10. On my mental health breakdown

What really happened on July 16th, 2023? Reflecting back on the year, how I got here and what I'm learning.

Editor’s note: I wrote 90% of this post back in August but wasn’t ready to publish it. Four months later I’m feeling proud of how much progress I’ve made and can look back on 2023 Alexa with more kindness and tenderness. I also feel like my writing has improved a bit with regular practice but I chose to leave the below mostly intact. As much as I love a red pen moment it felt important to capture exactly how I was feeling when I was in the thick of it. This is also probably my most personal post yet (cringe) but here goes nothing! 

January – June 2023: The Build Up 

Let’s just say this year did not go how I thought it would. In January 2023 I knew I was stuck. I was feeling anxious and trapped and just overall icky. Having never experienced anxiety before I tried to lamely describe it to my husband (who has suffered from anxiety his entire life), “It’s like this feeling in my chest, like it’s tight,” I exclaimed pointing urgently at my solar plexus, my eyes wild with fear. To his credit he didn’t laugh in my face but instead replied, “Yep, that’s how it feels. Welcome to anxiety.” I was all over the place emotionally. It didn’t help that Los Angeles was also braving a dreaded streak of rain(!) which meant I spent all my time sitting at my desk, enduring 9 hours of back-to-back meetings. At one point I remember the sky cleared for 30 minutes and I grabbed my Air Pods and ran outside, where I sat on a rock facing the beach and sobbed while listening to Florence and the Machine.  

Portrait of a girl in the midst of her first anxious episode. January 2023.

Sometimes the anxiety manifested as rage. I directed a lot of it towards work as an obvious outlet. One particularly bad night I was pissed, I had all this anger just boiling up inside me and I quite literally didn’t know what to do with it, it was making me crazy. I wanted to throw things, break things. I screamed into a pillow just to try and get it OUT but even that wasn’t enough. After listening to me blubbering incoherently for over an hour my husband grabbed my hand and said, “Come with me.” He led me to the bar cart in our apartment and poured two whiskey shots. “Don’t think about it, just drink it.” And I listened. It was around midnight on a Tuesday, we were both in pajamas, but what did I have to lose? It burned going down. And then, it felt a teeny bit better. Or at least it felt different. I collapsed into bed, exhausted from my emotional outburst, and was back on Zoom by 9am. I was clearly going through some shit, but I thought I could handle it, thought a night of partying or a vacation or a new job would fix it. I bought a handful of self-help books and an astrology book. Surely that would do the trick!  

Some of my 2023 reading list.

Things continued this way for a while. I mostly kept my emotions in check and decided I could fix it by channeling them into action. Not happy at work? Fine, get a new job. I brushed up my resume and my LinkedIn profile, setting the status to ‘open to work’ and thought ‘alright Universe, I’m ready.’ I applied to several open positions and interviewed at a couple of popular companies. I felt pretty confident that I was going to get one and work started to bother me less. ‘I’ll be out of here soon,’ I thought smugly to myself as I tentatively accepted calendar taps weeks into the future, already formulating a plan for who would cover once I was long gone. I didn’t get the job. It crushed me for a while, I was used to getting things, used to having things go my way. Since I was a small child, I have had a very clear life plan. My mom recently found an English assignment that I wrote when I was 14 titled ‘Who Am I.’ It was written with all the confidence of a straight-A student who genuinely believed that as long as she worked hard and did everything right and on time, then it would all go her way:  

“So here’s my life plan, I’m going to graduate high school, then spend the summer in Europe with Christina and Nicole, then go to either UCLA or NYU, definitely a big school though, for four years, and maybe a smaller design school to get my degree in design. I will have gotten a business degree at UCLA or NYU, and I’ll work at Nordstrom, just like my mom, cause she knows Blake and Peter and will be sure to get me a job, maybe like in Salon Shoes?! Anyway, then I will start my own label, have some famous celebrity wear one of my gowns at her wedding and suddenly I will be the hottest new wedding gown designer to all the celebrities, which means I will get invited to all their fabulous weddings. And I will live in a beautiful penthouse in New York, until I meet someone and get married (I’ll have an amazing wedding and design my own dress of course!), because then I will want to start a family so we’ll move to a house in LA and have 3 kids, 2 girls and 1 boy, and we’ll have a beach house in Santa Monica and spend our Christmases in Paris because by then I’ll be fluent in French, and oh my god it’ll be good. And that’s going to be my life. Doesn’t it sound, like, absolutely perfect?!!! And even though I know that most likely it won’t turn out like that, (actually it’s pretty UNLIKELY!) I still can’t wait for it to happen. I mean, I can dream can’t I? Have goals and ambitions? Isn’t that like a human right? What if it does happen? And I still have this English paper, and I look back at it and go oh my god, I really did it. I really made my dream come true! Now that is what I call a fairy tale.” 

