Hello from the Frontlines of a Nervous Breakdown
I don't know if we can still say nervous breakdown. I'm sure that if it was the 1960s, that's what the doctors would call it.
I’m thirty-five, born the year the Berlin Wall fell, thirteen when the Twin Towers did too. I’m thoroughly Millennial; everything I do, including that semicolon, is embarrassingly and quickly identified as Millennial by my Gen Z coworkers.
And right now I’m losing it. After almost fifteen years of consistent emotional stability (except for that one time I went off my SSRI for a year), I am a wreck.
Last week, I told work I was having mental health problems and needed the rest of the week off.
You don’t know how hard that is for a Millennial, unless you are a Millennial. I am absolutely terrified of asking for time off. This is exacerbated by the fact that I do frequently take time off.
But this time I had to tell them.
Take care of yourself, my COO slacked me.
We’d can you but now we’re afraid of getting sued, my anxiety heard.
Fairfield, CT
1993
The first time I remember being anxious was fire safety camp. I was four.
I don’t know who thought it was a good idea to send a four-year-old to fire safety camp. I asked my mom this recently and she giggled. “We thought you’d like the fire trucks!”
I did not like the fire trucks. I learned at fire safety camp that fire trucks came when your house was burning down and you were stop drop and rolling your way to the nearest exit.
Other kids laughed while we did stop drop and roll. I was convinced someday I would need it. This was my fire preparedness boot camp.
During breaks, we rode on foot-pedal firetrucks. I do remember when the fire trucks came. I didn’t like the trucks — again, it was bad news if you were seeing the trucks, even in these festive educational circumstances.
I liked the firemen. They made me feel safe in their tight navy shirts, with large arms. Surely they could save me, as long as I stayed vigilant and called 911 in time. This would follow me through early adulthood, as I frequently went through periods of calling 911 for unverified gas leaks, strange sightings, one time when my college apartment really was about to burn down, and the time I thought a bush was a serial killer when I didn’t fall asleep after taking an Ambien.
When I was sixteen, the firemen came to save me from a baby swing I’d optimistically stuffed myself into, only to discover I was skinny but not that skinny. I was stuck there for hours until they finally came, unable to hold in their laughter. They cut me loose and took two Polaroids, one for my parents and one for their station.
Anyways, fire safety camp embedded the fear of my family dying in a house fire into my soul. I don’t actually remember if I understood we could die in the fire — I just remember being absolutely terrified of it. I had dreams of fire, of being stranded on the second floor while my parents were on the first.
Then the house down the street burned down.
“Only the paranoid survive.” - Andy Grove