Katherine

Koziara
4/21/13

Now I Lay Me Down To Sleep

In seventh grade I went to bed each night convinced I would die before sunrise,

certain that in the morning the world would awaken but I would lay cold in my bed. This
wasn't because of a terminal illness or a recent diagnosis; my anxiety was the root of this
fear. I pictured my mother entering the bedroom to get me up for school and finding my
corpse. Each time I tried to sleep, my mind filled with these images. Stuck alone with these
thoughts, I tried and tried to shut them out until I eventually became so exhausted that I fell
asleep. The dreams I had were more of the same. No matter how promising and jovial they
began, they concluded with my soul hovering towards the ceiling, watching my mom shout
and shake my lifeless body and try to get me to wake up. Yelling down to her that I was "up
here, up here!!" never worked, and these screams were inaudible to those on Earth.

Surviving middle school is difficult; surviving middle school with the burden of

apprehension, the kind that goes beyond forgetting a locker combination, seemed
impossible. I wanted to fit in with the popular girls, sit at the best lunch table, and be in on
all of the jokes, but a significant barrier to accomplishing these tasks stood in my way:
anxiety.

General anxiety typically stems from family background and stressful life

experiences. While my mother suffered from Posttraumatic Stress Disorder for a long


period of time, she did a fairly good job of hiding it from my brother and me until we were
old enough to comprehend the disease. Occasionally she would have small panic attacks
while sitting in traffic or in the presence of sudden loud noises, but I didn't understand
these were connected until I was in high school. Her PTSD was the cause of childhood
traumas, however, and I hadn't suffered any of the abuses that brought on her disorder.

My mother's history may be related to my childhood anxiety, but it isn't the root

cause of these problems. As for the "stressful life experience" aspect, I don't have any
recollection of this kind of event. I grew up in a nice home, in a small town, with two
parents who loved me, an older brother who put up with me, and a dog who was always
happy to see me when I came home from school. Aside from moving a few times before
elementary school, my life was pretty ordinary.

I wasn't extremely anxious before seventh grade. During elementary school I

wanted to succeed academically, and I placed some pressure on myself to reach the 99th
percentile on standardized tests. Falling short of perfection caused some stress in my life,
like when I couldn't remember 11 times 12 equals 132 while completing a multiplication
tables quiz or when I lost a mock election in fourth grade. This apprehension, however, was
nothing compared to the anxiety I felt during middle school.

So what caused this sudden, paralyzing fear of many normal activities?

I was wrapped up in my own mind, trying to understand what makes life worth

living when the world is full of difficulties. I was taught the afterlife liberates individuals
from these troubles. My parents refer to themselves as "I love Jesus" Christians, meaning
they aren't affiliated with any particular denomination. While we were young we attended
Walloon Lake Community Church each week, my brother and I building a solid foundation


of the books of the Bible through Sunday School classes, but this changed before I entered
high school. Since then, they travel to conferences, try out different churches, or listen to
sermons online to learn more about God and the Bible. They take what they like from the
talks and leave the church politics behind, avoiding potlucks and Christmas pageants. My
childhood was filled with trips to the International House of Prayer in Kansas City,
Pentecostal churches in the Detroit suburbs, and one large convention under pop-up tents
in Orlando. During elementary school, when I joined my parents on these trips, I filled
notebooks with drawings and doodles while my parents filled journals with notes about
the power of prayer.

During the summer after sixth grade I started paying attention to these sermons. I

had just gone through my first year of middle school, where the teachers abandoned the
elementary school policy of occupying students with projects and crafts, and instead
expected us to develop listening skills as they lectured us on pre-algebra and the rock cycle.
While sitting in a spacious auditorium in Missouri, filled with rows upon rows of families
like mine, I listened to a preacher discuss the afterlife. I had already learned about Heaven
and Hell in Sunday School, but this preacher had an effect on me that caused a change in the
way that I viewed life on Earth.

"We are only here for a short time, and glory is waiting for us on the other side!" he

proclaimed, while I watched him on the projector screens. "When we are reunited with
Jesus we will experience a life far more vital than the one here on Earth!" Spit flew from his
mouth and his face turned red while shouts of "Preach!" "Oh Lord!" and "Hallelujah!" from
the crowd encouraged him.

