When Larissa met Ian at college in 2005, she never dreamed she'd one day be his wife ... and his caretaker. After a tragic accident left Ian without the ability to speak, walk or care for himself, she did what any woman in love would do: she married him.
"There will always be the older white woman in Walmart who stared at us with sheer disgust, or the African-American mother who looked at us and just shook her head.”
I saw the eight-year-old with paralyzing anxiety, the 13-year-old who battled anorexia, the 19-year-old lost and unsure in her own skin, the 27-year-old determined to run her pain away, the 31-year-old blacked out on the couch, and the 36-year-old who had finally learned to love herself.
When a fan asked Lauren Daigle how to cope with anxiety, the Grammy-award-winning artist spoke freely about how she handles crippling episodes of anxiety and mental illness in her own life.
It was not only challenging to raise an anxious child but also exasperating. I ranged from wanting to throttle her during her meltdown moments to wanting to cry right along with her for my supposed failures.
We make funny memes about how the Holiday Season has us freaking out, and we laugh and laugh. Meanwhile our hearts are hurting. We end up on the other side of January wondering where the joy went, why it can’t be like it was when we were a child.
In a raw and honest interview, Daigle explains that she sought help from a therapist and a neurologist to get her mental health back on track and combat the loneliness and isolation brought on by the pandemic.
For someone who doesn’t live with anxiety, it can be difficult to understand and care for someone who does. It isn’t choosey in whose mind it captures, and it’s relentless in its efforts to destroy any peace one might have.
"It’s waking up tired even though your day just started. Anxiety is wanting to fix something that isn’t even a problem. It’s the stream of questions that make you doubt yourself."
