A Hard Pill to Swallow- The non-chemical anxiety fix only your savage friends will give you.

I was diagnosed with Generalized Anxiety Disorder in my twenties by a well-meaning therapist. No one was surprised by this diagnosis if they knew about my dysfunctional childhood and early life traumas. We spent many sessions talking about my childhood and all the challenges I was working with.

She recommended medication if I wanted it, more sessions if I wanted to keep talking about things and, well… that was about it. I went back to pretending life was perfect, ignoring the wounds that were still bleeding inside.

My anxiety was offset by frequent bouts of depression. I lost years of my life sleeping on the couch in front of the television because I couldn’t make myself get up and live. I was morbidly obese, had chronic pain in my back and feet and very little energy. I had no self-esteem at all, and no dreams for my future. Life was fairly bleak.

Curling up in a ball in my living room felt like the only way to survive the days. Of course, I couldn’t let anyone know that I was spending my days in a miserable heap on the couch. I had lots of excuses not to go out and socialize because you know, we’re very busy over here and just don’t have a minute to spare.

I felt lonely, isolated and so sad. I didn’t know how to talk about it and didn’t feel like anyone cared that much anyway. I suffered in silence, not realizing that life didn’t have to be so difficult.

Eventually, I decided enough of that was enough. When I chose to return to the land of the living, I landed on a different couch, in a new therapist’s office, where I finally got serious about fixing what was broken. The medicine helped me through the hardest days, but I knew that even with the medicine, I had work to do.

Here’s the thing: antidepressants save lives. They do. They are necessary and important, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with taking medication as prescribed by a doctor to balance our brain chemistry. We have a long way to go in our culture to normalize mental illness and end the stigma that keeps so many people from seeking therapy and meds when they need them.

That said, there really is no magic pill. Medication can help improve and stabilize our moods, but if we want to break free of the things that are holding us back in life, we have to face them head-on.

For me, this meant many lessons in forgiving myself and the people who had hurt me. It meant taking an honest look at my life, and accepting things as they were. I began re-writing the script in my mind to give myself positive nurturing messages instead of beating myself up for being an imperfect human.

Those things paid dividends for me. But there was another thing I had to learn that would change everything- I had to learn who I was under all the crap other people had piled on top of me my whole life.

If I stripped away everything that didn’t feel completely true and right, what would be left?

I found that the identities I had chosen for myself came from the abuse in my early years. I believed that I was unlovable, unworthy, unimportant. I thought that people treated me poorly because I deserved it. I believed that I was destined for failure, and kept myself small because I was afraid to try.

I was repeating the people-pleasing and co-dependent behaviors that were modeled to me by my parents. These limiting beliefs and patterns kept me stuck in a place I didn’t belong, and every day I lived there, I moved another step away from myself until I didn’t recognize the woman in the mirror anymore.

I read somewhere that true authenticity begins when your thoughts, words, and actions are all in alignment with each other. I was nowhere close to living that way.

I was clinging to a broken marriage, spending time with people I didn’t like, going places I didn’t want to go, and giving my time and energy to things that felt empty and meaningless.

I had my game face on, trying to look happy and satisfied with my life, but inside I was just barely hanging on. The only way for me to fix myself was to burn it all down and start over.

I left my toxic marriage. As our life unraveled, I saw how terribly unhealthy we had been. He brought out the absolute worst in me and continued to do so until we were free of each other.

Then, I took an honest look at my other relationships. I had been a people pleaser my whole life- allowing others to make my decisions for me and tell me who to be. I was chronically stressed and unhappy because my days were so full of other peoples’ crap, there was nothing left for me.

When I stopped doing things out of guilt, obligation and feeling like I couldn’t say, “no,” I had time to invest in things that actually interested me and made me happy. As my life started to look on the outside the way I felt on the inside, my emotional health improved tremendously. It felt good having more things to look forward to on my calendar, and fewer things to dread.

When I was living to please everyone else, my relationships were a large source of anxiety. I was so desperate for acceptance and validation, I failed to create boundaries. I changed who I was to fit where I didn’t belong, without even realizing it.

My interactions with people were disingenuous by nature because I wasn’t giving them an honest reflection of who I am. I was giving them the version of myself I thought they expected. This made me feel uneasy, as I was always keeping up a façade instead of just being myself. If you’ve never done that, I can tell you, it’s absolutely exhausting.

When I stopped trying to please everyone else and earn their affection, I felt so much better. I learned to create boundaries. I learned to say, “no.” I learned to walk away from things and people that didn’t make me happy.

I was amazed at how much lighter I felt without the mask I had been wearing all those years. When I stopped trying to look happy and started working to actually be happy, I found my magic.

Yes, anti-depressants are beneficial and sometimes completely necessary. Therapy is a powerful tool to help us makes sense of our lives, habits, and patterns. But, our relationship with ourselves is also a very important piece of the mental health puzzle. When we learn to show up as our true selves and build an authentic life, happiness follows.

Today, I am the friend people come to for real talk. I will say the hard things and have been called “savage” more than a handful of times for my directness. When someone is struggling with anxiety and depression, my advice is always the same: Go to therapy. Get some medicine if you need to- and take it exactly as prescribed. Then, look at your life and see if you can tell where it’s broken and do whatever it takes to fix it.

This means walking away from toxic people- even if they are family.

This means either working on our relationships with a professional or ending them if they are not supporting our health and happiness.

This means getting really honest about our habits, choices, and patterns- and doing the work to change them.

This means creating healthy boundaries, saying no when needed and standing up for ourselves.

This means making sure that our thoughts, words, and actions are in alignment, and we are living authentically.

If we want to create a healthy happy life, we must first take responsibility for ourselves and our choices. We cannot change the past or control other people. But we can change the way we interact with others and the way we react to things as they unfold. We can choose to fix what’s broken or walk away before it breaks us.

No matter how small we may feel, we are the only ones who have the power to change our lives. We have a responsibility and obligation to ourselves to create a happy abundant life we were born to live.