I stopped thinking about how much longer I had to listen to him until the musicians

came back on stage as my adolescent mind began to wonder about the value of life. I
started to consider why anyone chooses to continue to live when this supposed greatness
was waiting on the other end of the spectrum. Torn between my faith that life is better on
the other side, and my fear of the afterlife, I became paralyzed with anxiety. I couldn't
figure out what made life worth living, and I also couldn't negotiate how details of the
afterlife couldn't be confirmed.

Why do we continue to toil through each day, when a quick accident is all it would

take to transport us straight from life on earth to the glory of Heaven? A bus crash during a
class fieldtrip or a gas leak in the school could easily take me away from my family. Did my
actions on Earth matter? If good deeds couldn't get me into the Kingdom of God according
to Christianity, then why should I do good deeds at all? Why should I do anything at all?
Wasn't I just waiting to die and transcend to the next phase?

I didn't consider suicide, but I wondered for those who had chosen to end their lives,

why not? What was so wrong about hastening the process of getting to the next stage, the
better stage? These thoughts caused my anxiety. I had to associate some meaning to life,
but I couldn't figure out what form this meaning would take. I quickly became afraid to die,
to suffer a sudden death and go to Heaven and discover that my fears were correct: that life
on earth was almost entirely inconsequential. Clinging to my family, isolating myself from
the world, and putting off sleep for as long as possible became my every day.

This internal conflict was compounded that fall when my seventh grade gym teacher

passed away. One November morning in 2005 he suffered a brain aneurism shortly after I
had left my gym class, dropped to the floor while conducting another class, and was dead
by the next morning. Now I was immediately up against the concept of death; the entire
school mourned the loss and attended the funeral. Counselors were available at the school
to help students cope, but everyone just kept focusing on how sad it was that our teacher
had passed away, and I thought it was selfish to talk to one of these professionals about my
fears about death and worries about the significance of life while the school dealt with a
tragedy. I tried to keep a running list of topics to think about when the significance of life
became too overwhelming, but the constant buzz of meaningless thoughts about TV shows
and to do lists was always interrupted by this idea of negligible life.

I began to fear I would die from some unforeseen illness, afraid every time my mom

dropped me off for school that I wouldn't see her face again. When my parents took me to
see a counselor I recounted these feelings. Expressing them to a complete stranger made
me see how irrational these fears were, but the fraction of my mind that was holding onto
these worries couldn't catch up with the reasonable part. My anxiety expanded to include a
more general, social anxiety that began to affect more aspects of my life in addition to my
obsession with life and death.

On a typical morning, I woke up for school, attended my first two classes, and, when

I didn't make it through Algebra without getting a pit in my stomach, walked to the office,
and requested to leave for the day. My excuse was that I was sick -- headache, stomachache,
anything to get me out of school and back into my home. The secretaries thought I wasn't


ill and simply wanted to leave school, but my issues were much deeper. I was ill; I had
anxiety about dying and I wasn't even a teenager yet.

My parents decided to force me to attend a sleepover as an attempt to get me over

this problem. My friend Charlotte's* thirteenth birthday party seemed like the perfect
opportunity for this intervention. Even my counselor, Sam*, suggested I try it out and see if
I could use this experience to build "self-efficacy," which he explained to me as just a fancy
term for "past successes." So off I went, on a January weekend, to join a group of my peers
for an evening of fun. I started to become estranged from these girlfriends due to my
anxiety; I hadn't spent a lot of time with them outside of soccer practice, the setting where
we all met during elementary school and built our friendships. I knew if I kept missing
parties and sleepovers I risked my membership in the friend group.

Charlotte's parents hired a limo that drove us to a nearby indoor water park, where

we spent Friday afternoon. Then we headed back to her house for pizza, popcorn, and an
endless supply of chick flicks. Everyone was settled on their section of the carpet in the
basement, falling asleep to film credits, while I lay wide-eyed, trying to think of any
possible thing I could do to make my parents come pick me up. I considered forcing myself
to vomit and blaming it on food poisoning or faking a migraine. Hidden in the bathroom, I
sat on the edge of the bathtub and called my mom.

