Several years ago, I started experiencing severe anxiety attacks.
I was working as a critical care nurse at a huge hospital in Los Angeles, floating to a different unit every day, never really getting to know the people or patients I was working with.
The hospital had developed a very oppressive, micromanaging culture, was pushing nurses to do more than any human could reasonably be capable of, and punishing us when we fell behind. It’s no wonder I was panicking.
The thought of going into work each day made me want to vomit. I began to fear I might have a nervous breakdown, and had the thought that a week or two in a psych ward might actually be preferable to my job. As a teenager, I had been depressed and despondent to the point of feeling suicidal, and was worried I might return there.
Fortunately, I came across the work of Dr. Bruce Levine, and read his book, Surviving America’s Depression Epidemic. For me depression and anxiety had always gone hand in hand, anxiety causing me to despair and eventually become numb.
In Levine’s book, for the first time, I heard an alternative narrative of mental illness. I learned that my depression and anxiety were not simply the result of a malfunctioning brain, or an inability to adapt to the responsibilities of adulthood, but that they were a result of a sustained assault on my autonomy, dignity, purpose, and connection to others from a consumerist, individualist, authoritarian culture. I was experiencing a very normal response to intolerable conditions.
I knew that rather than finding a way to cope with the conditions I was living under, I had to plot my escape. I began to search for a way to live that would nourish me rather than bleed me dry.
The truth was, that while this new job in LA was one of the most stressful jobs I had worked, my anxiety had been building long before that. I would wake up in the middle of the night, heart pounding, having dreamt of apocalypse and nuclear explosions. My stomach had become so acidic I felt constant nausea, had been losing weight, and had to stop drinking coffee.
I knew that I was deeply stressed and unfulfilled in the line of work I had chosen, but I didn’t know what else I wanted or was able to do. The money I made was good, and it kept me in a nice apartment on the west side, not far from the beaches of Venice and Santa Monica.
But I also knew, deep in the throes of panic and despair, that I had to choose between the soft imprisonment of that comfort, and my life.
So I decided to take some drastic steps. I moved into an intentional community of spiritually oriented organizers and activists on the east side of the city. I figured if I didn’t want to be bound to comfort, I needed to be around those who were living more simply and orienting around alternative values. I took a job at a nursing agency where I could make my own schedule, choosing to work less to free up space to consider other avenues. I haven’t worked full time in health care since.
I made big dinners for the parties and meditation groups we hosted at the house. I became more politically engaged. I completed a spiritual direction program. Eventually, I moved on and continued what I’ve called my “going to Hogwart’s” phase, studying intuitive development, energy healing, and astrology. I began to intuit my own life’s purpose, and learned tools that taught me to still my mind, trust my inner wisdom, and deepen my capacity for change and transformation.
While my life since then hasn’t been easy, without heartbreak, or completely free of anxiety and despair, I’ve learned some vital things that have helped me through it all. One, that for me, life is not worth living if I am not aligning with my deep desire and purpose. Two, I can handle a lot of difficulty if I’m doing the first thing, and that something bigger than me will have my back. And three, anxiety and despair are usually pretty good indicators that I’m not doing the first thing and that something needs to come back into alignment. I’ve learned to hold the intensity of my difficult feelings and move through them by allowing them to do their work.
I realize that mental illness is very complex, more easily treated for some than others. I’ve been fortunate to have a lot of great therapists and other mental health providers along my journey, and while I have tried to stay away from psychotropic medications after being on quite a few in my 20’s, I understand that for some they can be lifesavers. My decision to tell this story was inspired by many of my friends and clients who have been struggling with anxiety recently, including my friend Mike, who shares his story here.
The causes and treatments of mental illness are multifaceted, and the solutions are not easy, but I do know this: Our current social, cultural, political, and economic systems are big factors.
While I am not averse to the ideas of marketplace or exchange per se (obviously this newsletter has a marketing purpose), we live in a culture where we have been taught to get our essential needs and desires met through an exploitative marketplace at the expense of our relationships to spirit, the earth, to one another, and even to ourselves. We are taught from childhood to give pieces of our souls away every day in order to belong, and in return we are receiving less in actual wages, continued assaults on our civil rights and most devastatingly, the destruction of our earth and our ability to sustain human life on this planet.
Any approach that does not acknowledge these systems and address the injuries they inflict on the spirit and soul as well as the body and brain is incomplete. And while I know many mental health practitioners who do attend to these things, from my own experience as both a patient and a health care provider, that far too many do not.
The journey toward mental wellness for all has to begin with addressing the profound spiritual bankruptcy at the heart of our racist, sexist, classist, imperialist, capitalist system that degrades the web of relationality that binds us together. And it has to begin in each of us, as we support one another on our own unique journeys toward wholehearted living.
My own journey is leading me to let my nursing career go, as I pursue building a thriving business around this new healing work full time. It’s scary, like any kind of change is. I have to put myself out there in a way I never have before. But I know the rewards will be worth it. The opportunity to spend my time doing work that nourishes me and others. The ability to get arrested fighting climate change, something I’ve been afraid to do for fear of jeopardizing my nursing license. The chance to develop financial stability, pay off debt, and invest more deeply in building intentional, wholehearted community. I’m grateful for the difficult emotions and experiences, like anxiety, that have pointed the way here.
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