Changing the Voices in My Head: Running Through Anxiety

I never had anxiety before I had kids. When I was a kid, I was fearless. I began to get a sense of my mortality in my twenties. “Okay,” I thought, “death is real, and I could die.” But still, I wasn’t going to, not for a long time. Never did I think I would find myself daily running through anxiety. It certainly did not ever occur to me that I would be writing about changing voices in my head.

I was going to live to be 100, just like my great grandmother.

After a wild and crazy youth, I met and married my life partner.

Life was still grand. We traveled, we spent weekends drinking Spanish wine and watching Spanish language films, we hiked on weekends, and we ran in the afternoons side by side along the sidewalks of our city. We loved life, and we loved each other.

Then I had my first baby, and the voices crept in. I had tried for two years to have Celaya, and a dark inner voice worked hard to convince me that I didn’t deserve her. Little demons whispered to me that I would drop her; I would cut her while I was cooking; she would get a fatal disease.

The voices slithered in late at night, they attacked me in the middle of the day, and they interrupted my happiest thoughts.

I soon learned that I was not alone. Intrusive thoughts strike even the most mentally healthy of us. Many women have to rely on medicine just to cope through this often crippling anxiety.

I read that exercise helps with anxiety, so started running again. I hadn’t run since before Celaya was born, and after she turned a year old I picked it up again. Every single morning I would load her into the jogging stroller and head out for four or five miles five days a week.

But anxiety lingers. Once you have a child, you have a child. And having a child, for me, and for many others, is nerve wracking. Some might say what I was experiencing was postpartum depression, and maybe, in some form, it was. I was never sad, but the anxiety ran deep, and it was clearly connected to this new state of being a mother.

Once, I had anxiety so bad I called my mom.

“Have you ever felt like you’re heart is racing, you are running out of breath, and you’re going to pass out?” I asked her, as casually as I could one day on FaceTime as my two year old played in the background.

“Oh yea. You’re having anxiety attacks.” She said just as casually.

“What!?” I was shocked. Anxiety attacks? What the hell did I have to be anxious about?

Anxiety can hit you for a variety of reasons, it can hit you anytime, and it can feel crippling. Anxiety, at least for me, is like depression, in that you can go out and function in the world without a single soul realizing that there are voices in your head desperate to lead you to dark places.

When I was pregnant with my second child, the anxiety got worse than ever. It got so bad that I called 911 in the middle of the night at 8 months pregnant. I was sure I was going to pass out, and I was worried it would hurt my baby. My narrowing vision developed water spots. Somehow the pregnancy hormones made it so that at the height of an anxiety attack I would blink and see little bubbles in my vision.

Fortunately, I was familiar with anxiety attacks by this time, so I recognized them for what they were, but that doesn’t make them less scary when you are spiraling downward into a black hole.

I got to work, exercising, practicing good breathing, getting as much sleep as I could. And the anxiety lessened, the voices became kinder, more positive, downright encouraging.

By the time I went back to work after my maternity leave I was high on life. I was a mother of two kids and I was starting a new journey in life. I was working toward getting paid for my writing, homeschooling my five year old, and getting my husband into school full time. Life was fabulous.

But, I had no time to run, and the anxiety started to get really bad again.

I lived through about a week of monsters on my shoulder telling me that my goals were ridiculous, that my children were suffering with a too busy mother, that my husband needed a wife, not a full time writer.

I was at a loss and a crossroads at the same time.

If anxiety is like depression, then, for me, postpartum anxiety is like manic depression. One minute I’m on top of the world, inspired by my muse, and then next minute I’m drowning in self doubt.

And you would never know it to look at me.

This, I think is the most important thing to remember about anxiety and depression: often the people who seem like they have it all together and are the most optimistic and positive people you know are dealing with voices in their heads.

Which is why it is so important that we all share our voices, and that we work together to help change those voices.

After a week of fighting the monsters, I became friends with them. I started running at night after work. I pop my headphones in and hit the street. I feed the monsters with endorphins and they change their tune.

This is what works for me. Exercise, with music in my ears, helps me stay positive and upbeat so that the voices in my head like me, even if they will never leave me.

In the end, the benefits of running are myriad, and I cannot say enough about it. You will see many more posts here as I continue on my journey, changing the voices in my head, making them like me, instead.