Drinny FF

Chapter 1

The warthog's amygdala, the emotion centre of the brain, identifies the lion as a threat, which triggers the release of adrenaline throughout the body. It prepares the body to face the threat and fight or to flee.

The warthog's heart is racing and breathing speeds up. Lung passages expand and certain blood vessels dilate, all to make sure plenty of oxygen gets to the muscles needed to flee. Those muscles tense, ready for action. The warthog's pupils dilate so it's eyes can take in more of the scene. And then its peripheral vision shrinks to focus on the lion in front of it. Other systems get shut down. The warthog stops salivating and digesting. Blood flow is diverted away from the stomach, away from the skin, and nerves involved in arousal get turned off.

Anxiety evolved as a helpful emotion. It has prepared the warthog to escape with its life… this time. If you're a warthog, there's a pretty good chance you'll eventually be killed by a lion. But if you're a human, you're probably worried about other things. You can't exactly fight or flee taxes or traffic, but our body wants to respond just like a warthog when it sees a lion. Think of the symptoms of stress. Racing heart, tense muscles, stomach aches, a feeling of pins and needles, dry mouth, not wanting to or being able to have sex. All very familiar?

The different types of anxiety disorders can be grouped based on the fears that are involved.

Catastrophic fears, these are beliefs that something really terrible is going to happen. This includes separation anxiety, excessive fear of being away from loved ones.

Fear of evaluation. That's the hallmark of social anxiety, the most common anxiety disorder, a persistent, debilitating fear of being watched and judged.

Fear of losing control. It's a bis part of panic disorder. You fear the loss of control that comes with panic.

Lastly, fear of un certainty, of not knowing what's going to happen. This area includes generalized anxiety disorder and obsessive compulsive disorder, or OCD, a fixation on impulses and thoughts.

So when I, Ginny Weasley at age 11, got diagnosed with all of the above, I knew I was fucked.

It started when I was 9. The feeling light-headed, restlessness, headaches and hot flushes. The Weasley family has never believed in all that mental illness shit, until, at least, that one conversation with my therapist.

Therapist: I'd say she's suffering from comorbid anxiety disorder, attention deficit disorder and possibly chronic depression… but she's a little young to tell.

It's not like I was physically abused or had a shortage of clean water or was molested by a family member. So, explain this shit to me.

I don't remember much between the ages of 9 and 11. Just that the world moved fast and my brain moved slow.

After finally getting diagnosed with all the bloody stuff that was wrong with me, I got put on every single drug that was possibly created. With the medication, life started getting cleared and a little less shit, so I guess it worked… at first.

At age 11, I also got my Hogwarts letter. Though my parents were barely able to afford everything because of my treatment, they still managed to get me in. Every. Single. Year. Over time, my mental illnesses became this pet I would carry in the pocket of my trousers. Hidden from the world but always there.

So it happened that I started my fifth year at Hogwarts: School of witchcraft And Wizardry.