Body

I focus on my body too much. Well, not as in I’m a fitness freak, I’m not. I wish I were, but anyway, little aches and pains to me become big explosions within my body to me. Then I get to thinking, “Why do I have them?” And the funny thing about the mind is that a little knowledge about medicine (mostly learned through reading books on the subject) can create all sorts of wild thoughts. Some highlights:

“Oh, my arm feels numb and tingly, must be a heart attack. I’m going to die any moment.”

“I have a really bad headache so I must have a tumor. Or worse, maybe I’m having a stroke.”

“My foot’s tingle, my stomach aches, I feel some pressure in my chest, and my arm’s numb. I’m dying. It’s going to happen. Oh fuck oh fuck.”

Generally these sorts of thoughts are not productive and I see that now, but my boredom kept me thinking that way and a little bit of, “Why is this happening to me?” If I were thinking rationally about these thoughts I could see which each of them were and I wouldn’t have any panic attacks. See, I’m dominantly left handed because I was born with my umbilical cord wrapped around my neck which seems to have caused a ’stroke-like’ affect on my right arm. I can hardly use it for normal things. So, everything I do involves my left hand. Use a mouse it’s my left hand, catch a baseball and it’s my left hand, pick something up and that involves my left hand. This causes a lot of pain and damage over time, apparently.

The other things like the pressure in my chest is mainly from the acid reflux and I get tension headaches frequently most likely from looking at the computer too much. All of these things are very logically explained and if I took a second to think about it I could calm myself. But panic and anxiety rarely work that way. At least with me. In the moment these thoughts are disorganized and then they crystalize into something life-threatening which causes more panic. It’s a certainty that has no real basis for it. I’m seeing all of this now and you might call it stupid that I haven’t seen it sooner, but I think unless you’ve actually been through it then you’ll never really no how you’d react. I’ve tried rationally working things out before and no real luck sometimes.

Anyway, I think I’ve got some positive momentum right now with regards to this particular anxiety and am slowly building up steam now. I haven’t been focusing on my body as much and it’s helping a great deal to keep me from panicking. Time will tell on this, but I think I’m making more progress now than I made even a year ago.

Fading…

I feel like I’m dead and I just don’t know it. No, not in a gothic  kind of way. More like…I can feel bits of my life gradually fading and I’m struggling against it and I don’t know how to fix it. Does that make sense? It seems like the more I’ve dropped out of my life the more I’ve lost parts of myself that I felt genuinely were ‘me’. I haven’t designed anything in weeks and I have no ideas lately. Even half-bad ones I’m lacking. And driving…forget that, I haven’t been in my car in weeks–months maybe. I’ve ceased being ’special’ and now I’m just…existing. And I’d change all of this except I don’t know how.

I don’t know which side I want to ‘fix’ first and I’m trying to do it all and losing it. I just haven’t felt it. I…am a corpse, with a few synapses firing, apparently. And I need to stop it. I want to stop it. I must stop it. Fuck, how do people get past this stuff? How do they get past anxiety to be much more…complete? I don’t feel depressed anymore. Is that it? Was I more…’me’ when I was depressed? Am I just lazy? I have too many questions and not enough answers. Supposedly that makes me wise on some level. Well, fuck that. I don’t want to be wise. I just want to be me again.

Adventures In Weed

I say I don’t have a very interesting life and I think I’m correct in that assessment, but I’ve been known to do some shady things. Full disclosure: I’ve only attempted to smoke weed three times in my entire life. After the third time I’ve vowed never to try it again. Mainly because of what happened during the third time.

A year or so ago I was going through some serious anxiety and I was looking for ways to calm down and I was chatting with my friend and he was like, “You know what calms me down? Weed.” So, I thought it over and I was willing to try anything at that point and I said, “Sure.” I went to my friend’s house and then we went and hung out with his sister and her boyfriend and lit up. Okay, fine. So we’re smoking the weed through these handmade cigar-type things and we’re all sharing it. Big mistake for me as I was going through a germaphobe phase at that point.

As we all were smoking it I kept getting even more anxious than before. Since then I’ve vowed never to attempt to smoke weed again. I really don’t mean this to sound disparaging of my friend; it’s not, I actually did have a good time barring the smoking weed bit. I just couldn’t handle sharing anything at the time without going, “Oh fuck, what if I catch something?!” On a whole, not the brightest move I’ve ever made on my own, but nothing ended up happening to me.

Nightmare Passing complete

I never really elaborated on this. You all know what’s been happening with me and everything, but lately I’ve been feeling a lot better. More relaxed. Comfortable you could say. And my stomach’s been doing a lot better. Any way, I went to the doctor a couple of weeks ago (going on 3 woohoo!) and he checked out my heart and such and reassured me of everything. And it all clicked. It never had before, but that last time really solidified in my mind and I started thinking about the positives. I focused on that instead of the pain. And the pains went away.

