Chapter 1: Always a Little Bit Sensitive

Before I get into this series, I want to preface that I love life, MY life, right now. I have great relationships with my family and my friends. I am currently not stressed out, I have a full time job, I am living my life.

With that said, that wasn’t always the case, and that is what this series is about. It is about looking at my life through much more aware lenses, looking for the subtle signs that something  was*different* about myself.  That little something that would eventually develop into my anxiety and depression. Maybe she’s born with it (I was).

Some of these moments will involve people who are very important in my life, and who I love very much. I will never say anything malicious about these people. I will never “call out” these people for certain situations when we were all misinformed about mental illnesses. In these particular cases, do not try to comb into things I may leave vague. This journey is about me, and I’m not trying to drag anyone else into it. With that being said, where do I begin?

When I think about the first sign that I may have had anxiety and depression, I remember being little, like around 5-6 years old, and crying instantly whenever I would do something to make my Dad raise his voice. I remember he would say the usual, “Why are you crying, I’m not even yelling at you?” He would then get irritated with my responses of, “I can’t help it”, mumbling while I was trying not to start the true waterworks. Every time, I would try so hard not to cry, and every time I would fail, to both our frustrations.

Thinking back, I remember feeling like the shittiest kid on the planet whenever my Dad reprimanded me. I felt like he didn’t love me anymore, it was an irrational fear that he would just give up on me because I was a bad kid, and he would leave. I took everything he said at face value, and felt like a liar. Being the “perfect” child in social gatherings and then not listening to my parents over the dumbest things, I felt like I was living a facade. But then things would be okay, until the next time I did something wrong.

(I’ll take this moment to say, that I truly deserved those reprimands and never had any form of “extreme punishment”. Remember the key thing to keep in mind is my “irrational” thinking from a young age.)

These irrational thoughts would plague me.  I was always worried something was wrong.

Once, I couldn’t fall sleep after listening to “Where is the Love?” by the Black Eyed Peas on the radio. I had to ask my Mum if  everything was okay in our lives because that song made me think that things weren’t. I had heard that song in the afternoon and it just stayed in my mind.

I just *felt* things harder.

I felt things and no way to explain how I was feeling without being “too sensitive”.

Why was I always so sensitive?

In hindsight, an exchange between my Mum and I year later, gave me the clarity. My Mum says that this incident was the moment she realized I was a good person. For me, it made me realize that I just *felt* emotions more than the “average” person. The moment in question, happened when I was young (around 6 years old).  I was watching the film Radio (Mike Tollin, 2003) in the living room. I went to go see her in a different room and I was crying. She asked me why I was crying, to which I responded something along the lines of, “I don’t understand why people have to be so mean to each other?”

I was crying in response to the scene where some of the football players told Radio that one of the girls needed help in the women’s locker room. Radio knew it was wrong, but the players made him believe it was important. Obviously there was no emergency, Radio got in trouble, and did not tell the football coach which football players told Radio to go into the locker room.

As someone who has studied film, I know that the reason I was crying is because I empathized with Radio, putting myself in his shoes and hurting like he was hurting. But I wasn’t like Radio, a misunderstood person, who just wanted to make the people around them like them? Or was I? At 6 years old, I resonated with this character.

But looking back, I resonated with a lot of characters who went through some sort of hardship.

And that was just the way my life went.

– Alexis