Well... shit. I mean, 14-year-old Alexa got a lot of it right. I did spend the summer in Europe (chose to go by myself instead of with friends) I did end up at UCLA (after transferring in as a Junior) and I did land my dream job working in bridal right out of school (merchandising, not design), I did live on the East Coast for a few years (Philly, not New York) and then I did move back to Southern California with my now husband (Long Beach, not Santa Monica). The fluency in French leaves much to be desired (“juste un peu”) and I’m currently very happy with my cat instead of 3 kids (3?? are you sure about that?) but all in all, yeah, she was pretty on point. So, powers of manifestation, check. The problem now was… I didn’t know what the fuck to manifest.  

Me, roughly age 12, having won some medal at school.

I had very clearly decided that this job was not IT anymore, but I didn’t know what IT was. The things that used to fill me up just didn’t fill me up anymore. Yes, I still loved my team and I still enjoyed aspects of the work, but I didn’t feel motivated or engaged anymore. I just felt kind of lost. It was less about the work itself, I wasn’t feeling overly burnt out on answering emails or anything, after 6 years at the company I felt like I could do that in my sleep. I also felt valued and respected at work, which I know is an extremely fortunate way to feel. The burnout was more emotional. I had willingly taken on the role of emotional caretaker of the team, and I had poured so much energy into checking in on them and making sure that they were okay that I wasn’t taking good care of myself (I know, I know, you can’t pour from an empty cup). Plus, it felt like the energy I was dedicating to everyone else’s wellbeing just wasn’t a priority for our leadership team (my husband came up with the term ‘corporate energy matching’ for this which I think is absolutely brilliant). It started to feel desperate and futile and after a while I started thinking that maybe a new job in the same field wasn’t the answer, wasn’t going to solve the problem. I started joking to my friends that I was having a mid-life crisis and needed to figure out what I wanted to do with my life. 

So, following the next logical step, I started working with a life coach in June. I’d been meaning to find a new therapist for ages (I hadn’t been to therapy since 2017) when work announced a new mental health platform as part of our benefits. I half signed up and then forgot about it, pulled back into the current of busyness, and the reminder email sat untouched in my inbox for weeks. (I’m someone who keeps ~50-60 unread emails as part of her to-do list along with 158 open tabs on my iPhone - yes that’s a real number. Don’t hate.). I finally completed the sign up and was matched with a coach for weekly Zoom sessions. The first few sessions went as expected, I expressed my discontent with work, general feelings of lostness and existential angst and she listened while asking probing questions. As part of the program my coach assigned me ‘homework’ to be completed in between sessions which I greedily accepted (homework? yeah, I’m amazing at that). I left each session feeling productive and like we were really getting somewhere as we discussed values, boundaries, and what it means to live a life of purpose. I felt things start to shift. I could practically feel myself starting to crack open. I started reaching out to people, old friends and colleagues, and talking to them about their career paths. I signed up for Substack and started to get excited about the idea of writing. I journaled for the first time in almost 2 years while on a flight to the East Coast. I shared personal things on Instagram. I was putting myself OUT THERE, dammit. I felt like I was waving a giant flag in the street like ‘helloooooooo Universe, I am ready!’ I could feel it coming, it was only a matter of time. Feeling nervous but excited I packed my bags for a weeklong work trip in San Francisco and headed out the door, even posting a quick sunset snap as we landed. It was all going to work out.  

