You Need to Get Help: A Shameless Work in Progress

By Ellie McAfee

In Ellie McAfee's debut work, YOU NEED TO GET HELP: A Shameless Work in Progress, the author uncovers the mental health stigmas that many adults, herself included, carry with them from their childhood. Wanting others to feel comfortable enough to seek out resources, treatment, and boundaries, she sets out to spread one underlyi

• Language: English
• Publisher: New Degree Press
• Release date: May 4, 2022
• ISBN: 9798885041881

Book preview

Introduction:

Heroes and Villains

There are no villains in this book.

I am not the hero of this book.

This is not a heroes and villains story. It is not the young heroine who defends herself against these particular people who get in the way on her journey, like the final battle in a superhero movie. There is not a dichotomy of good versus evil. There is no light side versus dark side. The people in this book are some of the people I cherish most in the entire world. They are not the villains of this book because there are no villains in this book.

You Need to Get Help is a memoir retracing the past of my mental health and sharing the moments that led to finding the acceptance and help I needed. I guess, technically, I am the protagonist, but I am often my own antagonist at the same time. I have lashed out at those who tried to help me. I have pushed away friends and family offering me a hand. I have said mean things to the people I love most because so many emotions were pent up and bubbled within me like an angry tea pot. In these stories, you will see selfishness and cruelty, disillusion, destruction, and distrust. But I believe the best way to make progress is to be honest, and when I make progress for myself, I make progress for the people around me as well.

I wrote You Need to Get Help for me as much as I did for you. I wrote it to try to solve the question my classmates and family members were so keen on asking me. So where did it all come from? and in the less sensitive moments, Why are you like this? I wrote it to help others like me get a jumpstart on their own recovery journey. I hope it will help anyone who has heard similar questions like the ones above. I’m hoping my stories, while not completely identical in their specifics, will contain enough universal themes that they can be useful to everyone else too.

The night I first lost control, in November of 2020, my creative nonfiction workshop classmates asked the questions above in a not-so-veiled manner after reading one of the stories that makes up an early chapter of this book. They loved the writing, thought the storytelling was superb, but they wanted to know where it all came from. Why was I so afraid to be honest and vulnerable? I wanted to know too; so badly it drove me off a cliff and into the deep end. I have spent the last year thrashing my way back to the shoreline in awkward, uncomfortable strokes of doggy-paddle swimming. It has not been easy, and yet, I believe I am writing this book back on dry land.

During my whole childhood, I was missing a key piece to understanding myself and what was going on inside my head. I knew nothing about mental health. I had never heard the words anxiety or depression. I thought I was just crazy. I grew up trying to make sure everything was good, perfect, and okay, so I wouldn’t come off as melodramatic, sensitive, or a hypochondriac: words I was oh-so-familiar with hearing.

Since then, even with that missing piece, an official diagnosis, and professional help, I wasn’t completely relieved, because now, I had a new thing to hide from. From what I heard in my home environments and in the media, mental health problems were a bad thing. I was desperate to hide it from my loved ones and escape from it any way I could, so no one would see all the issues lying beneath the surface.

Unfortunately, during the online school semester of the Covid pandemic, a lot of emotional triggers happened for me. This time I couldn’t escape from any of those emotions, and worse still, I could not hide them from my roommates while we were stuck inside our apartment day after day. I snapped. And following that break, I had to retrace my steps to try and figure out where it all went wrong. I had to figure out where I could go from there.

There are no villains in this book…except maybe mental illness, as cheesy as that may sound. Except the society that required you to look normal and labelled people with any hint of mental and emotional problems a crazy person; labelled you as weak.

I spent much of my life trying to prove to everyone around me that I was okay—I wasn’t weak. I’m not too sensitive; I’m not a hypochondriac. I’m not trying to fake my way out of school and life. I can manage and handle everything around me.

But this book is a testament to the fact that honesty and openness are my strengths and can be yours, too. Admitting I’m not okay will be my saving grace. The stigma I witnessed and took part in kept me from truly being able to embrace and explore this whole other side of me. Once I was able to explore it, I got wildly stronger, more confident, brave, and healthy. This strength through acceptance is what I hope to give to the reader.

There is no right and wrong in this book. There is stigma, but I hope its inclusion only serves to release myself and others from it. There is no judgment. This is my truth.

And it is in my truth that my dilemma, and my stigma, emerges.

I didn’t get diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) until my freshman year of college. I hadn’t even heard the term anxiety until my junior year of high school, which is astounding and embarrassing for the private education system, seeing as one in three adolescents could qualify at some point for an anxiety disorder (NIMH, 2003).

I prefer to use the term GAD because it makes everything sound more real. More legit. GAD is a mental disorder recognized by the DSM-V. Plus, having to whine to someone, "It’s because of my anxiety," sounds like the punchline of a sick joke I don’t want to keep telling.

