I’m Anxy — But I’m Not the Only One
The personal story behind starting Anxy Magazine
by Indhira Rojas
I awoke suddenly with a tightness in my chest. It must have been around 3 a.m. I could feel my heart pounding really fast and my mind racing with desperate thoughts. As I lay there, looking at the pitch black ceiling, a question emerged: “What am I doing?”
At the time I was teaching interaction design at CCA, running a design studio in San Francisco, and starting a co-working space abroad, in my home town of Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, with a few local friends. My days were spent running around from one thing to another without even an instant for myself. I was busy, busy, busy — crazy-making busy.
I was also tired. Exhausted.
Who was I doing all this for?
My parents are not the type who put pressure on me or try to dictate what I should or shouldn’t do with my professional life. My husband has always been supportive of all my endeavors. No one was forcing me to do any of the things I was doing. I chose to stay busy.
And suddenly it came to me…
I felt worthless.
I was trying to prove to myself — to the world — that I was worth something. I wanted people to see me. To validate me. I was trying desperately to avoid any moment of silence. Of quiet.
Quiet was suffocating to me. It filled me with a huge emptiness I didn’t know what to do with. I had already managed so many years of my life suffering.
Most of us, when we survive, feel overwhelming worthlessness.Yet it’s one of the hardest feelings to pinpoint, because it can feel like so many other things: depression, anxiety, sadness, workaholism. It masks itself too well.
I wasn’t able to fall asleep again that night. In a miserable attempt of self-care, over the course of the following months, I downsized my commitments: I closed out the studio, concluded my last semester of teaching and sold all the assets of my co-working business in the Dominican Republic.
It took me two more years of burnout, two more years of relationship struggles, and two more years of feeling invisible to understand how much my traumatic childhood experiences impacted my day-to-day interactions.
I’m a survivor of child sexual abuse. An abuse that started at the heart-breaking age of 7 and spanned years. The context of the sexual abuse was a toxic environment of emotional neglect in which I lived until my late teenage years, when I had the independence to move away.
Sometimes, I don’t know what was more tragic: the neglect or the sexual abuse.
I’ve spent the past year and a half getting the help and support I needed. I’ve been diagnosed with Complex PTSD and Generalized Anxiety Disorder, which has brought a lot of clarity for me. With the help of therapy, I was able to identify the toxic behaviors I learned and the negative messages I received. I was able to connect my caretakers’ actions with symptoms of undiagnosed Borderline Personality Disorder. And slowly, I’ve come to see how much of a parentified-child I was and in some ways continue to be.
I’m now aware of my hyper-vigilance, my people-pleasing tendencies, my potential triggers. I’m more educated on the impact of transgenerational trauma in my family, and I’ve come to see its roots in domestic and social violence. It’s a lot to grieve.
Most people who know me don’t know anything about these aspects of my life. I’m a high-functioning, get-shit-done creative professional, a very adaptive response to my trauma. Workaholism is my coping mechanism. It goes unnoticed…because it is so highly rewarded in our society as intense productivity, regardless of whether it’s at the expense of the mental health illnesses it obscures.
We’ve been taught to think that stories like mine are the exception. That trauma is an irregular aspect of our lives and that those to whom this happens are in unusually unfortunate life circumstances. But that can’t be further from the truth.
Every day millions of seemingly ‘normal people’ suffer in silence. Whether they are hurting in response to tragic events similar to mine, or other equally impactful experiences, these seemingly ‘normal people’ are riddled with so much pain and shame that, like me, they work hard to make sure no one ever notices.
We are afraid of being labeled broken. We are afraid of being called frauds. We are afraid of being made to feel lesser. We would much rather bury our weaknesses, our fears, our struggles, and let them corrode us (through our depression, our alcoholism, our drug abuse, our inner-critic and self-abandonment) than break the silence and expose our true vulnerable selves.
As a culture focused on solutions and perfection, we fail to acknowledge the impact trauma has on our lives at both the individual and collective level. We won’t let ourselves grieve, openly and honestly, unless we have permission. We’ve grown accustomed to pretending everything is perfect; we’re all working so hard to make each other believe we have our shit together. But the reality is that we don’t. We’re just carrying appearances rather than openly discussing what’s really going on inside.
We need to break the silence.