My ESA and Me

I have struggled with anxiety and depression my entire life but I refused to seek out real help until last semester at college. I decided it was time that I take my life back from the debilitating diseases that stole it from me so long ago. I have also always had pets. At home with my family, my pet dogs, cats, goats, and horses have been there for me. Last year, my first year off on my own for school, I struggled a lot with my issues and some days I was completely unable to get out of bed.

I still have some of those days but this year I have drastically improved. I had come back home from university over Christmas break to see my family and work a bit. On Christmas Eve, we were saying our goodbyes to family members that had come over to our house and my sister came back inside the house with a white ball of fluff. The little van calico kitten was later on dubbed Eve Marie by me and I begged to take her to school with me. My parents agreed to let me take her and when I left to go back to school, I had Eve in a crate right next to me in the car.

I spoke with my psychiatrist about the process for having an Emotional Service Animal and she walked me through the steps of what she would do and then I talked to my apartment and asked them about what their process was for an ESA. All in all, the process for me, having a prescription from my psych, was simple enough but I knew that keeping the animal myself wouldn’t be that easy.

Eve is a sweet little kitten who often gets the “Zoomies” (as dubbed by several pet articles I read through said) and she suffers from excessive licking, herself which sometimes causes me to not need to brush her which is nice and also my arms and nose are her favourite spots to lick time and time again. She also needs cat food and litter which I have began to realize can start to rack up quite a bill for such a tiny animal. She can be a handful and requires quite a bit of attention compared to most cats that I’ve met but she is wonderful for me.

Now, I on the other hand, suffer from more issues than “Zoomies.” I have been diagnosed with severe anxiety disorder, social anxiety disorder, major depression disorder, and OCD. There have been times in my life when all I can do is lie in bed and wonder when I will be able to function again. Eve had honestly drastically helped with this because in order to properly take care of her I am required to get out of bed on a daily basis and due to her bowls and litter box being in the bathroom, I usually just decide to get ready anyways since I’m in there. Another issue that I deal with is my OCD which causes me to have certain “tendencies” such as picking my fingers, tearing my nails, scratching an itch excessively even if it no longer itches, and many other things. Eve helps out because even if she doesn’t realize what I am doing is bad for me, she still understands the need for attention and she can feel my mood shifts. She ends up jumping into bed or onto the couch with me and she will lay in my lap which in turn distracts me from whatever habit I was consumed by and I will begin to pet her. She will lay with me for multiple hours at a time letting me pet her until I can finally get out of bed and go on with what I need to be doing.

Emotional service animals are a topic that can be hard to talk about in a sense because some people receive them for no reason at all other than they want a pet that they are allowed to have with them anywhere even if they don’t actually need it. On the other hand, there are people who actually need an ESA and are unable to have one because the other people have ruined it for them or made the process more complex. I’m not saying that no one without severe disabilities or diseases should have one but there does need to be more control over who is able to have an Emotional Service Animal. I am so grateful that I have my baby girl Eve though.

I have struggled and suffered long enough and I am happy to be able to say that because of Eve I can do things more confidently with her around. I am also able to calm down easier and faster than I have been able to. I suffer on a daily basis but because of Eve, I don’t have to suffer as much as I used to.