Mary Hammond - Mercury and Social Anxiety: Why Limiting Your Exposure to Mercury Can Ease Shyness, Anxiety and Depression

I remember being part of a group when I was small, running around in a pack with the other neighborhood kids, up and down the streets, in and out of each others houses, not different, not special in any way. It was a belonging without any thought. But somewhere along the way I got lost. I became the quiet girl on the outside of the group. My heart would pound in my ears when it was my turn to stand in front of the class and present a current event. I would have pored through the newspaper the evening before and found a small piece, a column as short as I felt I could get away with, a little piece of newspaper no more than one and a half inches wide, less than three inches long, and I would have practiced and practiced presenting it. I can still remember being so nervous in class knowing it would soon be my turn, not able to concentrate on anything else except that, and then getting up standing in front of the other children holding my news story, summarizing it for the class, my skin getting redder and hotter and always my heart pounding away, I can see it all still, as if I was there, the classroom, the chalkboard, the chairs, the children sitting on the rug in front of me... the memory is burned into my minds eye.

At the end of the year in fourth grade I brought my yearbook up to my teacher and he drew a little cartoon of a beard and a pair of glasses to represent himself, signing it to noisy Mary. He hadnt meant to hurt me, but I was crushed with the sudden understanding of how he saw me, the knowledge that while I felt like I knew him, he did not feel like he knew me. And it went on like that, my life, with me on the sidelines, taking other people in, but not able to extend myself. I was terribly shy all through my school years. By the time I got to college, I was even worse than I had been in elementary school. Around this time I started to have terrible problems with prolonged blushing. I tried my best to be invisible, but inevitably, I would be called on to speak in class and no matter how hard I fought to be easy, my body would betray me. I would feel my face getting warm, and then it would build and build and build until the fact that I was turning so red was now the problem, a self-perpetuating loop of hot embarrassment which would last for five or ten minutes. I met someone in college who I really liked, but one day he put it to me straight. I need someone who is going to be able to help me in the world, he said. He had trotted me out to meet his friends, one after another, little tests of social facility that I was doomed to fail.

I had been out of college for a few years, floating in a legal assistant job and doing fairly well with the people in the small office I worked in, when my ability to overcome the limitations of my social anxiety was put to its most extreme test. I took the law school aptitude test just to see, and it came back with an exceptionally high score. I knew I didnt have the right personality to be an attorneybut there was an offer of a scholarship. I had painted myself into a corner by creating an opportunity for myself that I couldnt refuse.

Of course it went badly.

Law school was a repeat of college, but I imagined that it was worse because I was a bit older than the other students and I told myself that was the reason I didnt fit in. In reality, I was too anxious to become a part of any social group, and I watched as they formed and closed with me standing in my usual place, on the outside, walking alone, studying alone, finding quiet places on the grass with a nice view to eat alone, and etcetera, etcetera. I wasnt happy about it, and I tried to find a way out of my self-imposed isolation through self-help books, but they didnt really help in the long run. Yes, I could see that I was focusing too much on myself and how uncomfortable I was and that it was my anxiety that was making other people uncomfortable with me, and not any greater failing, but it didnt do me any good to know that.

After all the work that it took me to get through law school and to pass the bar, I quit law entirely after my first experience in front of the Court of Appeals. I had chosen appellate law because I liked the research and writing involved, but mostly because it required much less face time in court. That face time, however, when it finally came, involved trying to present a case in front of 3 justices at once, each one of whom broke into my statement of the case with questions, trying to guide the argument to his own position. I had prepared for weeks, but there was no way to prepare for this experience. It was simply beyond me. The last 4 years had been a calamitous confrontation with my own weakness. It didnt matter in the least how smart I was, and I told myself that I should have known better than to even have tried.

I had gotten married recently. Against all odds I had found someone who put up with my tendency to fall apart and run off at the slightest emotional challenge, and I was expecting our first child. So I turned away from the world and tried to be kind to myself. I had grown up and found a nice life for myself with a really respectable, successful and self-confident man, and I kept expecting that I would break out of my shell and grow into a more mature sense of self confidence myself, but if anything, I got worse. I couldnt even take a proper photograph any longer, I couldnt stand the attention or the intensity of the camera, and I hated the crazy, trapped look I would have in the photographs that I hadnt been able to avoid. I thought I was irreparably damaged from childhood and I would have to learn to accept that I wasnt ever going to improve. I wasn't asking for much any longer, I just wanted to be able to say "hi" in a natural way to people I might pass walking the dog, but I was always awkward.

Still, I was grateful for my children and my husband and the life I was able to live away from the bigger world. My entire life had been difficult for me, but having decided to accept myself as I was, I felt that it was as good as it could be. There were still moments that were very difficult for me, childrens birthday parties (which I couldnt escape attending) were an unexpected source of ongoing pain, but on the whole, in a life which had been terribly painful, really, these were the good years. So I took it in stride when I started to have physical problems. The first was a permanent sunburn in my blush areas, my face and chest. I tried wearing broad brimmed hats everywhere, even into the ocean, and I tried having the redness lasered away, but without much success. I had a series of miscarriages, one, two, three in a row, I developed high blood pressure, and an apparent case of tendonitis that seriously hampered my ability to walk for an entire year. I fell down the stairs and starting holding onto the rail walking the risers one at a time, one step down, the other foot to meet it, walking down the stairs like an old woman. I went to doctor after doctor, telling them the pain in my ankles, the high blood pressure, they all started at once, but I couldnt engage any one of them in consideration of an underlying cause. They blamed my high blood pressure on my increasing weight and age. I blamed my swollen painful legs on the blood pressure medication. My life was going well, I had a lot to be thankful for, but I found myself increasingly fragile emotionally. Depressed. My hands looked like an old womans. They would fall numb now and then while I slept and Id wake with them curled in hard at the wrists. My handwriting, never good, was falling apart. I was losing words. My appetite was out of control.