basement. My mother was extremely emotional and my father would often repeat to me and my four siblings, in a precautionary way, "Don't upset your mother, or she'll end up in the hospital again." When I was a child, my mother did refer to a time when she had a nervous breakdown, but she never explained what that was. For most of my...
Source: Healthy Living - The Huffington Post - Category: Consumer Health News Source Type: news