Mackenzie's story - The Alarm Is Still Ringing, but There Is No Fire

For a long time, I have wondered why I am the way I am.

Why am I so anxious when nothing is necessarily wrong? Why do I need so much control? Why am I terrified of people leaving me, yet sometimes feel the overwhelming urge to pull away from the people I love? Why does my mind constantly search for something to worry about? Why does relaxing sometimes feel more uncomfortable than staying busy? Why can life feel so frightening when, logically, I know I am safe?

At 20 years old, I am trying to understand myself beyond the labels I have accumulated. Anxiety. Depression. Panic attacks. An eating disorder. Fear of abandonment. Avoidance. Hypervigilance. For a long time, these felt like separate things that were wrong with me.

I thought maybe I was simply too sensitive, too anxious, too emotional, or somehow incapable of handling life the way everyone else seemed to. The more I have learned about trauma and the nervous system, though, the more I have started wondering whether these parts of me are connected. Maybe they are not random flaws in my personality. Maybe they are adaptations. Maybe my mind learned how to survive long before I was old enough to understand what survival even meant.

I grew up with an alcoholic father whom I loved deeply. That is one of the complicated things about growing up around addiction. The person struggling with addiction is not simply the source of fear. They can also be the person you love, admire, depend on, and desperately want back. My dad was my dad before he was an alcoholic in my eyes. He represented love and security to me, but alcoholism gradually made that security unpredictable. There were periods of sobriety when life felt hopeful and periods of relapse when everything seemed to change again.

I learned very young that something could feel okay one day and fall apart the next.

Without realizing it, I became incredibly observant. I learned to watch people. I noticed changes in voices, moods, expressions, behaviours, and the overall feeling of a room. I wanted to know whether everything was okay before anyone had to tell me it was not. I became a watcher because watching gave me the illusion that maybe I could prepare myself for what was coming.

Somewhere along the way, my nervous system learned that being alert was safer than relaxing.

That is something I still carry with me. The circumstances have changed, but the scanning has not completely stopped. Instead of wondering whether my dad has been drinking, my mind finds new things to monitor. Is someone upset with me? Did I say something wrong? Does someone seem different today? Is my body changing? Did I eat too much? What if I gain weight? What if someone leaves me? What if I have a panic attack? What if I cannot handle something? What if something bad happens?

The subject changes, but underneath so many of these thoughts is the same question I think I have been asking since childhood: Am I safe?

At the same time that I was navigating instability at home, I was growing up as a competitive figure skater. Skating was an enormous part of my identity. It taught me discipline, determination, resilience, and how to keep going when something was difficult. However, it also existed in a world where perfectionism could easily be rewarded. My experience included criticism, pressure, negative messages about food and bodies, and a coaching relationship that affected me deeply.

When you are young and constantly being evaluated, it can become difficult to separate your performance from your worth.

At home, I learned to anticipate uncertainty. In skating, I learned to control myself. Together, those lessons became incredibly powerful. If I could do everything correctly, maybe I could avoid criticism. If I could work harder, maybe I could finally feel good enough. If I could anticipate every possibility, maybe nothing could catch me off guard. If I could control myself enough, maybe I would never have to experience the terrifying feeling of being out of control.

Eventually, control found somewhere else to live: Food, exercise, routines, and my body.

There were so many things growing up that I could not control. I could not control whether my dad drank. I could not control whether he stayed sober. I could not control conflict. I could not control another person’s emotions. I could not guarantee that the people I loved would always be okay. I could not control what my coach said or what other people thought of me. But food seemed controllable. Exercise seemed controllable. My body seemed controllable. Rules seemed controllable.

An eating disorder can make the world feel smaller. When life feels enormous and unpredictable, suddenly there is a very specific set of things to think about. Food. Weight. Exercise. Numbers. Routines. Rules. The eating disorder takes all of life’s uncertainty and gives the mind something concrete to focus on.

