I Am The Face Of

In the United States about 78 million adults have high blood pressure, which can lead to heart and kidney damage.

This is her story.

If we're getting technical about it, my chart says "Primary Idiopathic Hypertension." Translated, that means "We have no idea why your blood pressure is high. Here are some pills."

I've had high blood pressure since I was eighteen.

In the beginning, no one even tried to figure out why. My doctor at the time just looked at my readings, said it probably explained my headaches, and sent me home with some medication. It worked, so I took it and didn't think anything about it.

Several years later, another doctor told me how unusual it was for someone to have high blood pressure at my age and proceeded to do every test she could think of. Cortisol tests, an MRI to make sure I didn't have a shunt, and metabolic blood tests galore. They all came back completely normal and the doctor wrote my prescription as always and sent me home. I think she was actually a little disappointed.

This has gone on for years now and I manage it by taking my medication (three kinds now!), watching my sodium and caffeine, and exercising. The only thing that seems to make a difference is the medication, though. As always.

My favorite part about having high blood pressure is the body-shaming. I have lost count of how many doctors have told me "if you just lost some weight your blood pressure would be normal."

I wish it was that easy.

When I was first diagnosed, I was just this side of underweight. At one point I weighed well over two hundred pounds. When I lost sixty, my blood pressure didn't change. Not one point. I try to explain this to the doctors and they just don't listen. None of them. And it feels just great to be told how fat you are when the medication you're on is what caused the weight gain in the first place.

Judging from the way my life has gone so far, I'll never be able to completely go off my medication. If I were to become a champion marathon runner, I would probably still be on it. I don't love it, but there it is.

For the rest of my life I'll have to have blood tests to check my kidneys, eye exams to check my retinas, and use my home pressure monitor to make sure I'm still in the right range because untreated hypertension can cause all kinds of horrors. Sometimes if my readings are off, I get dizzy and disoriented. Sometimes I get headaches. Occasionally my feet and hands will swell.

The point is, you can never tell what someone else has going on inside them. I hear "You have high blood pressure? But you're so young!" all the time. I didn't ask for it. I certainly don't enjoy it. But I can do my best to control it.

I am the face of high blood pressure.

Now where did those pills go?

Sometimes, we at the Band know that part of owning who you are is admitting it  to the world. It's one reason why we at The Band work tirelessly to  break down stigmas and find the ties that connect us all, the ties that remind us that we are none of us alone.

Please join us in standing tall and proud as we tell the world who we are.

What are you, The Band, The Face Of?

I am fairly open, I am aware that the only way people are going to understand various things is to have people speak out about them to be the face of them.

I am fine being the face of things; I proudly wear my labels as an ACOA, rape/incest survivor, special needs parent, non-traditional student, and self-injurer. But, I have spent years hiding, pretty well denying, a label that I should be wearing. It's a label that gives me butterflies as I sit here getting ready to type it.

Addict.

I am, in no uncertain terms, an addict. Yet, when asked what I am the face of or talking about me and my past I never use that term. In fact, I often comment on how my family has history (a strong history of) addiction, I just fail to mention I am part of that history.

But, I can't hide it any longer. And I am not even sure why I hide it; I mean I know why, I am scared of what people will think and say. But, why? I am not ashamed or worried about anything else in my past, though a lot of the dumb things I chose to do occurred or were a result of not being sober.

I spent much of my youth from about 14-15 using pain medication and alcohol. I mean pain medication was easy to get because I was an active kid who was prone to injury. I often went to the doc for an injury and they would write me a script. While I took them "as prescribed" I would take them too long when I actually no longer needed them.

I would find a way to get different medication so I could "alternate" and maintain the high longer. I would toss in alcohol when I could because my parents were open about alcohol, that it wasn't taboo. My parents didn't know about a lot of the drinking that occurred nor the extent to which it happened.

It made me numb, I made dumb decisions on it. I hurt myself and others, but I still doubt that many people of my youth realize what I was doing. After all most addicts are good at manipulating the situation.

Yet, still this label has been one I denied and disowned which in the long run did as much harm to me and my psyche as if I had denied my own left arm. Because this label, being an addict, is as much a part of me as my left arm.

