My Mate Anxiety

Anxiety has caused I Quit Sugar crusader SARAH WILSON incredible pain in her life, but rather than viewing the disorder as a monster that must be medicated, her approach is to see it as a thing of beauty — her ticket to wisdom and maturity

I was diagnosed with childhood anxiety and insomnia at 12, then bulimia in my late teens, then obsessive-compulsive disorder shortly thereafter, then depression and hypomania and then, in my early twenties, manic depression, or bipolar disorder as it’s now called.

I’ve seen about three dozen psychiatrists and psychotherapists and spiritual healers, generally twice a week for years at a time. I was medicated from 17 until I was 28 with anti-epileptic, anti-anxiety and anti-psychotic drugs. I’ve waded through CBT, NLP, hypnotherapy, Freudian analysis, spiritual coaching and sand play. For long, lonely slabs I’ve had to step out of the slipstream of life, missing school, dropping out of university twice, quitting jobs and unable to leave the house for up to a year at a time. Also twice.

I can now tell you it was all anxiety. All of it. Just different flavours.

But at 27 I decided to go my own way. I was living in Melbourne, writing restaurant reviews and celebrity features for the Sunday paper. I also wrote a weekly opinion column. I’d write it Thursday night and had the most marvellous time, under the pump, with an outlet for my thoughts on homeless people, feminism and the reasons men always power-walk in pairs. I’d recently split from my first boyfriend and was living with a fun artist in a South Yarra terrace that was to be demolished in coming months. We wrote on the walls, ivy grew through the kitchen, we cooked stew. And I was on a conscious mission to explore sex. I came to sex late and had only had one sexual partner. I was ready to play; it was a fun experiment and one not based on pain or compromise. Things felt aligned and touched by some rippin’ flow.