La Vida es un Problema
Little flowers in a prescription bottle.
It was a summer day. My anxiety attacks kept creeping up on me and the Celexa I had started a couple of weeks back was not yet working. The medication was actually heightening my anxiety tenfold. I was becoming agoraphobic. I was sitting down by the window in the kitchen having some heated conversation with my mom. I was crying, this anxiety was getting exhausting. I was unemployed, I didn’t have many friends, I barely had a relationship. My mom was upset about our family in Mexico spending the money she was sending on their debts, instead of fixing my grandma’s home and taking care of my grandma, like it was intended for. My mother felt helpless because she couldn’t go to Mexico, she was also under a lot of stress from her job as a building manager. We didn’t know how to help each other out, but we kept seeing the pain in each others eyes, and I want to believe that we felt understood.
A couple of months back I had my first panic attack due to being under a lot of unnecessary stress I personally put myself through. A week in December I had a stupid work presentation at my college campus that I over stressed about because I didn’t want to look stupid, I got a call from my doctor who told me that the warts I was tested for was HPV after all, and I was suppose to meet my ex who I had recently started talking to again that weekend and I felt like it was gonna lead to sex. When I got the news, I started to stress out majorly because I knew I couldn’t possibly have sex, and I didn’t want to tell him the reason. The day of the presentation (Friday) I was so nervous I didn’t eat, I had a starbucks cold brew. Big mistake! Presentation felt like a train wreck but I got through it. Later that afternoon I was leaving campus to go pick up my PrEP medication at the specialty Walgreens on Van Nuys near the 101. As I started driving, I felt my blood pressure drop significantly and got lightheaded. I felt compelled to pick it up so I kept driving, and felt it drop again, this time I knew something was up. I called my mom and she recommend I eat something of course, I had a torta from Gallo Giro and a coke. I felt so much better and started to drive again, a few minutes down Van Nuys Blvd II felt my blood pressure drop again, it felt like a weight fell on my head and it moved to my feet with so much power. My left arm started going numb and then my left leg, I started to shake, my heart started racing, my face sweating profusely. I had to pull over and start calling who ever I could to pick me up and take me to the hospital, I didn’t want to call 911, at the time I didn’t think it was THAT serious because I had never had something like this happen to me. After a few calls and no one available to take me, I decided to call on another ex (who I wasn’t talking to at the time) to take me because I knew he was near by and would help me. I went to two different hospitals because the first one was not helpful. After the whole ordeal of me saying my good byes to my parents thinking I was dying, and partially losing my vision from so much anxiety, it was all literally going black, at the end they told me it was just anxiety and gave me a bottle full of Ativan.
After that night, I noticed I wasn’t the same, I couldn’t get behind the wheel of a car without panicking or getting vertigo. I stopped driving for months. I kept taking the Ativan “as needed” and it helped calm me down as my panicking was at its peak. I went to the hospital about 5 or 6 times, and saw cardiologist when my anxiety got so bad, I was certain it must be a heart issue. I had to wear some monitor on my birthday to check my heart, no issues were found.
A self-portrait on my birthday wearing a heart monitor.
I didn’t get to see my ex that weekend, we postponed, and I eventually told him about my results, and he was more than understanding. I had freaked myself out for no reason. and now I had this to deal with.
We started dating again, my condition got better and we started to have sex again, the rare times I would visit him. I had started Celexa, which was an everyday thing to minimize my anxiety and depression, but the first 6 weeks were terrible. They gave me a strong dose and my anxiety got worse before there was any improvement. I was getting more panic attacks, hyper vivid dreams, and erectile dysfunction. I felt like I couldn’t please my partner, and again, he was very understanding and would try to make me feel better, but the medication just made me so depressed that all I could do it cry. and sleep. Then the agoraphobia kicked in and I wouldn’t come out from my home anymore because I felt like I was seconds away from a tragic death. I remember calling my doctor everyday telling her I didn’t want to be on the medication, she always tried to calm me down and reassure me I would feel better if I kept taking it. One day I know I was getting on her nerves and she was getting annoyed, and she didn’t say her usually phrase of giving it more time. She said “you want to stop taking it?!, stop taking it!. You are not married to the drug!”. I stayed silent, and continued to keep trying. It wasn’t until the 6th week that I woke up and I felt nothing. No fear, no anxiety, no depression, no erectile dysfunction, nothing. I felt hopeful.
Eventually I wanted to stop or at least lower the dose, the psychiatrist that I had wanted to double it and give me the max available dose. I said fuck no, but he kept pushing it. I said fuck no again, and I told him I wanted to be seen by another psychiatrist. This new one actually helped and she lowered my dose which worked better for me and I eventually weened off Celexa after a year and a half of taking it. Celexa and therapy helped me with my anxiety so much. I know it’s a whole thing to not want to be on medication, I hear people feel shame or whatever, and I felt like that too, but I had to admit that it worked for me.
Back in the kitchen with my mom, she kept going on about how upset she was that my aunts and uncles were mistreating my grandma and benefiting from the money she was sending them. She was also telling me about how my dad was planning on leaving us, which he would tend to say a lot and never do it. I was telling her about my failing relationship and how I also didn’t know what I was doing with my life, and how the anxiety I had acquired made it so hard to do anything now. I felt so stuck in life. At some point my mom said “Yair, la vida es un problema, si no fuera problema, no fuera vida!”. I will never forget that, I felt she was trying to snap me out of what I was feeling. She was saying it as a person who had so much thrown at her and was overcoming it, in whatever way she could. I started to feel like a bad son, because I couldn’t get us all out of this bottomless pit. Life is a series of problems, and I need to learn how to problem solve.
Writing this now I think about how those problems during that era of my life feel so small now. I am no longer with that person obviously, my anxiety is more manageable even when it peaks compared to how it was, my grandma is living with my mom who is taking better care of her. She doesn’t stress out about her job that often anymore. Money is still a stressor, and always will be, it’s just ingrained in us at this point.