"What, what, what's wrong?" my mom answered, clearly on edge after receiving a

call in the middle of the night.

"It's me, Mom. I don't feel that great." I knew she was going to see right through this

one, but I didn't even care. I just wanted to be home.

"You don't feel that great, Katie, or you are anxious?" she pried, gently.

"You know the answer already, Mom. Will you just come pick me up? I need to come

home." I looked at the time. It was 1:40 a.m., and the drive was only ten minutes from my
house, so realistically I could be reunited with my parents in less than a half an hour if they
got ready quickly. I could manage a half an hour.

"Can you go get Charlotte's mom, Katie? I want to talk to her, and then dad will come

pick you up."

At my next weekly appointment I felt like a failure. The counselor assured me I was

fine, that I had done a good job by trying, but this anxiety had forced me to miss out on so
many staples of middle school. My friends began to ostracize me, in part because I ceased
to be involved in a lot of the activities they participated in and in part because they were
annoyed by my constant failure to keep my plans with them. It was time to take a more
aggressive approach than weekly chats about feelings. At this pivotal meeting I sat on a
couch across from Sam, a short, pudgy man with round, rosy cheeks and a bald spot that
staked claim to most of his scalp. We discussed some options. He wanted me to go on an
Outward Bound experience, a weeklong program that aimed to foster personal growth and
social skills through outdoor activities such as white water rafting. I pictured myself having
an anxiety attack in the middle of a river and quickly shut that idea down. I wanted to try
something easier, like breathing exercises. He noted how in my case, this would accomplish
little more than our conversations over the past few months had. We settled somewhere in
the middle, with Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) psychotherapy.


EMDR uses repeated eye movements and other types of back and forth motion to work
through distressing memories and develop coping mechanisms. I decided to give it a shot,
and soon I was holding two black, battery-powered ovals, waiting for the next step. Sam
turned on the machine, which sent small vibrations back and forth between the two tiny
eggs, and asked me some questions in a calm voice.

"Visualize an image of your anxiety. Figure out where you are, what you are doing,

who you are with. Let me know when you have this image." I pictured the scene from my
dreams, the one where I was silently screaming at my mother but she couldn't hear me. I
winced, not wanting to face the image in the daylight.

"I have the image," I noted, hoping the next question wouldn't be so painful.

"Now conjure an image where you don't feel anxiety at all. When you have this

image, let me know," Sam said calmly. I pictured a pool. A pool out in the sunshine, filled
with crystal blue water. My mom, dad, and brother all relaxed in pool chairs next to me,
reading books and listening to music.

Next, he asked me how true I thought those images were. Initially, the anxiety image

felt very true, very pressing. We began the eye movement therapy until I was able to
recognize the anxiety image was only true in my dreams; it didn't exist in reality. The pool
image was an actual memory from a recent trip to Florida. This was an image I could
strongly believe in. We continued the therapy until our session was over that afternoon,
and Sam gave me relaxation techniques for whenever I felt anxious and encouraged me to
keep a journal through the next few weeks.

At first the journal was filled with the same, recurring nightmare. The feelings didn't

end in a day. Throughout the spring of 2006 I was constantly struggling to implement my


new anxiety management strategies before feelings of fear became too strong to combat
with breathing patterns and eye movements. I went to counseling until the end of the
school year and had a few more EMDR sessions. Even after these sessions ended, the
struggle to control my anxiety remained through the beginning of my high school years. By
the time I entered freshman year, the group of girls I had been so close to in middle school
no longer wanted to be associated with me. I can understand why -- I always found an
excuse to stay home with my family when my girlfriends went skiing or shopping, and
when I did join them I was a liability as I could get that all too familiar pit in my stomach at
any moment and need an escape route.

