Who I Am, and Who I Am Not

My name is Marc. I am in my fifties, born French, became Canadian, and for most of my life I thought I knew who I was.

I thought I was shy. Cold. Individualistic. Not social at all. I was never an employee, I always ran my own business or worked for myself. I always had difficulty connecting with others and making friends. I always preferred individual sports, running mostly, over team sports. I always believed that the choices I made in my life, particularly professionally, were the result of my own decisions, my personality, my nature. What a mistake.

It took me decades, and a complete breakdown, to understand that almost none of it was a choice. It was anxiety, pulling the strings behind the scenes, from the very beginning.

I grew up in a deeply dysfunctional family. My parents argued constantly. Infidelity was common. Consumed by their troubled relationship, they were emotionally absent, incapable of showing affection. My father had no interest in me because I did not share his world: hunting, soccer, and a certain idea of the role of men and women in society. When he finally understood that I would never be the ideal son, he shifted his attention to my sister and ignored me completely. My mother was depressive and suicidal. She made attempts. When I was eighteen, she was diagnosed with leukemia. A few months later, as the illness reached its terminal stage, she chose to leave on her own terms.

At home I was invisible at best, a disappointment at worst. But school was no refuge either. I had white hair, I was very pale, very thin. The other kids called me the albino. I was bullied. I was never invited to birthday parties. I did not fit in anywhere, but curiously I did not suffer from it. I let myself be absorbed by studies, science, aquariums, biology, cosmology, all kinds of fields that captivated my mind and kept me occupied.

I felt like an alien. The others were different, and functioned in ways that were a complete mystery to me. Social and interpersonal rules seemed incomprehensible.

I did not know it yet, but my nervous system was learning lessons it would carry for the rest of its life. That the world was dangerous. That people leave or push you away. That something would always go wrong. That I was deficient. That I was a monster, incapable of feeling affection or empathy.

Not long after losing my mother, I developed health anxiety. At thirty-five, a tumour the size of an orange was found in my abdomen. The specialist was certain: given the size, it could only be cancer. He gave me two years at most. It was a rare cancer, with no treatment other than surgery. I underwent a major operation, which allowed the tumour to be analysed and found to be benign. But the fear of illness that already lived in me found new territory to occupy, and it never really left. I remained afraid of medical tests and doctors, to the point of fearing that a dental X-ray might reveal a tumour in my mouth.

In 2021, everything fell apart. A serious health scare triggered a surge of anxiety of an intensity I had never known. Two people close to me died by suicide in a short period of time. Approaching fifty, and realising I had twenty years left before turning seventy, hit me hard. And for long months, my nervous system was put to the test when I decided to invest in cryptocurrency, only to lose a great deal. The background noise that was my anxiety became a roar.

By 2022, I was no longer functioning. What I was experiencing was no longer anxiety in the ordinary sense. It was constant, relentless terror. The feeling, for several hours a day, of being on a plane that is going down. Over time, depression followed, logically. Then anhedonia set in, the inability to feel anything positive. My energy levels dropped sharply. I could not even sit in a chair in front of my computer.

Working through this with a therapist did something I did not expect. It did not just help me manage the crisis. It helped me see my entire life differently.

The shyness was social anxiety. The coldness was detachment learned in a home where closeness had never been safe. The individualism was self-protection. The career choices, the sports, the small circle of relationships: anxiety had been quietly making decisions for me for forty years, and I had called it personality.

I had always known something was off. I thought it was my genes, some fundamental flaw in how I was built. What I discovered is that my behaviour was the product of my thinking system, shaped in a chaotic and lonely childhood, and stripped of the foundations that parents are responsible for providing: security, affection, communication, attention. That system was refined by a succession of traumas: emotional distance, humiliation, bullying, rejection. But that system was not who I was. It was simply what I had learned. And what is learned can be unlearned.

My crisis lasted years, with ups and downs. Some days were normal, others were spent at the bottom of a bed or on a sofa. I called the good days blue days, and the others red days. There were waves of terror, and windows of respite. Little by little I understood things, learned techniques, educated myself, and came back into the world. The battle is not won. I have not had a crisis in two years, but I can feel that on certain mornings, familiar sensations resurface. I have learnt the tools to defuse them, but I know I am not safe from a real relapse.

I am not a therapist. I am not a psychiatrist, a doctor, or a researcher. I have no qualifications in mental health, other than having lived it from the inside, studied it obsessively, and come out the other side.

Everything I share here comes from my own experience and my personal reading. It is not medical advice. It is not a substitute for professional support. If you are struggling, please see a therapist or a doctor. This newsletter is a complement to that work, not a replacement for it.

I am still in the noise. My brain is still hyperactive, still quick to sound the alarm, still occasionally convinced that something is really wrong when it is not. I have just learned, slowly and imperfectly, to stop letting it drive.

Not a therapist. Not a doctor. Just someone who went through hell and came back with notes.

Welcome.