What baffles me is when a friend slips or enters recovery I am the first to be there.  Never saying a word about my issues, I offer to go to meetings and have a "safe space" at my home. All the while biting my tongue and not finding the camaraderie I could have, should have.

So, what brought me to the point of revealing this layer? Well, I slipped and fell HARD this week. We have been having lots of struggles, mostly financial, and this isn't an excuse just a telling of the events. I ran out of coping skills, ultimately that is what happened, I ran out of fucking coping skills.

I started popping again, finding a way to take the pain medication every hour. Never letting my feet touch the ground, so to speak, for about a week. I would pull into work and start calculating when I could leave and get home to take another pill. I would take a pill and immediately look at the clock and figure out when I could take another. This whole time rationalizing that I was "taking it as prescribed." Technically I wasn't taking any more pills than what the bottle said, never mind I wasn't in pain.

I finally told hubby two nights ago that I snuck a pill in yesterday morning, then he made them disappear (honestly, I wasn't here so I have no idea about the disappearance--other than I asked him to get them someplace I don't know of) and bought me pomegranate juice, which I love. I still have been holding close to my secret.

Ultimately I chose to peel open this layer because I can no longer be silent, because the silence is killing me. It's allowing my illness to fester and then allows it to be fed. And I know that's not okay. I need a support network more now then ever, one that I know "in person" doesn't exist but one that I know I have here "online" and far away.

I know many of my friends will recoil, wondering how it could be. I don't know how or why, I just know it is. I just know I can't go on denying such a huge part of me. I need to find the fellowship, I need to be able to reach out when I am falling down that black hole. I need help figuring out what this means for me, my life, and how this slip is going to color my world from now on.

I have Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder.

You wouldn't think so, just by looking at me. Hell, most people in my daily life don't know. Surely you can't tell by looking at my home. It certainly doesn't look like the stereotype tells us it should. (Thank you, Hollywood.)

I have not always had OCD tendencies, I wasn't born this way.

I developed OCD as a coping mechanism for dealing with my untreated anxiety when I was a teenager. 

In my family, we don't talk about mental illness. It's not okay to talk about needing help or that something might not be right in your head. I was raised that if the doctor said I had anxiety, well then, I just needed to pull on my big girl panties and deal with it. Having a mental illness meant I was just being a sissy. 

So when my doctor did tell me that I had anxiety at the ripe old age of 15, my parents looked at me with exasperation and left me alone. There was no therapy or anti-anxiety medication. I was just supposed to deal.

I tried a number of things that failed before falling into a nasty neurotic spiral. I can't pinpoint exactly how it happened but I can distinctly recall spending an entire weekend deep cleaning my parents' house. I scrubbed the grout in the bathroom with an old toothbrush until my hands were blistered from the bleach. I cleaned the stove inside and out. I even alphabetized and cataloged all of our VHS movies. (We had over 500.)

Of course, no one said anything of my weird behavior. My family turned a blind eye as I tried vainly to exert control over my surroundings. 

In hindsight, I know I did it because I desperately needed something I could control. My mind was spinning, reeling, and I was lost. Since I couldn't control my thoughts or the paths they took me down, I cleaned. I organized. I mated all the unmatched socks in our laundry room.

So why doesn't my house look clean and organized now?

A number of reasons, really.

I have RA, which makes deep cleaning difficult. I also have a lot of stuff. Or rather, my fiance and I have a bit more than our one-bedroom apartment should be able to hold. 

But mostly, I have a slightly better grasp on my anxiety. I don't have huge tailspins anymore. Well, not often.

When I do? I have a few other coping mechanisms in my arsenal to employ. 

I sing. I craft. I write. 

But sometimes, I clean.

I am the face of OCD. 

Forty million adults in the US have an anxiety disorder. This is her story.

Some days it seems like all I can do is breathe. Sometimes it’s the anxiety that overwhelms me, paralyzing me by being too much all at once. Other days it is the depression that consumes me by taking everything worthwhile away, separating it from me as if by a glass wall. I know everything remains out there, but all that is left is still and rotten as if I am a corpse who yet breathes. Those shadows and fears will choke me if I let them; sometimes the worst of them are made of good things.