We, as a society, have turned that phrase into the joke. The way we approach conversations, or more accurately, do not approach conversations, is damaging. It creates a brooding, unescapable stigma that mental health is a trivial problem only the weakest fail to conquer.

I’m always trying to earn my anxiety, and yet I never can. I grew up with close relatives and loved ones, friends and companions. I never had to worry about where my food was coming from next, and I always had a roof above my head. I worried constantly that my worries were silly, stupid, and meaningless: unfounded fears of my friends and family deciding they don’t love me anymore, turning their back on me, and kicking me to the curb did not cut it. It sounds downright ridiculous. Hence my dilemma is this: I don’t always believe I deserve the anxiety, and I know it, believe me I do, and I am terrified everyone else knows it, too.

I’m anxious about being anxious. My leg shakes the most and my heart starts to beat the fastest when I’m relaxing on the couch watching a movie and I get lost in the worry that my friends will see I’m worrying. When I tell someone, I’m feeling nervous. When I must justify behavior with the fact that I’m anxious about something, anything.

I’m worried, right now, about the pandemic, my family, schoolwork, testing, my friendships, and the future. But there’s nothing I worry about more than someone breaking down the façade I’ve built up and seeing just how crazy I really am.

But within these pages is the honest truth I have previously not allowed myself to admit. It’s the pain and deliberate disapproval of my mental health that tried to belly up and consume me. The stories within these pages are my work in progress. I am a work in progress, and we are all works in progress. As you read further, you will see the work and you will see the progress, but you will also see the struggle. The hardship and the pain. There cannot be work and there cannot be progress without that beginning. Without all the suffering and heartache. I am trying to be proud of my work. I am trying to be okay with the progress I have made. Rome wasn’t built in a day, and recovery won’t be achieved in one either.

I am a work in progress, and I am learning to be okay with that.

PART 1 —

LANGUAGE MATTERS

Chapter One.

Funhouse

I’m standing in a carnival tent. Red, white, and yellow stripes stretch all the way to the ceiling. I follow them upwards with my eyes, and my head goes dizzy and my stomach twists as I reach the top of the tent. I bring my eyes away from the blinding colors and turn my face from the loud circus music, and when I reorient myself, I’m facing a mirror. One of those funhouse kinds that distort your image and roll your body into wonky shapes; that turn the surrounding landscape into crazy, mismatched ideas of what the world is really like. I stand on my tiptoes and my body contracts; I bend my knees and my body elongates. Like magic, like a fantasy, an unwound mockery of what the world actually shows you.

Because when you are looking into a funhouse mirror, you can never really be sure what to believe.

One week during my junior year of college, I sent Anna, my roommate, nighttime apology texts four days in a row.

I lay in my bed, covers drawn up all the way to my chin with the lights out, the perfect still life painting of a restful sleep. And yet, my thoughts wrestled me from one side of my body to the other. I turned onto my back, then my front, back to my side. No position felt right. The sounds of my breath weren’t calming to me as they normally were; they rustled around in my chest and pounded against my sternum. Curled up on my left side, I thought maybe I had misread the situation, but as I turned once again to my right, I knew I had not been misreading anything. So, unable to fall asleep until I righted my wrongs from the evening, I typed out a quick text message.

Sorry if I was annoying you tonight. I love you so much.

Within seconds of sending, Anna responded, and I held my breath as I unlocked my phone to see the message.

Oh, you weren’t annoying me tonight! I love you!

And though I did release my breath, I was not able to sleep after her message. I did not believe her. I could not believe her.

Because I had heard it, sensed it, felt it that night. The way the tone of her voice wavered in the air when she talked to me. Responded to my questions with clipped snappy answers. Refrained from laughing when I made a joke and avoided eye contact with me.

My foot tapped a staccato rhythm beneath my covers as I bounced ideas around my room. Maybe Anna was a little annoyed that I had hovered while she was cooking dinner. Or irritated that I barged into her room while she was doing work earlier in the afternoon. Maybe she was just a little sick of me today. Sick of everyone. Tired of studying for the three exams I knew she had that week and didn’t have time for my nonsense. Either way, an apology never hurt, and besides, she had said plain and clear: nothing was wrong.

The next day was similar. I knew something was up with us. I could feel the tension in the air. It permeated off the walls in the kitchen and the living area. It hovered above me as I got dressed to go to class.

Once again, the tension followed me all the way to my bed at night. I typed a similar message as I did the previous evening. A few minutes later, I received the same response.

Nothing is wrong! Sleep well, love you!

Sorry for bothering you again, haha. I’m sorry, sleep well. My fingers rested on my phone keyboard. I restrained myself from hitting send.

Two more nights of texts later, Anna brought it up with me when we were sitting on the couch watching a television show. You have to stop sending me apology texts. We’re good, I promise, I love you. You have nothing to be sorry for.

The stripes of this tent are red,