At least mostly. I still feel them but they don’t freak me out as much. And then I went on a Dead Like Me binge and I thought about a line from that show about thinking about the stuff you like. I realized that that’s what had kept me going before. Not that tv shows are some untapped wisdom. But every now and then they give little truths about our lives. For me it was that.

Rube: You like spaghetti, George? I like spaghetti. I like board games. I like grabbing a trifecta with that longshot on top. That ozone smell you get from air purifiers. And I like knowing the space between my ears is immeasurable. Mahler’s first, Bernstein conducting. You’ve got to think about all the things you like and decide whether they’re worth sticking around for. And if they are, you’ll find a way to do this.
George: And what if I don’t?
Rube: Then you go away, and you don’t get to like anything anymore.

I lost my perspective, as it were. And I wasn’t focusing on things that I liked or that I liked about myself. When you begin to do that it starts to weigh you down. You feel like your body weighs 800lbs and you can barely move. Or at least that’s how it felt for me. I felt so drained. Everything wore me down. I realized that it was all from burnout. I didn’t come to this realization until the feelings of anxiety became fleeting to almost non-existent.

So, I’m giving myself time off to think and to rebuild myself mentally as I took quite a bit of a shock to the system this past year and things that I thought were solidified in my mind weren’t. I thought my psyche was stronger than it was, but it wasn’t. One thing set off a whole chain reaction that blew it apart. I think I need to build up a better defense for the next time something like this happens. Which I’m working on. I’d also like to thank the friends who stuck by me while I was going through this. Your help and your confidence in me was much appreciated.

A holiday

I haven’t been creating much, though I have a lot of ideas. And some work that I could do, but right now I’m just taking a break. I think I’ve been burned out since last year and it just finally made me snap. Luckily I’ve snapped out of it. Which is funny, because that’s a lot of snapping.

Any way, my year has been shit for the most part. And by ‘year’ I mean from August till now. Bad anxiety, bad mood, bad outlook, etc. It’s really not a fun thing to constantly see the bad in every situation and while I have a bit of a reputation for doing that–in this case it was more than a little morbid. I could ’see’ bad things happening which made me panic.

Gastritis doesn’t help as it made me feel worse physically than I already did before. On the good side, I’ve lost almost 50lbs so far and am still losing it. So, I guess that’s good. Shame I had to have something bad happen that didn’t help my temperament.

So, lately I’ve been putting myself back together mentally and it’s not been an easy process, but I’ve quit taking the lorazepam as I don’t need it. I’m learning not to hold stuff back, well, mostly. I’m re-forging my psyche, I guess. If you want to be dramatic about it.

That’s been my whole problem, though, I’ve let stuff build and I don’t share it with anyone. Even my closest friends. I guess I’m afraid they won’t understand or they’ll think I’m nuts, or…whatever. Anyway…that’s what has been happening to me. I feel a lot better and I’ve been a lot more positive. Except this sunburn is killing me.

Where to begin…

For about a year now I’ve been having anxiety attacks. Just sharp, sudden outbursts; it used to be contained to just my house and now it’s creeping out into the outside world. I cry, I feel faint, my body feels weak, my heart starts to race, and I feel like I’m going to die–no, I’m certain I am going to die. At least when they happen.

These all started the last week of August before this monster semester of college that I setup for myself. During that summer my father was having blood pressure spikes, my car broke down, I had pneumonia, and my grandfather died within days of my birthday. My life was spiraling downward in what should have been one of the best times I was gonna have. I was graduating in the spring and I was finally becoming very good as a graphic designer.

The first attack came after I was home for a while and my left leg started tingling. I shrugged it off, but it persisted, I brought in some groceries and my heart felt like it was racing. I felt faint, dizzy, anxious, I yelled at my father to get me to the hospital. I thought I was having a heart attack. Turns out this was the first in a long, long series of anxiety attacks. Time passed and I kept crying and having fits, every ache and pain became magnified into a life-threatening illness. It wasn’t until about January when I felt somewhat normal again. And for a time they went away and sometimes I’d cry, but nothing really to worry about.

Lately they’ve been intruding on my life again, I was diagnosed with gastritis recently and I don’t know if the anxiety caused it or just my poor diet. Probably both. I have tendinitis in both of my shoulders from excessive computer use. I keep looking up symptoms online and seeing if they match up. And if they do I usually think I’ve got that illness or there might be a chance that I’ve got it.

And now I see myself dying almost every day. I’ve probably ‘died’ hundreds of thousands of times over the last year. My social life is in the crapper and I have way too much time to think about what’s wrong with me, and I have friends, but I don’t see them very often. And now this anxiety is transferring over to my driving.

I’m at my wit’s end and I don’t know what to do to get myself out of this place. I used to be at least normal, if not happy. Now I just see death and nothing positive about my life. If anyone out there has any suggestions I’ll gladly take them because I’m just about out of solutions for myself.

