Chapter 11

In college, I was diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder, or GAD, for short.

It shouldn’t have come as a surprise to me, but it did, even though I’d been anxious for most of my life, worrying excessively about everything, so that at one point, it became a running joke between my parents – how once when I was fifteen, I’d gotten so fixated on how the ceiling fans in our house could randomly fall on us at any time that I had constant panic attacks, which only let up when they all got replaced by standing fans.

That was one of many examples they had of me going off the deep end over an event that wasn’t likely to occur, which in turn meant my GAD held me prisoner, though years of involuntary practice meant I’d gotten good at managing it even as I went undiagnosed.

All of that fell apart over my third year, when my grandmother, Marie (who I’d been close to), died in her sleep.

I became wracked with a debilitating