Anxiety disorder and other labels

A few days ago, I found out I have an anxiety disorder. And that made me feel all the feelings (fear, inadequacy, shame just to name a few)🥺because it sounds so serious. ⁠

I've had emetophobia (fear of vomit) since I was about 3 years old. When I tell people about it they say, “oh yeah, I hate being sick too”. But the thing is, it's not just a hate. It’s an intense and irrational fear. It's a fear that saw me running out of classrooms at school, sitting in panic for hours on long school trips, jumping off the tube at night when surrounded by drunk people, making my boyfriend sleep out on the balcony all night because I was afraid he’d be sick after drinking one too many beers. I’ve missed out on many things too - breaks away, nights out and experiences because, ‘what if?’. Its panic attacks and constant paranoia about things and situations most people don’t even recognise.

I wash my hands dozens of times everyday to guard against viruses and bacteria. Autumn and winter is like navigating a minefield as I live in perpetual fear of Norovirus. I avoid touching door hands and stair bannisters and using buttons on parking machines, card readers and just about anything else some other person might have touched. Eating out always results in me wondering if I’ll get food poisoning and travel is an obstacle course of hoping not to be near children (too prone to motion sickness), people who drink (because alcohol), or just about anyone else. Every twinge I have in my belly results in my spiralling into a mind-strudel of whether I’m going to end up sick. This is my life. Every. Single. Day.

I’ve used the word ‘anxiety’ to help people understand what it is I’m talking about for years. To explain why I’d rather pay extra to travel alone in a taxi than on a packed bus. Or why I’ll swiftly cross the road while walking through town on a Friday or Saturday night to avoid someone who looks too drunk. Or to explain why I don’t like getting public transport on certain holidays, in certain places or with certain people. So it shouldn’t have been a surprise to see emetophobia being classed as an anxiety disorder at all. But it was.

Seeing those two words together made me look at myself differently. I’m supposed to be a yoga teacher, taking about mindfulness and sharing tools to deal with things such as anxiety and stress, calming the nervous system and all of those things. And then I realised, that it’s just a label. It’s not as if anything major changed in that second, apart from finding out about a new classification. It doesn’t change my ability to navigate my life, or to help others navigate theirs. If anything, it maybe even helps. Because I really do understand how it feels to have your body do something before the rest of you realises, all in an effort to ‘protect’ itself. I know what panic feels like. I understand how it feels to will your mind to stay rational.

Of course, diagnoses are more than just labels, and I’m not dealing with a serious mental illness. But I do wonder how much damage is sometimes done when we over-identify with the labels society puts on us. Whether that’s the label of panic disorder, mother, wife, boss, celiac, vegan or anything else. Labels put us in a box and while, on one hand they can help us find a tribe, they can also separate us. When, in the end, we’re all the same.

Any label, whatever it is, is just a part OF you. It is not the whole you. No matter how life-altering that label might be.

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