Hide And Seek

I took a creative writing class a few years back and the book that our professor wanted us to buy was: All I Really Need To Know I Learned In Kindergarten. I’ve never read the whole book all the way through. I find passages I like and can relate to and I read them. My favorite is ‘Hide And Seek’. I think that resonates with me because I’ve been ‘hiding’ well from everyone and everything. I have no social life and at this point in my life I think I could die and no one would notice. At least not until years later or so. Maybe that’s just my own cynicism.

I think about myself every day and how I wish I were different; how things could have been different for me, at how little I’ve done with myself outside of school. And it makes me sad–no, fucking depressed. The problem is that I’ve gotten so…used to this pattern that it’s really hard for me to change it. And every year my shut-in mentality gets worse. It’s like being phased out of existence a little bit at a time, only not as fast. First your social life goes, then your emotions, and eventually your sanity. Like so: I’ll often feel an ache and think that I’m dying or I’ve got some major disease. That it’s incurable. I’m very certain I’ll die soon. Etc.

Crazy stuff, I know, but that’s what’s happened to me. I don’t know how to get out of it. I can’t think straight and I lose memories, which I’ve heard isn’t that uncommon if you’ve got a lot of anxiety. So, the ‘Hide And Seek’ part I definitely can relate to, but the problem is actually getting ‘found’. I try and I usually fail or some other calamity happens that makes me wanna give-up. Or my own insecurities make me so insecure that I act awkwardly around people or say stupid stuff. I dunno…it’s a mess and I struggle every day to sort it out but once I think I’ve got a handle on things then something else happens.

I’m becoming my father, actually. He reminisces about his childhood and how he loved it and such. And I don’t want to be that person whose ‘best years’ are so far behind him that I end up not living and just….give up on having a life. I think I’m headed that way and as I said: no clue about how to deal with it. I’m only 25 for cripes sake. I shouldn’t be thinking like this yet I do.

I come back to this: There’s no quick fixes in life and everything takes work, even sorting yourself out, but what happens when you don’t believe that you can be sorted out?

The Fog Has Abated

In the past few weeks I’ve been a wreck. I’ve been depressed and full of anxiety. So much so that I think the effects from it are going to stay around for a while. But within the last couple of days the fog on my mental state has been clearing. Now I can see the extent of the damage it has caused, though. On my grades specifically. But I can still pull through this–I must, because the alternative is undesirable.

I’m thinking more clearly and I know what I need to do now and I’m going to do it. As Apollo Creed once said (hey, he’s inspirational…kind of) “There is no tomorrow.” And there isn’t as far as I’m concerned. So, wish me luck.

Fading

I’m writing this to hopefully vent my fears and frustrations from the last few weeks. Hopefully to understand what’s going on.

I haven’t really been enjoying myself since…well…mid-June. My father started having these attacks that raised his blood pressure and the first time really scared me because I thought he was having a heart attack. Even he was convinced that he was having one. Next thing my car’s transmission went up and I was without a car until August. I ended up paying $2000 back to my aunt. And thoroughly hating my summer.

Then the day before my birthday my grandfather died. And a couple of days before that I had pneumonia that lasted into my birthday. As the month went on my father continued having attacks and even spent about a week in the hospital being checked out. In the beginning of August we moved to a townhouse and I started vegging out really badly for whatever reason, even after getting my car back.

This isn’t to say that my summer was all bad, there were some bright spots which included passing a math class I needed to take. But overall it was pretty bad. Toward the last week of August I started having these weird panic attacks for whatever reason. It felt like I couldn’t breathe one morning (this was after my father had another attack). Then I was diagnosed with a sinus infection which lasted for about 3 1/2 weeks.

And recently the congestion from the sinus infection doesn’t seem to want to go away. Which left me frustrated to the point of crying. I’m feeling somewhat better, but in the last couple of weeks I’ve been watching the news and they’ve been reporting on MRSA (antibiotic resistant staph infection). They make it seem like you could get this anywhere and now I’ve been having real bad hypochondria attacks. I think I’m even starting to become a quasi-germophobe.

Now I’ve been crying off and on for the past few weeks. Partly out of frustration and partly for irrational fears. I don’t know when this is going to end, but I feel like I’m disappearing and being replaced by the blubbering shell of a person I used to be. I can’t focus, I can’t stay concentrated on my school work, and I’m starting to fall behind as a result.

I’ve been having few moments where I resemble the person I feel I used to be, but those are becoming rarer as I keep getting worse. I’m constantly fearing germs and fearing for my own health (despite my own physical appearance). Tonight I get a sleep study and I’m considering not going because of anxiety over my health and being in an unfamiliar place. I really don’t know what to do at this point. I’m trying therapy and hopefully that helps. But yeah, I’m not in a good place right now and things just seem to be deteriorating.