I asked fellow anxiety explorer Amanda Stern (you may also know her as the writer of the book behind Adam Sandler’s new Netflix movie “You Are So Not Invited to my Bat Mitzvah”) if I could write a post about breakdowns for her How to Live newsletter.
Amanda and I share a love of emotional investigation, a ceaseless curiosity about mental health, and a desire for community and clarity in the treatment of anxiety disorders. She said yes! Here is how the piece begins…
I’m the Chief of Staff of Pinterest’s innovation lab and have spent my career in technology as a writer, producer, and product builder.
At age 39, in the middle of a frantic run of startup jobs, I found myself bedridden with migraines and fainting on my morning commute. I was curled up in a chair, wracked with pain when my neurologist told me that my physical symptoms were a sign of anxiety and diagnosed me with Generalized Anxiety Disorder.
I felt a surprising sense of relief and peace. What she was saying felt true and right. After living with my new diagnosis for a couple of days, I wondered, “Why didn’t I know this earlier? What were the signs?”
That’s when I realized there had been a sign in my twenties. A big one. I just hadn’t listened to it….
To read the rest of this post and see a photo I took in the middle of my dark experience, click here.
(While you’re there, subscribe to How to Live! It’s great!)
As usual, thank you for being part of this conversation, fellow voyagers. ❤️
I love this piece so much. My journey with BPD has brought on a variety of “breakdowns” and I also felt the same strange relief when I was diagnosed.
Telling these stories is so important. I’m in the beginning stages of my journey in sharing my story and making sense of it all, but it totally resonates that healing trauma comes from “creating a relational home”.
Also -- I LOVED the Bat Mitzvah movie on Netflix. As someone with two daughters I’m such a sucker for any story of two sisters and a lost/loving dad. Sandlers kids were so awesome and it looked like they had a lot of fun as a family on set.
Great feature.
Im so intrigued by the “nervous breakdown” catch all. It’s been something almost like lore referred to in enigmatic old stories of a relative without any real knowledge of what that means because the the language was non existent at the time. As an adult who has been informing myself more, I often wonder if this type of thing was more high escalated panic disorders. And because people couldn’t deal with it and didn’t have the tools it got classified as “nervous breakdown”
Unrelated, I happened to watch the first two episodes of “Depp vs Heard” on Netflix. Don’t think less of me please. Anyways Depp is no stranger to substance abuse and not surprisingly he has a family history of mental health challenges and he talks about how his mother used to take “nerve pills” that he was asked to give her from a young age. At some point him his tweens he was having increasingly difficult unmanageable feelings and didn’t know where to turn so he started snagging a pill everytime he gave his mother one.