I had been experiencing long periods of not sleeping, so the doctor attempted prescribing sleeping aids, not knowing at the time that the insomnia was due to manic highs. In one of my sleepwalking episodes, I caused a domestic violence situation.
I experienced sleep walking, as a side effect to medications. I would lay awake in fear and not get a wink of sleep. It was not until I was twenty-one that I started to encounter a shift in my sleeping patterns. I was happy to be able to treat something, maybe I wasn’t crazy after all.īecause I didn’t want to burden anyone with what I was going through, when I met with the doctor, I accepted the diagnosis handed down to me at this time. With my internal medicine doctor at my side, I was able to begin treating my anxiety and depression. After this incident and many others, I worked with a doctor to receive my diagnosis and started to treat my symptoms. At this moment I thought, this is it, there is something terribly wrong with me. One day at work the phone rang abruptly, it startled me and sent me into panic mode. My first panic attack occurred at this time. My anxiety took a turn for the worst when I was nineteen after my DUI. This created an unbalanced feeling my heart would pound rapidly and often I felt as though I would black out, my body shaking uncontrollably. As a teen, I always worried about what other kids were saying about me or doing behind my back. I started battling anxiety and depression as a young adult. I didn’t even recognize it as a problem when I lost jobs, my license, my freedom it didn’t hit me until my physical health actually took a turn for the worst and I started to experience detox symptoms the first time, but this didn’t happen right away. I was young and this is what young adults did, I never thought of it as a problem, even when I felt depressed. I recognized this as a pattern but I also associated it with adulthood. This is when the depression started to sink in I felt all alone in this world. I would come home from my day job or my second job, that I had in the evenings, and drink alone. I wanted to prove that nothing would stand in my way.Īlcohol became a pattern in my life because I allowed it to. I wanted to prove that I was better than what my life had unfolded into over my first nineteen years. Guilt would eat at me every day which turned into a vicious cycle of depression, drinking more, which then led to more depression. This question repeated in my life over the next fifteen years, how am I in trouble again?ĭuring this first bout with the law, I felt like a loser, a failure. All I could think is how am I already in trouble with the law? One hundred pounds and standing at 5’2, I found myself in front of Judge Trebetts, as I listened to the sentence being handed down to me. In July of 2005, I found myself standing in front of a judge at the age of nineteen for my first DUI.