Identity

 

I was seven when I had my first panic attack. I remember it vividly; I was standing in mass, and we just finished saying the Our Father. I let go of a boy named Carter’s hand and felt extremely light-headed. I asked to use the restroom, and I walked to the back, closed the bathroom door, and remember breathing heavily, wondering what that sensation was.

From that moment on, I coined myself as an “anxious person.” I began having regular panic attacks at the age of 20. For the last five years, I’ve spent most of my energy and time focusing on a loaded combination of how to prevent these attacks — being terrified for the next one, shaming myself for acquiring a Xanax prescription, shaming myself when utilizing said prescription, trying supplements, meditations, therapy modalities, and the list goes on. You name it, I have tried it. The minor exception being eating mushrooms in a forest with a shaman. 

I just figured I’d have to live with this. I figured it’d be something that would stay with me for the rest of my life and I should get really, really used to it. Welcome it, maybe make it a lovely guest room to stay in.

Until I had a revelation. My anxiety had always been something that people told me was a chemical imbalance within my brain. Something that was just “wrong” with me. But because that never served as a good enough answer for me, I wondered: what if my anxiety was, at best, a really bad habit my nervous system adapted at a young age from a combination of observing others and external factors outside of my control? And what if this habit, like all other habits, could be dropped?

This begs a more intricate question of identity. If we have lived with something for so long, how do we view ourselves in a different lens without it? How do we let go of an identifying factor of our core selves in exchange for an easier, better way of being? 

Based on science, our nervous systems actually can’t tell the difference between the people we are now and the us that we were when we were, say, 7-years-old fending off a panic attack in a church. This is why nervous system regulation is so important and why inner child work, alongside other therapeutic practices, are essential for trauma survivors.

Bearing all this information in mind, I wish identity was something more talked about in mainstream chats about growth and the human experience. Shortly after I competed for Miss Iowa for the final time in 2018, my life imploded. I was lucky to start working a gig as a barista for a popular coffee chain in eastern Iowa. My boss was a guy I had known for several years. During my interview, I’ll never forget something he asked me. He asked, “if you’re not a pageant queen anymore, then who are you?” In a lot of ways, I feel like that question was the start of my life. My identity had been destroyed — and when that happens, your only option is to rebuild. 

I’ve known so many versions of myself in the last five years. As I approach my 26th birthday, I think a lot about what this next version will look like. What she’ll do, what she’ll accomplish, and the grief it’ll take to get there. We don’t talk enough about the grief associated with the loss of a part of ourselves. There’s only grief of other people; never of ourselves. I think about this when I think about recovering addicts. Their entire life after getting sober is about recreating themselves… without a drug. I can’t imagine what a simultaneously scary and rewarding journey that must be. And a deeply challenging one, too.

The grief in losing a version of yourself is horrifyingly bittersweet. As Brene Brown would put it, “the price is high, the reward is great.”

I no longer want to identify as the anxious girl. And I don’t think that’s a choice I could have made one second sooner. Because right now is right on time. I read about this 71-year-old woman the other day who started weight lifting as a coping mechanism after her husband passed. My hope for you is that you recognize it’s never too late — to become someone new, to start something new, to lose a version of yourself and start over from scratch. It’s never too late to take the parts of you from a past version that you loved and toss them in with the new you that you become. 

May be all be the weight lifting lady.