Fun fact about me is that I played competitive fastpitch softball for fifteen years. I was relatively good at it. I was recognized for my ability in the sport with various state tournament wins, an All-State title my senior year of high school, and an athletic scholarship to play in college. My life was dedicated to the sport with workout and/practices every weekday morning and night. Softball tournaments were scheduled for every weekend from the end of March to the middle of October. By all means, softball was everything to me at that time in my life.

A not so fun fact about me is that, despite my love and skill at the sport, I had a panic attack the night before every softball tournament. There may have been one or two tournaments sprinkled in there where this wasn’t the case, but for the most part my Friday nights were spent on an emotional roller coaster of my own design. Various teammates and coaches would remark about how impressive it was that I always kept my head cool during a game, but that’s because I already spent the evening before that game crying and hyperventilating on my bathroom floor, worrying about all of the ways I’d lose a game or mess up our chances at the tournament. There was very little opportunity to be anxious or nervous again during the actual game when I exhausted myself with emotional overload the night before.

My anxiety has been a consistent monster I’ve hidden away for most of my life. For the most part, this monster was hidden because I didn’t recognize it existed. I didn’t know my weekly panic attacks, triggered by softball or even a tough homework assignment, were unusual responses to stress. I thought it was expected to approach every new situation with a racing heart and twelve thousand thoughts about how it could all go wrong rather than optimism or neutrality. I believed that everyone had trouble falling asleep at night, their minds racing with thoughts about what to save if the house suddenly caught on fire or how I was ruining my life with the choices I made that week rather than winding down. When I found out most people are able to fall asleep pretty easily once they go to bed, I just identified my sleeping troubles as general insomnia and adopted the night owl lifestyle with passion. I was proud of being known for being the friend that was still awake at one in the morning for a late night chat if needed.

(For the record, I still attest that the best time to go grocery shopping is from 8pm to 10pm at night while the store restocks inventory. I apologize to any grocery store workers this might be an inconvenience to, but I’m a big fan of fully stocked aisles with no old ladies to elbow out of my way for the last container of panko breadcrumbs.)

However, in college, my insomnia got to the point where I just stopped sleeping in general. I’d be up for an easy twenty four hours fueled only by coffee and maybe a twenty minute nap in between classes or shifts at work. I entered therapy for the first time, visiting our on-campus resources, to hopefully get some advice on how to sleep because I was tired of sucking at it and everyone else seemed to be doing okay at it.

Instead, I got ✨anxiety✨

Specifically, the therapist identified that I suffered from long term anxiety and my insomnia was just one symptom across the board of many, many, many bad coping mechanisms my body had innately adopted to self-soothe that anxiety. There was also the possible minor alcohol abuse, the definite major caffeine abuse, withdrawing from social connection, surrendering projects or opportunities that might challenge my status quo or provoke my fear of failure, etc.

Unfortunately, for everyone involved, I still denied that I had an anxiety disorder. Surely, college was stressful for everyone. I wasn’t the dramatic or broken one for having to duck into bathrooms at a moment’s notice to hide my latest panic attack. There was nothing wrong with me. Everyone had anxiety. I was just bad at dealing with it. I could just deal with it better.

So, I learned how to deal with it better.

It took seven more years, several failed friendships, a period of unemployment, a global pandemic forcing me to reckon with myself without distraction, another therapist that I visited regularly for a year, some good friends who tolerate my less than great moments with patience, and way too many self-help podcasts and books, but I was able to come up with my own blended toolbelt of coping mechanisms that work for me. I’m still working on that toolbelt. There’s always opportunities to grow and develop, but I’m able to (mostly) hold meaningful connections now without fearing when the other person will inevitably realize they hate me and leave me, self-sabotaging the relationship in the process. I seize new opportunities with excitement to see where they take me rather than fearing them or, alternatively, accepting the opportunity and then doing poorly in the task because I figure I might as well fail on my own terms than on theirs to protect myself.