In a strange way, it can feel like protection. If I follow the rules, maybe I will be okay. If I remain in control, maybe I will be safe.

Except eventually, the thing that promised me control began controlling me.

The rules became stricter. The thoughts became louder. Rest became harder. Food became frightening. My body became something I constantly monitored. The temporary relief I felt from following the eating disorder only made disobeying it feel more dangerous. My brain began learning that restriction reduced anxiety, movement reduced anxiety, avoidance reduced anxiety, and control reduced anxiety.

Each time I escaped something uncomfortable and felt relief afterward, my nervous system interpreted that relief as evidence that escaping had protected me. That is one of the cruellest parts of anxiety. Something can make you feel better in the moment while making you more afraid in the long run.

One of the experiences that makes my hypervigilance especially understandable to me happened when I graduated high school. My dad had been sober for two years. After living through so much uncertainty, two years felt like proof that maybe things really had changed. Maybe that chapter of our lives was finally over. Maybe I could relax. Then he relapsed badly and my parents eventually divorced.

I sometimes wonder what that experience communicated to the frightened part of my brain. I imagine it saying, See? This is why we never relax. This is why we stay prepared. This is why we never completely trust that things are okay. Good things can disappear. People can change. Safety can be temporary.

Today, things are different. My dad is sober. My parents are divorced but remain friends. I am older. I have more independence. I am not that little girl trapped inside circumstances she cannot control.

But sometimes my body does not seem to know that yet. That has become one of the most important realizations in my healing: the danger can end while the alarm keeps ringing.

I notice this especially in relationships. I have a deep fear of abandonment, but I can also become overwhelmed by closeness. I desperately want to be loved and reassured, yet sometimes when another person gets emotionally or physically close, something inside me wants to run. For a long time, I could not understand how both could be true.

Now I think they make more sense together than I realized. One part of me wants someone to say, “I am here. I am not going anywhere.” Another part whispers, “Do not depend on anyone too much because losing them will destroy you.” Love requires vulnerability. It requires accepting that I cannot control another person. I cannot guarantee that someone will never change, disappoint me, hurt me, or leave. For someone whose nervous system learned to survive by anticipating what happens next, that uncertainty can feel terrifying.

Sometimes my rational mind knows that I am completely safe while my body seems convinced otherwise. My heart races. My thoughts become loud. My body feels restless. Everything suddenly becomes too much. I want to go home. I want to escape. I want to regain control. Then I leave, and I feel a sense of relief. My nervous system interprets that relief as proof that leaving saved me but that is how avoidance grows.

I have found that the best way to understand my nervous system is to imagine a smoke detector. A smoke detector is supposed to go off when there is a fire. But imagine a smoke detector that has experienced so many fires that it becomes overly sensitive. Eventually, it starts going off because of steam, a candle, burnt toast, or the slightest possibility of smoke. That is sometimes what living inside my mind feels like.

My alarm system works extremely well. Maybe too well. It detects danger everywhere, even when what it is detecting is uncertainty, vulnerability, change, food, rest, intimacy, uncomfortable emotions, or simply not being in control. My body sounds the alarm, and then my mind desperately searches for an explanation. Something must be wrong!! I need to leave. I need to control this. I need to fix something. I need to make this feeling stop!! The more I understand this, the more I realize that my nervous system is not trying to ruin my life. It is trying to protect me using strategies that were created during a completely different chapter of it.

Even my depression makes more sense when I look at myself through this lens. Imagine spending years monitoring, worrying, restricting, controlling, performing, anticipating, avoiding, recovering from panic, fighting eating disorder thoughts, analysing relationships, and preparing yourself for things that might never happen. Eventually, the mind and body become exhausted.

Sometimes depression feels less like sadness to me and more like being tired of fighting an invisible battle all day. Tired of thinking. Tired of worrying. Tired of being afraid. Tired of trying to control everything. Tired of surviving situations that are not actually happening.