The fact that I would have to find a new friend group that didn't know about my

dealings with anxiety became apparent during a particular high school soccer practice that
took place during my sophomore year. On this fall evening I had to scramble to find a
partner outside of my circle of friends for soccer drills because none of them chose to work
with me. When practice was let out a little early, my friends all piled into a teammates car
and waited for their parents to pick them up, as she was the only one with her license. I ran
over to the Jeep and tapped on the passenger side window. Another teammate, Elise*,
rolled down the window a few inches and glanced over at me.

"Can I hop in with you guys until my ride shows up?" I asked, eager to get in on the

laughter and jokes I could hear from outside the car.

"Um, there isn't really room for you, sorry," Elise sneered, closing the window. I sat

down on top of my soccer bag a few yards in front of the car and pretended to be occupied
with my phone. Blasting music reverberated from the Jeep, and I became extremely
uncomfortable. Not only was I humiliated, but I was also alone, and I just wanted my mom


to arrive and save me from this embarrassing situation. What was actually fifteen minutes
seemed like an hour, and I began checking the time on my cell phone and texting my family
to see why no one picked me up. Scenarios of my mom getting into a car accident on the
way to the soccer field or a house fire engulfing my entire family started playing in my
mind. At that moment I knew I needed to control the situation. I shut my phone off and
placed it into my bag. Closing my eyes and stretching my legs out onto the grass, I took
deep breaths and calmed my mind. By placing my hands on my knees and tapping back and
forth, concentrating on this movement, I was able to relieve my anxiety until my mom
arrived.

This incident was a breakthrough for me in multiple ways. I realized I could manage

my anxiety in times such as these, and began to sign up for overnight conferences for high
school students at universities across Michigan. While I experienced anxiety before and
during these events, I usually ended up enjoying myself and forming friendships with the
other students. Each time I saw what I had been missing out on when I allowed my anxiety
to control my life, I grew stronger in my combat against anxiety.

I also came to terms with the fact that my problems had destroyed my friendships

with my circle of friends. Growing up in a small town meant few people my age were
unaware of my flakey friendship. There were people who would have accepted me had I
been honest with them about my anxiety, but the risk of my problem becoming the gossip
of the week and thus making my time at school even more difficult was too high. I spent a
lot more weekends during high school going home after football and basketball games than
going to hang out at a friend's place, but I decided to throw myself into books, music, and

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extracurricular activities to occupy my time, figuring I could make a new name for myself
once I went to college.

I still suffer more anxiety than a typical, female college student does when she

leaves home for a completely new setting. When I begin to feel sick from social situations I
use the techniques I learned in middle school, but I don't let this feeling of apprehension
stop me from creating and maintaining friendships, attending campus events, and enjoying
my time at the University of Michigan.

Unlike my social anxiety, which has been lessened due to my comfortable social

standing at college and my confidence that I can effectively control these emotions, I'm still
unsettled by talk of the afterlife. I won't have the answers to my questions until I die, and
this uncertainty is enough to produce anxiety. My way of dealing with these thoughts when
they present themselves is to focus on being present today and not worry about the
inevitability of death and what follows it. Religion has helped me, but not in the way one
might think. I share my parents' Christianity because love is the key principal emphasized
throughout the Bible and the teachings they follow. I don't focus on the judgment or the
condemnation some religious aficionados preach about week after week, but I instead try
to be kind to everyone: my best friends and my family, as well as the coffee baristas or the
post office workers I encounter over the course of a typical day. I sign up for clubs with
philanthropic goals, I invest my time in my relationships with friends, and I plan on
pursuing a career in the public service sector.

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This connection to other people, this feeling of a shared humanity, is what keeps me

grounded in the present rather than obsessing about the future. It is these relationships
that constantly remind me why life is meaningful, why living isn't just a stagnant process of
waiting to find out what comes next. When my anxiety flares up, I recognize the feeling of
fear and then I use eye movements or pat my hands back and forth on my legs or tap my
feet repetitively against the ground and I make it through the feeling. Through this process
I acknowledge I don't have control over what happens when life ends but that I do have
control over my experiences and the connections I form while I still have life to live. I do
this until I am no longer stuck between fearing death and rationalizing life.
_________________________________________________________________________________________________________
*Denotes Name Change

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