The anxiety is particularly frightening. It is as though I am over-sensitized to everything: any breath of air, comment, or even a thought is too much and I end up shaking. The terrifying thing is that I can be happy and still very anxious. I know I have a happy baseline but it seems as though every new feeling and moment of happiness is too much and it turns to pain. The best analogy is when you have your hand in cold water; for awhile it's just cold but if you leave it there, you feel it start to burn even though the water is the same temperature.

The anxiety leaves me frightened of everything, so frightened that I cannot tell you what I am frightened of. I may start out anxious over a specific thing, but eventually it generalizes and becomes so overwhelming that it seems I can never get over it. The only way is to conquer pieces at a time, over years, in order to get over the mountain that is my fear. The anxiety leaves me quietly cowering in a corner, deathly still in an effort to somehow escape from the fear.

The depression quiets me in a different way. While the anxiety leaves me screaming inside, the depression takes away my voice; more than that, it takes away my desire to voice my pain. The wavy glass jar that comes down separates me from any feeling at all. I cannot even say that I am sad when depressed - it would be more accurate to say that I just exist. I can see the rest of me trying to get through the glass, but my drive and ambition are on the other side so I cannot help them get through. I sit quietly and watch, not feeling much of anything while depressed.

In a way, I am thankful for the depression. It leaves me void, but satisfied in some sick way. All of my wants and needs are outside of the jar so I am content to sit inside slowly decaying. Eventually the jar lifts and once again I am free to see the world. This is the cruelest curse of depression - you end up letting your life decay because you don’t have any need to fix it. When the jar lifts, I end up grieving the life I had instead of the mess my life has become.

The sunshine comes and warms me, but that sunshine is a double-edged sword. I know the shadows that haunt me would be invisible if not for the light. People talked about the black being bad, but for me the very worst things were always grey, somewhere in between good and evil - those are the most believable. The shadows that grow as you pay them attention, the fears that have a lot of truth to them are by far the worst... When mired in chaos, my mind grasps for logic and reason - the fears that are based in reality become the most insurmountable problems. It feels satisfying that the scariest things can only be seen by the light; the wonderful warm happy beam that overpowers the shadows nevertheless fuels them, as well.

Out of all that wreckage comes the full sunshine, and when it shines, all of those wicked shadows I see as reality when depressed or anxious are proven to be just small tiny things that can be managed with care. In the light, no matter how big or scary they are, I can see them for their flaws. The sunshine warms me from the inside out and reminds me why it is a wonderful day to be alive. As I smile until my cheeks hurt, I soak in the beauty because I know there will be all too little of it for now, but it will always come back again.

None of us are alone.

Sometimes, we at the Band know that part of owning who you are is admitting it to the world.

It's one reason why we at The Band work tirelessly to break down stigmas and find the ties that connect us all, the ties that remind us that we are none of us alone. Please join us in standing tall and proud as we tell the world who we are.

What are you, The Band, The Face Of?

I am the Face of chronic migraines.

Migraines rule my life. I must take a daily medication to control them. Without it, I get migraines twice a week, minimum, and can't function as a normal college student.

I will likely be on this medication until I haven't had a migraine in six months or I'm pregnant, whichever comes first.

I am the Face of paroxysmal supraventricular tachycardia (PSVT).

I can't run too fast or work out too hard without my heart beating too fast at the wrong times. I wish I could run like everyone else. I wish I could be a ballerina like I wanted.

I am the Face of OCD.

I have tiny, constant things that I have to do to be okay.

When a necklace broke that I wear every day, I nearly had an anxiety attack.

Odd numbers bother me a little more than normal.

I know, in my family, it means that I am probably a carrier for Tourette's Syndrome. If I ever have a son, he will likely have some form of Tourette's.

I am the Face of low self-esteem.

I am a victim of sexual harassment that has left me a little broken.

I am the Face of healing.

I am also the Face of love. I volunteer. I am going to be a teacher. I am a part of the most amazing sorority. My friends, family, and partner love me. I am blessed, so very blessed. These things help me get through day-to-day life.

I am the face of so many things, but they do not define me. They are part of me. I am open about them because I hope that others will be inspired to share their stories.

I have so much hope - my migraines may go away still, my self-esteem may get a boost, my someday son may not have Tourette's or he may have a form that he can control, and I may grow out of PSVT because I am still young.

I am the Face of hope because I have love and I give love.

And I? I am With The Band.