LIVING A DOUBLE LIFE WHILE STRUGGLING WITH ANXIETY

Story By Nicola Mercer

I once had a friend who kept a huge secret from her husband and family; she was having a long-term affair. The web of lies she’d created was complex and frightening. I used to question how she could keep track of what she’d told her husband, and how she could sleep at night knowing she was living this whole other secret life.

I never associated her big secret with my own. I was also living a secret life. One that I felt I needed to hide for my safety, sanity and ability to survive. The reality was that in hiding my secret, I was doing more harm than good. 

The burden of carrying a secret and the shame with it to keep anyone from knowing is enormous. It takes such a toll on your mental wellbeing. Whatever type of secret you might be hiding, I realize now the magnitude this has under the surface of your seemingly normal life.

My anxiety began when I was nineteen years old and studying at university. I had spent four months working as an au pair in the USA – I’m from the UK. I came home from my trip feeling like I’d lost myself. I’d put a lot of weight on after enjoying the delights and huge portions my first visit Stateside offered me. Many of the friends in my main group weren’t at university and they had spent their summer earning money in full-time jobs, buying cars, going on nice holidays and finding boyfriends. It felt like my life was at a completely different point; one that wasn’t right because it was polar opposite to everyone else’s.

I had my very first, life changing, panic attack a few weeks after returning from my summer trip. I’d never felt anything like it and had absolutely no idea what was happening. It felt like death was imminent and I had to manically fight it. It was a traumatic experience, for my family as well as me.

Over the coming months, anxiety ate into every part of my life; I couldn’t sit in a lecture theatre as I immediately felt like I was going to freak out. I’d start sweating profusely in classrooms and had to leave an exam because I was shaking so much I almost made the table start rocking!

My journey with anxiety and panic was only just beginning. The world wasn’t talking about mental health issues and opening it’s arms to welcome you in, anxiety and all. The internet was only just rippling out, slowly, so there was no easy way to find information when you had a problem. You either went to the library or the bookshop to get resources. Or you sought medical advice; which in my experience was purely dreadful.

I had to survive, it was that simple. I knew I wanted to get my degree and had a dream to work as cabin crew, flying the skies. I wanted a boyfriend and to earn money to enjoy myself, going out and on holidays – like the rest of my ‘very normal’ friends. 

Unfortunately, everything I did and worked for was tainted by my ongoing anxiety problems.

I did accomplish my dream of flying, but after only a year, I struggled to manage my thoughts and feelings whilst 37,000 feet over the Atlantic. I moved into my first corporate role and started out on the road to building a pretty successful career over the next twenty-four years.

Because this was the nineties and there was literally no-one else I knew who suffered with what I was experiencing, and the medical support made me feel like an abnormality, I chose to not speak about my problem. It seemed in my corporate world that everyone had it together and loved their job, the company, and the social life. Outside of work we were young twenty-somethings, supposed to be living the best years of our life.

I tried to conform and play the part, and in all honesty it sometimes helped. Other times the pressure of going to events and being social when I was actually feeling like I was about to burst out screaming, or have a heart attack was too much to bare. I’d cope, but now realise the aftermath of the stress my body was experiencing left me feeling drained and exhausted.

I wanted to be ‘normal’. I wanted to be successful and earn good money. I wanted to be naturally happy. So I tried to function as normally as possible. I looked for ways to ‘treat’ my illness; to fix it. That’s how I positioned it in my mind; that it could and had to be fixed for me to exist.

I tried hypnotherapy, I tried counselling, I took medication, I went to a spiritualist church in  the hope I might have some kind of calling to soothe my nervous system. I read books, and there weren’t really any that spoke of exactly what I was going through. I listened to CDs on how to be calm and confident, I tried reflexology and acupuncture. I even hid that I was doing things like this because eighteen years ago these were not as mainstream as they are today.

The big thing I used was avoidance. I tried my hardest to avoid situations I knew would trigger my rapid panic response. I learned some techniques through an amazing business psychologist I was fortunate enough to work with as part of my development programme. I put these into place and found they helped avoid the panic hitting me rather than constantly avoid situations as I had been.

I hid myself and my secret, ashamed that if those around me, in business and my personal life, would think I was something I used many awful words to name – a freak, nut case, psycho, crazy bitch, weirdo, nutter. The list was long.

It was only after many, many years, I began to realise that I was far from all of those appalling names I’d labelled myself. I saw that actually I was strong. I had to be to go to work in the type of job I did every day and be a success. To form a relationship and live together, going on to have a beautiful daughter. To eventually marry, make new friends, push myself into new roles and build so many new habits to carve out a healthy way of living.

I was so immersed in the protection of my sanity that I’d not seen what I was truly capable of and that although my anxiety hadn’t been ‘fixed’ – because I know now that’s just not how it works – I had found many ways to cope with it. I started to see that I could live with my mental health problems, and the growth in conversation of mental health helped me to heal my shame.

I still didn’t share my problems openly at work, or even in private with my wider friends and family. I couldn’t quite accept who I was, and viewed revealing my issues as something that would bring judgement and disapproval. I did not want to be rejected or regarded as abnormal. That was a huge fear for me.

The pivot to share my experience happened a bit like a lightening bolt in the sky. I was made redundant from the company where I’d worked for twenty years, and because of other personal events I’d experienced in the year or so before this happened, I realised big time that I had to live my life. The real life I’d always wanted to live. The one I’d been existing in for twenty-six years, watching from the sidelines, holding myself back from jumping into.

And so I embarked on a very scary and new journey to share my story. I can’t say the worry of being criticized and judged has completely gone away, but I absolutely feel this is the right thing for me to do and that the process is a cathartic one. It’s helping me to heal my years of hiding in shame, my years of doing everything I could to appear in-control, confident and capable. It’s what I know is the right thing to do to be able to help other women build a strong, happy life.

I’ve been asked a few times as I’ve started sharing my story, what I would do differently if I could go back to when it started. That type of question is always a tricky one, because of course, what you know now could be like winning the lottery if you’d known it back at the start! But then I wouldn’t have become this strong woman I am today if I’d not gone on that journey. I might not have found my purpose like I have now. The only answer I have given is that I wish I’d been more open about it. It felt essential to hide it, because the world was a different place back then to what it is now. But the world needs strong people to speak out to make change happen. It needs women to push the boundaries of what is normal and right and build acceptance for what we truly are; human beings with very normal thoughts, feelings, actions and dreams.

Ways to connect with Nicola:

WEBISTE: https://lifenow.uk
INSTAGRAM: https://www.instagram.com/lifenow_coaching/
FACEBOOK: https://www.facebook.com/lifenowcoachinguk