For a long time, I thought healing would mean reaching a point where I was no longer anxious, where food did not scare me, where I never panicked, where relationships never triggered me, and where I finally felt completely certain about everything. I am beginning to realize that healing may be almost the opposite.

Healing may mean learning that I can survive uncertainty without controlling it.

For so much of my life, control and safety have become intertwined. My childhood taught me that vigilance could protect me. My eating disorder tells me that controlling food and my body will protect me. Anxiety tells me worrying will protect me. Avoidance tells me leaving will protect me but healing is teaching myself something new.

I can be uncertain and still be safe. I can rest and still be safe. I can nourish myself even when my eating disorder tells me not to. I can make mistakes without losing my worth. I can have needs without being a burden. I can experience anxiety without immediately trying to make it disappear. I can love someone deeply without abandoning myself. I can experience an uncomfortable moment without believing my entire world is falling apart. I can hear the alarm without automatically assuming there is a fire.

Perhaps the hardest and most beautiful part of healing is beginning to wonder who I actually am underneath survival mode.

For years, I thought being anxious was simply my personality. I thought perfectionism was who I was. I thought constantly preparing for the worst was just how my brain worked. I thought needing control was part of me. At times, my eating disorder became so loud that separating its voice from my own became incredibly difficult. Although, now I wonder how many of these things are actually adaptations.

Maybe I am not inherently afraid of everything. Maybe hypervigilance is not my personality. Maybe perfectionism is not my identity. Maybe my eating disorder is not my identity. Maybe the urge to run when I feel overwhelmed is not who I am. Maybe these are things my mind learned to do and I do not want to hate myself for learning them.

There is a younger version of me underneath all of this who was trying desperately to understand circumstances that were far too complicated for a child. She learned to watch. She learned to prepare. She learned to perform. She learned to control. She learned to make herself small. She learned not to relax completely because experience had shown her that stability could disappear. Those strategies helped her make sense of a world she could not control.

But she does not have to stand guard forever.

I cannot go back and give her a different childhood. I cannot undo alcoholism. I cannot erase the fear, instability, or experiences that shaped me. I cannot change the environment in skating that influenced the way I learned to see achievement, food, and my body. I cannot guarantee that nobody I love will ever hurt me, disappoint me, change, or leave.

What I can do is give myself experiences now that teach my nervous system something different. I can show myself that a peaceful moment does not always mean a storm is coming.

I can show myself that making a mistake does not make me unlovable. I can show myself that an uncomfortable emotion does not require an immediate escape. I can show myself that rest is not dangerous. I can show myself that I do not have to earn the right to nourish myself. I can show myself that love does not require me to disappear inside another person. I can show myself that uncertainty is uncomfortable, but it is survivable.

I am still healing.

I still struggle. There are days when my anxiety is debilitating, when eating disorder thoughts feel impossibly loud, when depression makes everything feel heavy, or when my nervous system seems permanently stuck in fight-or-flight.

Understanding where these patterns may have come from has not magically made them disappear. But understanding has changed the way I speak to myself. For years, I asked, “What is wrong with me? and I am trying to ask something different now. What happened to me? What did my mind learn from it? What protected me then but is hurting me now? What am I still carrying that I no longer need to carry? And what do I want to teach myself instead? Maybe healing is not becoming the person I was before trauma. I was so young that I never really got the chance to know who that person would have been.

Maybe healing is finally getting the chance to meet her.

The person underneath the fear, the perfectionism, the eating disorder, and the person underneath the constant preparation for disaster.

There is still a younger part of me waiting for something bad to happen.

I do not want to spend the rest of my life fighting her or being angry that she is afraid. I want to understand her. I want to take her hand and remind her that she does not have to watch the door anymore. The alarm may still ring sometimes. But that does not always mean there is a fire! I am not powerless anymore and I have choices now. I am allowed to take up space in my own life rather than spending it constantly preparing for the next emergency.

Maybe that is what healing will mean for me: slowly teaching my mind and body that I am allowed to do more than survive. I am allowed to live and eat the damn chocolate cake!