Sitting in the cafeteria at Fargo’s Agassiz High School in sixth grade, I was suddenly overwhelmed by a feeling that shook me to the core.
It was like I wasn’t real. I felt like I was suddenly living in a dream, cut off from the world around me. Almost like you’re watching a movie. I had no idea what I was experiencing and was consumed by the fear that something was terribly wrong. Was I losing my mind? Did he have a brain tumor? Am I stuck feeling this way forever?
It wouldn’t be until college that I would learn that what I was experiencing was something called “depersonalization/derealization.”
This experience had a profound impact on my mental health and began a process of being hyper-aware of everything that was happening to me internally. Every thought, emotion, and sensation in my body felt magnified.
A palpitation of the heart made me fear that I was having a heart attack. A swollen lymph node made me deeply afraid that I had cancer. The slightest hint of dizziness triggered a panic that I was going to pass out. This internal noise was a constant fixture for much of my life in middle school, middle school, high school, and college.
In college I finally started to learn more about “anxiety” and worked with a therapist for the first time to develop tools to manage it.
After college, I began a career in broadcast journalism as an anchor and reporter, eventually landing at KARE 11 in Minneapolis. As my career progressed, anxiety stayed with me. The mental noise that used to focus on health-related anxiety began to shift towards things like relationships and my own character. I began to struggle with panic attacks on live television and also began to understand more deeply how obsessive-compulsive symptoms were part of my story.
In 2019, after going off the air to care for my mental health, I publicly shared my story. Since then, I have had the honor of speaking about mental health with the public, both in person and online. I launched the program “Take what is served. Leave the Rest” as a way to provide a safe space for us to have conversations about mental health, and I also started graduate school in mental health counseling.
My intention from the beginning is to help others feel less alone. When you struggle with an active and sticky mind, it can often feel like you’re the only one. I truly believe that when someone has the courage to share their story, we all get a little stronger. I hope to be a small piece in that process for others.
I still have difficult mental health moments, and yet I am so thankful that I have more tools in my mental toolbox to manage them.
Together, let’s travel forward. One moment at a time.
Visit our podcast page to listen to “Take what’s good. Leave the rest”
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