However, one of the most important tools in my toolbelt is, in fact, my anxiety medication.

I was still resisting the idea that my anxiety was something that needed to be managed with a prescription as late as fall 2022. Blame my stubborn personality or my Midwestern “repress all feelings and also mental illness doesn’t exist” upbringing, but I thought I had everything under control without popping a pill. I was anxious, but I wasn’t that kind of anxious person, you know? Other people might need that medicine for their problems and that was good that medicine helped them, but I would be fine without it.

“Good for them, not for me,” as my personal hero Amy Poehler would say.

Well I was properly humbled and corrected in this mindset when I had three back-to-back panic attacks the night before a major work event, forcing me to cancel my attendance at the actual event since I only had twenty minutes of sleep that night. I take great pride in my career and it embarrassed me that I couldn’t manage my anxiety well enough on my own to participate in it. Luckily, I had my annual wellness check with my doctor about two days after this occurrence so I was able to explain my situation and she prescribed hydroxyzine for me.

I like hydroxyzine because it’s a “take as needed” medication, which alleviates both my stubborn (and probably wrong) “I can do this on my own” personality and my general aversion to medicine that makes a major impact on my hormones. I was provided the option to take the daily mood stabilizer medication, but at this point in my journey of dealing with my mental health, the “take as needed” medicine works well enough for me.

Hydroxyzine has truly been a game changer for me in terms of how I handle my mental health. Nights that I normally would’ve spent in an emotionally charged maelstrom of anxiety leading to groggy mornings impacting my work or relationships are now spent sleeping. It’s a quick shortcut to calm my charged nervous system when none of my other available tools in my toolbelt are working.

I’m sharing this story now because, despite the strides made in mental health awareness, mental health is still very heavily stigmatized. In fact, I was laughing at myself the other day because I had a panic attack at work after making a minor error that ultimately had no impact on the day, have an active anti-anxiety prescription, and was still trying to convince myself that I don’t have an anxiety disorder because the stigma that mental illness is bad is so ingrained in me. There’s still a sting inside of me not wanting to share this blog post because of the connotations associated with mental health and all of the opportunities to mock one of my biggest vulnerabilities. Much like my younger self on the bathroom floor, I still don’t want the world to perceive me as “weak” just because I have anxiety so I try to hide it whenever I can.

But I also want to share this to assure anyone else who’s in the same boat as me that having mental health issues doesn’t make you a worse person. Being prescribed medicine for your mental health doesn’t make you more broken than other people. It doesn’t mean you’re defective. It’s just another tool in your toolbelt to help you live your best life. I get the resistance - I really do. Again, it took seven years after someone told me my anxiety might be a bigger problem than assumed for me to finally suck it up and get a prescription. I was even pro-medicine for mental health! I wrote Fatal Flaws, which features a main character with an active antidepressant prescription essential to the plot, five years before receiving my own medication for my own mental health issues so I never had any aversion to the practice aside from personal preference.

Even with the hydroxyzine in my toolbelt, I still have to work daily at managing my emotions and regulating myself to not impact my relationships and career with my anxiety. One of my other biggest misunderstandings with my anti-anxiety prescription was that the medicine would magically make my life better and fix all of my mental health issues. It does not do that. It just calms my nervous system when nothing else will and reduces my anxiety to something manageable when it feels like the world will crash and burn around me before I can get my racing thoughts under control. I still have to work with my other tools to keep everything else managed, but the medicine makes it easier.

If I could go back in time and give younger Maddie any of the tools I have now to help her through those lonely nights hiding her panic attacks from the world because she didn’t want to be seen as “weak”, the hydroxyzine would be the first thing I handed over. I understand it’s a privilege to have this prescription in my toolbelt and also possess the ability to identify the issues with my mental health that require said toolbelt. My hope is that my story helps someone else out there better understand what tools they’ll need in their toolbelt or, frankly, give them the insight to be able to identify if they need a toolbelt at all.

For now, I’m just happy I can sleep.