Last August Kloe's
anxiety started to kick up. She would be going to High School and she wasn't looking forward to it. She was anxious about a new school, making friends and to make things worse Kev and I were putting pressure on her to get involved with some extra curricular activities. We thought her being more involved would be a good thing, and it eventually was, but it needed to be on her timetable. She explains below what her anxiety looked like the first half of her Sophomore year.
It was the end of the Summer of "all about Dakota" (which really benefited all of us). It had been such a fun Summer packed with tons of vacations and crazy good stuff so I already didn't want to go back to school because I didn't want the fun to end, but also it meant Kota was leaving. A lot of people didn't realize how close we were until he left but we were really good buddies. He'd come home at night from whatever he'd be doing and he'd stand in my doorway and just talk to me. We were each others' venting buddies and it was nice because I knew he wasn't going to use it against me or tell people. Me and him also had a lot of inside jokes, he understood all the "Internet" jokes and memes and we'd go back and forth all the time. To shorten it up a bit, he was my best buddy and him leaving was really rough. I hadn't realized it at the time but all my friends would come and go, not Dakota he was always around and it wasn't til he left that I realized how much I appreciated him being there for me in those small ways. This was just a little bit that contributed to my anxiety. It was only me and him in the basement and I always felt better knowing he was just down the hall. When he left I kind of lost my constant friend and I had no idea what it'd be like going into high school, I just wanted him to be around so I could ask questions and vent a little. So that was definitely hard.
I had already had some friend issues before high school even started. There was a misunderstanding and it got way out of hand and now it seems like no big deal because we're still really close, but at the time it was really hard. I was going into high school and already having friend troubles. I won't go into too much detail but basically most of my friends were interested in other things and I just wasn't a part of their lives anymore unless I reached out and that was really hard. I wasn't invited to anything and wasn't included the way I thought I should've been and it sucked. The stupid part though is that if you know me, you know that parties and all the "boy drama" is not my scene anyways. But once I started learning about my anxiety and talked through things with Court I realized that I just wanted to feel like I was wanted; I wanted to feel like I still had friends and that they wanted me around, which unfortunately just wasn't the case with my friends at that time. I felt very alone during the first half of high school and a lot of sadness was happening. I also felt upset because I couldn't drive for the first half of the school year. I wanted to be able to just get out and drive if I needed to, but I couldn't and I felt so stuck and frustrated. I hated being at school but I also hated being at home just because I felt so alone all the time.
I had a choir class my sophomore year and it was a good class, I love to sing. One day I was feeling really weird and I felt like my vision was off (even though it is.. I'm blind but obviously I didn't take that into consideration). I felt like something was off and that since I didn't feel right something had to be wrong. I started to have an anxiety attack and I tried talking myself through it but I just felt so off and I couldn't shake the feeling. It got so bad to the point that I needed to go home, so I did. I was so scared of feeling the way I did that one time, that every time after that, when I'd go to choir, I'd be so nervous I made myself anxious again. Like I said before it's like I was out to get myself. It happened a lot that year and I really struggled feeling comfortable in that class the rest of the year. Little anxiety attacks would come up all the time in random classes. The classes it would happen most in were Choir, Math, and sometimes in Spanish. I couldn't tell ya why.
I started getting really bad headaches in the middle of November. I don't know why I was having them, but it was every single day. I remember waking up each day and I would feel so terrible. Middle of November to middle of January I was having these headaches and they never went away. The headaches combined with the constant sadness and loneliness I felt and the random bursts of anxiety at school really started getting difficult for me. I would pray really hard every day for the help to know what I needed to do to get out of this hole that I had fallen into. It never felt like I was getting an answer or the help that I really really needed and that was really really hard. It was hard to trust that Heavenly Father had it under control because it felt like the complete opposite for me. It felt like my whole world was crumbling right in front of me and all I could do was just watch it happen. On January 1st 2018 I woke up around 12:30 in the morning and I didn't feel good. I felt like something really terrible was going to happen. I got up and walked around a little bit and all of a sudden I just felt myself come undone. I started sobbing and I was praying so hard for help. I was so scared. I was SURE that since I had felt this way at the beginning of the year that that was an indication of how the rest of the year was going to be and I was terrified. I convinced myself it was going to be a bad year and I had made up my mind that I couldn't handle it. I prayed and prayed and finally went upstairs to wake up my mom. We talked for hours and we prayed together. I eventually felt okay enough to go to bed and for about a week after that things were okay, I felt a little better and my mom had given me some good advice to follow but I still woke up with headaches and I still felt so sad and alone.
That morning I realized Kloe's anxiety was getting much worse. I saw how scared she was over her headaches and tried to assure her that headaches are really common and we talked about a variety of things that could be causing them. Emmy was getting ready to move to Arizona so Kloe was feeling as if her next best friend was leaving her too. I have always told my kids to consider making their best friends their siblings because friends move on and move away but family is always there, but in all reality family members sometimes move away too. I reminded her she still had Gracie who is a wonderful sister and friend (they've since become really close). We talked about the things she could do to get back to being present and staying present when the attacks came. I found out she was having a lot more attacks than what she was telling me about, so we came up with a system. When she felt a bad one coming on she would text me these three emoji's 🐊🐊🐊 and I would know she needed me to help talk her through it.
A few weeks later on a Saturday and I was on my way to go to work. I had just worked an 8 hour shift the day before and I had another 8 hour shift ahead of me. I was still new to my job so I wasn't used to it but basically I ran food up and down flights to peoples' tables on the three different levels for 8 hours. I was so tired. While I was driving I started shaking really bad half way there. I had never experienced the shaking so it really freaked me out. I started to worry that I might pass out while driving and so I called my dad because I knew he'd answer no matter what. He picked it up and I explained what was happening and he didn't quite understand the severity of it so he just kept saying "Kloe you are okay. You can do this. Just text me on your break and tell me how you're feeling and doing". I remember trying really hard not to cry because I knew he didn't understand and I didn't want him to think that I couldn't handle it. I wanted to prove to myself that I could get through it. The last thing I wanted was for my anxiety to stop me from doing things. I got to work and parked and all of a sudden I was hit with a huge reminder of all the pain and sadness I had been feeling almost everyday for two months and how I hadn't felt happy in a really long time. I bawled and bawled in the parking lot. I remember praying to Heavenly Father telling him that I had had enough. That I couldn't take it anymore. I said, "Heavenly Father, I am so tired of feeling this way. I have tried everything I know how. I cant do this anymore, it's too much. Please let me feel okay again". After that I pulled it together enough to go clock in and do my second 8 hour food running shift. The entire shift I was miserable. When I finally got to my car everything came back to me and I just cried and cried again. I was at my lowest point on this night and I came to the conclusion that I was going to get on medication because I couldn't keep feeling the way I had been feeling for so long anymore. It got to the point where I didn't want to be here if that was how my life was going to be. I thought that medication was the only thing that could help me. When I got home my dad had heard me and he came and gave me a really long hug. I remember my legs were shaking so bad because I was so tired from running up and down the flights of stairs with trays of food and I had been crying so much that I was a complete mess. We sat down and I told him everything. I was so worried about my headaches, I had been having them for so long that I convinced myself that something was definitely wrong with me and that it was really serious. That, plus I was so sad because I felt like I didn't have anybody anymore.
Kevin and I weren't opposed to medication for Kloe's anxiety but we decided to get her some counseling first. In the next post Kloe will talk specifically about how her therapist, Court helped her.
To read past posts about Kloe's anxiety...
Part 3
