Content note: This post discusses anxiety, depression, suicidal thoughts, and difficult feelings about self-worth and existence. Please take care of yourself while reading.

There’s a knot in my stomach.

People talk about getting butterflies when they’re nervous. That fluttering feeling of anticipation when something new or unfamiliar is approaching.

But this isn’t butterflies.

This is the kind of anxiety that settles deep in my stomach and tightens around my chest until even breathing feels like something I have to consciously remember how to do.

My body freezes. The feeling is almost paralyzing. Numbing, even.

I love working in the mental health field. In many ways, I feel like it’s what I was made to do. My own experiences with pain have shaped the way I connect with people who are experiencing theirs.

But here’s the part I don’t always know how to reconcile.

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I struggle with anxiety. I struggle with depression. And sometimes, my own thoughts take me to dark places I don’t tell anybody about.

Not just once in a while, either.

And when that happens, I can be absolutely fucking merciless toward myself.

How the fuck do I belong in the mental health field?

Because here’s the thing. I don’t just have to live inside my own head. I also have to live in a body that doesn’t always listen to me.

I imagine that for many able-bodied people, their mind and body feel like parts of one cohesive whole. Different parts of themselves working together.

But that’s not how I experience myself.

Sometimes, I feel like I’m made up of three completely separate entities.

My mind. My body. My heart.

My mind can be a cruel place to live. My body doesn’t always cooperate, even when I know exactly what I need it to do.

And my heart?

My heart is the only one of the three that seems to listen to me.

So I find myself wondering what people would think if they knew what it is really like to exist inside my mind and body.

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Would they still trust me to help someone else?

Or would they think I’m a fraud?

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The Lessons That Stuck

I’ve been thinking about those questions a lot lately, especially as I navigate a new professional chapter.

The more I think about it, the more I realize that some of these fears didn’t start with my professional life.

They’ve been haunting me for years.

I remember being in third grade, walking toward my classroom with my walker while my classmates filed through the door ahead of me.

My teacher was holding the door open.

One by one, everyone went inside.

And then there was me.

I was moving more slowly than everyone else, as I often did.

My teacher looked directly at me.

And then she slammed the door right in my face.

My mom happened to be there that day. She saw the whole thing.

That same school year, my difficulties with math were becoming increasingly apparent. I failed my first math test, and it was becoming clear that I needed additional support.

When my mom spoke with my teacher, her response was essentially that she had twenty-two other students in my class. Was she supposed to stop the entire class because I needed more help?

I don’t have to wonder what those experiences taught me. I know exactly what they ingrained in me.

Don’t be too slow.

Don’t be too demanding.

Don’t need too much help.

And above all, make yourself as small as possible.

Those lessons didn’t stay in the classroom.

Growing up with a disability affected my family, too. There were surgeries, hospital stays, and circumstances that sometimes required additional attention to be directed toward me.

I’ve spent a lot of my life trying to understand how those experiences affected the people around me, especially my twin sister.

Their feelings mattered, too.

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But somewhere along the way, I wonder if I became so focused on making room for everybody else’s feelings that I forgot I was allowed to have my own.

There were afternoons when I’d come home from school hungry, unable to reach anything substantial to eat without assistance.

And sometimes, rather than asking for help, I simply went without.

I’d wait until my mom came home. Too often, by then, I’d be pale, with a brutal headache from going so long without enough to eat.

Not because I wasn’t hungry.

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But because asking for help felt like asking too much.

And when I look back on those afternoons, I wonder how I learned to ignore my own needs just to avoid inconveniencing somebody else.

When My Word Wasn’t Enough

By fifteen, I’d already spent years experiencing what it felt like to have my abilities questioned.

But one period of my life has stayed with me in a way I can’t shake.

My left hip had deteriorated so badly that I had spent nearly a year without cartilage in it. I could no longer walk with my walker. I couldn’t even do certain everyday things, like getting dressed, without assistance.

The pain was excruciating. There were mornings that I woke up with my entire left leg bent and drawn up towards my chest, unable to lower it. The medications I was taking to manage it were strong enough to leave me feeling nauseous.

