Letter to your Younger Self: Conquering the Unthinkable

SEATTLE-

It is the best day of the year. You will be skiing with your friends that you have known for the last two to three years. You have missed two days of school chasing what is thought to be the storm of the year. It started with the news of learning that the resort was closed due to power issues and you had to make the best of it.

You will head down to Leavenworth to spend the night with your grandparents and your friend Charlie. The next day you head up to the resort, making it up there for what would be one of the best days of your life.

You ski all day until 1pm. You are standing in line and see everyone turning their heads and you will do the same as well. In your vision you see a snowmobile that was pulling a ski patroller with a sled with a man and another ski patroller on top giving CPR.

Your mind will immediately start to realize what is happening, and it will race with thoughts. Your brain will start thinking about things that you have not thought about or questioned in a year and a half. Thoughts about death and what happens after that will start to circulate in your mind and your mood will immediately shift from the best day ever to complete shock and caution.

Over the next two weeks, you will think about it some more and start to go down a rabbit hole. You will leave school on a Friday afternoon for the MLK weekend and head to your usual event for that weekend of spending time with friends over in eastern Washington that you have been doing for the last 15 years.

During that car ride you will learn that your grandpa had a low blood pressure event and needed some blood work done at the hospital and that your mom will be going to the hospital to meet him. Your dad and you will get a pizza for dinner from your favorite spot in Leavenworth, not expecting anything of it. You will go on with your evening and expect a good weekend with finals of first semester coming up the next week.

Later that night you will have your first of many anxiety/panic attacks.

After you went to sleep and woke up in the middle of the night you felt some pain in the right side of your chest causing you to panic. You didn't know why.

You will get that worked out and finally get some sleep and wake up the next morning ready to move on and have a good weekend.

You will have a good weekend with your family and friends while also watching the Seahawks demolish the 49ers. You head down to your grandparents’ house for a little bit and think everything is normal and have a tutoring session to help with your math test.

That is when you have the first of a couple health concerns that you will feel like are super real but are actually not.

You will start feeling a tingling feeling in your toes and immediately start worrying that it is a bad sign. You will shrug that off, move on to the next thing, focus on finals, and leave after you're done with your meeting.

On the way back you will talk to your dad about what is going on and how you feel about these things that you have never felt before. That night you will start to look stuff up and connect dots and start to feel like you have diabetes.

The next few days will be the worst days that you have experienced in your life besides when you got the news about your mom having stage 4 metastatic breast cancer.

It will start with this feeling in your hand on the first day of finals. It feels like it does not work as well as it should and you are starting to feel the effects of what your mind is convincing you of- that you have diabetes.

You will end up taking your mind off of it and relaxing for a bit while doing your finals and not thinking about it. Little did you know your anxiety and panic would get worse that night.

Later that evening after studying for your finals the next day, you will be taking your nightly shower before you go to bed. During that time, you will start working yourself up and convincing yourself that you are having trouble breathing. It will get worse and worse until you run out of the shower and have to talk to your dad to get yourself out of the panic.

That night after the shower you will fall asleep with your feet in the foot massager because it will be the only thing stimulating you enough to make you relax.

The next day during your first period you will have some anxiety/panic about the same thing you had the night before and make it seem so real, but you end up being able to distract yourself and not think about it for a little while.

You will think you are fine and able to push through, but you will actually end up not being fine. In the next class period, you will be super anxious and panicky before your theology test, and you will not be able to concentrate.

 This continues into the multiple-choice exam that ends up being entirely in your head and it makes you keep thinking and thinking and thinking. Your mind will start to convince you that something is actually happening, and you start panicking. You will not be able to focus on the test and solely focus on the panic that you are scared of and have to end up leaving early from the test.

This will be the lowest point that you will get to in your life so far. You will feel broken and distraught and not really sure what to do with yourself.

You will be confused. It will make you want to find answers the quickest that you can ever find them and want them immediately. You will want an immediate fix that cannot be there. It will still linger there for the next 5 months and probably continue on after that.

But you will not let that destroy you and get down on yourself for that. You will want to push further and further so that you can get back to where you want to be in your life. You will be able to conquer the fears that you have and learn to deal with them.

You will go to counseling once a week for the next 5 months (as you still do). You notice little things like making it through a class period without getting anxious, you will take tests upstairs at first because you are scared to take them in the classroom again where you worry that a panic might start.

You will finally be able to conquer big events like mass or assemblies or times where all you can do is sit in the quietness of your own head.  You learn to think about different things so that you won’t worry and distract yourself from the thoughts in your head.

Your school counselor, Ms. Soldato, becomes even more familiar with you and your situation. You find that she isn’t just that counselor for help with academic classes and college applications. She is caring and loving, and you could not ask for a better one. You will realize that at any time feeling anxious or not she is there to not only talk you through stuff but also help you with making accommodation for tests and how to make me more comfortable with things.

You will want to thank her a million times over and even then, you realize you will never be able to thank her enough. It will mean the world that you have her as a resource and be able to work through things with her. You will be beyond thankful for her and that she was there for you when times were the hardest you have experienced in your life so far.

You learn in time that life can bring so many different things that cannot be explained and you want to question them yet there is no answer to them.

It will change your life for the better and it will make you appreciate those little things. It will make you change your plans for after school and what you do every day. You will want to walk every day and get that exercise, and it will provide you with discipline.

You will almost want to thank anxiety for being there because it has made life worse and better at the same time. It gives you a goal to get to every time you think about stuff and every time you do not see something that you can work for it will still be there to conquer.

You will eventually be writing this letter reflecting on what has done for you and how it has changed your life.

So now you will go on and conquer that goal of yours and kick it back to where it should belong.

-Nathan