Not exactly foreboding…

July 2023: The Breakdown 

Then life absolutely smacked me across the face. After a week of being in person with my team, non-stop meetings, happy hours and team dinners I arrived home in LA in a fugue state. We headed straight into a weekend trip with friends, and I drifted through the whole thing in a wine-fueled daze. It was easy to distract myself when friends were around, but underneath I was crumbling. During the car ride home on Sunday, I could physically FEEL it building up inside me. As someone who has proudly never suffered from anxiety (I’m *so chill*), the tightness in my chest that I’d been experiencing for the past 6 months was a completely alien sensation. And it was getting to be overwhelming. I was anxious and irritable, I snapped at my husband and scrolled Instagram incessantly just to try to get away from the feeling. If I could just beat it back for a little bit longer. But of course, I couldn’t. By the time we got home I was an emotional wreck. I had hit a wall. My body gave up, the defenses crumbled, and it all came pouring out. I sobbed, my entire body shaking and spasming. Once Pandora’s box was open there was no putting it back in. I don’t even remember if we ate dinner that night or how I got ready for bed… I just remember crying and crying and thinking over and over, ‘Why do I feel like this, I don’t want to feel like this, how do I make this go away.’ At some point I collapsed into sleep but when my alarm went off the next morning it was all right there waiting for me. I sat in bed sobbing and pleading to my husband, “I can’t go to work like this, please help me.” He dashed off a text to my boss explaining I was sick, tucked me back into bed, and headed out the door. I slept until 2pm that first day. By Monday night we had decided that I needed to take the week off.  

The first few days I couldn’t go more than two or three hours without bursting into tears. I spent a lot of it in bed. I didn’t feel like watching TV or going for walks, all I wanted to do was snuggle my cat and binge read Fourth Wing. Everything felt overwhelming and scary, and I was so sad all of the time. My husband was working intense hours and trying his best to take care of me, but it was a lot. I was a lot. Finally, my mom came to visit and between the three of us we started to come up with a plan. I needed to buy myself some time, and I needed to find a therapist. With their help I mustered up enough energy to put the plan into action and by the end of the next week I had talked to HR, my boss, my coworkers, my family, four different therapists and a psychiatrist and things were starting to come together. Despite how hard it is to find a therapist (I could write an entire post on that topic), I was lucky enough to find one that I felt really safe with, and I had negotiated to take a two month leave of absence from work. I exhaled a huge sigh of relief. 

I made the joke to my therapist in one of our early sessions that I was having a ‘mid-life crisis’. She nodded calmly, “That makes perfect sense.” I looked back at her, puzzled. “You started early, when you were 14, so of course you’re having a mid-life crisis early.” Alas, yet another example of me being an overachiever. I’m working on that. 

August – November 2023: The Leap  

A period best explained by reading my other posts but here’s a brief timeline: 

August: spent mostly in a bubble, reading, journaling, doing arts & crafts projects, cuddling with my cat, rewatching Schitt’s Creek and seeing Barbie three times in theaters. Still celebrated my birthday because, Leo.

September: traveled to Italy, quit my job, started Sundays in high school.  

October: the bubble starts to slowly expand... spent quality time with friends and family, got a new volunteering gig, joined a community group, went to concerts and a poetry reading, tried pottery and cat yoga, honed my newfound cooking skills. 

November: rejoined my yoga studio, moved into our new house, hosted our family for Thanksgiving. 

...all punctuated by intermittent bouts of depression and anxiety, regular sessions with my therapist and life coach and, of course, weekly newsletters.  

December 2023: The Reflection  

So that’s how we got here. It’s been quite the year to say the least but looking back I’m mostly grateful for everything I’m learning.  

• I’m learning infinite amounts about myself, my values, my mental health.  

• I’m learning what a Highly Sensitive Person is and that I probably am one.  

• I’m learning what it means to set boundaries and how to rest.  

• I’m learning how to listen to myself and my body, and how to trust myself.  

• I’m learning to accept where I'm at and let it be okay.  

• I’m learning how to sit in the discomfort, to not back down from big scary emotions, and how to make space for them when they inevitably come up.  

• I’m learning that my anxiety and depression don’t define me, that all feelings are valid but ultimately temporary.  

• I’m learning that I am my own worst critic, that self-compassion is the hardest but most vital.  

• I’m learning that vulnerability is a superpower and connection is the purpose.  

I’m also remembering that I love to write! And I’ve been reminded of the incredible support system I have, how lucky I am to have people in my life who love me and are proud of me unconditionally. I don’t take that for granted. So if you’ve made it all the way to the end of this (very long) post, thank you.  

I didn’t make any resolutions for 2023 but my word for the year was initiative: “The power or opportunity to act or take charge before others do. The ability to assess and initiate things independently.” With a word like that perhaps I should be less surprised by how things turned out. I’m still thinking about what my word for 2024 should be... do you have one yet? I would love to hear yours.  

As always, thank you for being here. I’ll be sending one final newsletter of the year next week and then taking a break over the holidays. I hope this time fills you with an overwhelming sense of joy and peace, but if it doesn’t feel like that 24/7 just know that you’re not alone. Until next time.