I was miserable. The earliest age that I can remember having suicidal thoughts is nine, but by sixteen, I was thinking of dying by suicide as a means to an end.

All I wanted was for the relentless pain to end.

That year, I saw a doctor who told me that I should “get used to” being wheelchair-bound. Not temporally. Forever. That I was essentially a hopeless case.

Hopeless.

His proposed solution was to take muscle from my thigh and place it between the bones of my hip, where there was no longer any cartilage.

To me, the whole approach seemed outdated. But what bothered me even more was the way he treated me, as though he’d already decided what I would or wouldn’t be capable of doing.

I wasn’t asking him to promise me that I’d walk again.

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Instead, I felt like he’d already written me off.

And the thing is, I was so over living with that constant, unrelenting pain that I was beginning to resign myself to a surgery I didn’t even want — steeling myself to go through with it if it meant the pain might finally stop.

Not because I’d stopped wanting to walk again.

But because I was fucking exhausted from hurting.

After that experience, my parents and I went to Shriners Hospitals for Children in Tampa, where we met with another doctor.

This time, the experience was different.

She was kind, but she was also honest. My hip had deteriorated to a point where she didn’t feel she had the expertise to operate on it herself.

And I understood that.

She referred us to a colleague at Shriners Hospitals for Children in St. Louis, Missouri.

So in January 2012, my mom and I boarded a plane to St. Louis.

I was scared to hope, but I wanted so badly for this to be the beginning of something different.

I can still picture myself sitting on that X-ray table, my legs swinging nervously as I told the surgeon that I wanted to be out of pain and walk with my walker again.

But instead of responding to me, he turned to my mom and questioned whether I’d actually put in the effort—or whether I was simply saying I would.

I was sitting right there.

I wasn’t telling him what I thought he wanted to hear. My whole heart was in those words.

And somehow, that still wasn’t enough.

I’d been dismissed before. I’d been overlooked before. But this was different.

At sixteen years old, I started questioning something much bigger than whether I’d ever walk again.

Did I even deserve to exist? I began to think the answer was no, because I’d never be enough. What I was made of- heart, was never, ever, enough.

In the end, it was decided that I was a candidate for a full hip replacement, but not without my pleading. That summer, I underwent two surgeries at Shriners Hospitals for Children in St. Louis.

I had a full left hip replacement and a right femoral osteotomy, which involved cutting and rotating the bone in my right leg to help reduce the scissoring of my legs.

Dr. Perry Schoenecker and Dr. John Clohisy worked together on my care.

After everything I’d been through, I finally had a real chance to work toward what I’d wanted all along: to be out of pain and to walk with my walker again. And I did.

Years later, Dr. Schoenecker called to ask my permission to use my results and X-rays at a medical conference.

I agreed.

And yes, there was a part of me that was glad I’d proved him wrong.

But I’d never wanted to walk again just to prove a point to somebody else. I’d wanted to walk because it mattered to me. Because I’d meant what I said when I was sixteen, and I’d followed through.

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I’m grateful for what Dr. Schoenecker and Dr. Clohisy did for me. But that gratitude doesn’t erase how deeply that moment on the X-ray table affected me.

And I think that’s what makes experiences like these so difficult to leave behind.

Sometimes, even when you’ve already proven yourself, you still carry the fear that the next person—or even the next group of people—won’t believe you, or won’t believe in you.

The Fear That Follows Me

Which brings me back to that fucking knot in my stomach.

I’ve recently started a new professional chapter. I’m excited about it. I’m proud of the experience and education that brought me here.

But I’m also learning unfamiliar systems and procedures.

And sometimes, my brain knows exactly what needs to happen while my body struggles with the physical mechanics of making it happen.

In my line of work, there are situations where someone may be at imminent risk of suicide.

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Time matters.

So when my fingers don’t cooperate, or I need an extra moment to navigate an unfamiliar system, I worry about what that could mean for the person on the other end.

And then there’s the other fear.

What if somebody sees me struggling and assumes I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing?

Because I’m not just afraid of making a mistake when the stakes are high. I’m also terrified of somebody looking at my physical limitations and deciding that I’m not capable of doing my job.

And sometimes, those two fears become so tangled together that I can barely tell where one ends and the other begins.

But here’s what really fucks with me.

The people I work with now haven’t treated me that way. When I’ve spoken up, they’ve listened. They’ve been understanding. They’ve offered support.

So why the hell am I still waiting for somebody to decide that I’m more trouble than I’m worth?

Why am I still expecting somebody to lose patience with me?

I think part of the answer is that I’ve spent so many years being dismissed that fear has become its own kind of protection.

It’s there before I even open my mouth, warning me not to ask, not to need anything, and certainly not to give somebody another chance to make me feel like I don’t fucking matter.

And I know that keeping quiet can hurt me, too.

But here’s the thing. I’ve lived with this fear for so long that sometimes I don’t even know how to exist without it.

I can recognize that it’s hurting me and still not know how the fuck to make it stop.

And maybe that’s part of why Taylor Swift’s I Can Do It With a Broken Heart hits a little too close to home. “I cry a lot but I am so productive- it’s an art. You know you’re good when you can even do it with a broken heart.” That contrast between what I feel and what people see is painfully familiar.

I can show up, do a job I genuinely love, and care about other people while simultaneously fighting a fucking war inside my own head.

And nobody would ever know.

Still Here

The knot in my stomach is still there.

I don’t think writing this made it go away. I don’t think naming where it came from untied it. But I do think there’s something in the act of tracing it back — following the thread from that X-ray table in St. Louis, to that slammed classroom door in third grade, to the afternoons I went hungry rather than ask for help — and seeing how long I’ve been carrying it.

Because that fear didn’t start with my new job. It didn’t start with any one doctor or any one teacher. It started somewhere much earlier, in the quiet lessons I absorbed when nobody was explicitly teaching them. Don’t be too slow. Don’t need too much. Make yourself as small as possible.

And I’m tired of those lessons. I’m tired of the way they live in my body before I even open my mouth.

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I spend my professional life supporting people who are experiencing some of the darkest moments of their lives.

Their needs matter. Their feelings matter. Their lives matter.

I don’t question that.

But when it comes to me?

Do my own needs really even fucking matter?

No.

At least, that’s what the voice in my head tells me.

And here’s where things get complicated.

I know how cruel those thoughts sound when I say them out loud. I know I would never think that way about somebody else.

But they feel true.

And there’s a part of me that genuinely feels like I deserve every bit of that cruelty.

It’s not that I wake up every morning and consciously decide to tear myself apart.

I don’t have to.

Those thoughts are already there. So deeply ingrained that I don’t even have to question them for them to feel true.

They just are.

I don’t want somebody to mistake the way my body functions for what I’m capable of.

I don’t want to feel like I have to conceal every challenge I experience just to be considered competent.

And I don’t want to spend the rest of my life feeling that being capable means never needing assistance.

I wish I could tell you that understanding where these fears came from means I know how to make them stop, but I can’t.

I’m not going to wrap this up with a lesson or a revelation, because I don’t have one. What I have is this: I’m still here. Still trying to take up the space I’m actually allowed to have.

Remember that snake I wrote about before — the one that coils around you before you even realize it’s there? I’m beginning to realize it doesn’t always show up the same way. Sometimes it looks like fear. Sometimes it sounds an awful lot like my own voice.

And the fucked-up part is that I can recognize what’s happening and still feel every bit of it. Still carry it. The way you carry something bitter you can’t quite spit out — that taste that lingers long after the moment is over.

Even when the people around me have been nothing but supportive, there’s a part of me that’s already bracing for it — already preparing to be dismissed.

Maybe that’s the aftertaste of existing: not a lesson, not a revelation, just the taste of everything I’ve had to carry.

I’m still here. The fear is still here, too. It lingers, even after I think I’ve swallowed it.

Until the next sip ✨

✨ Artwork created with the assistance of ChatGPT, inspired by my own ideas and creative direction.