Living with Anxiety
Fuck this shit, I’m not gonna get anything else done tonight. So I might as well write. I’m.. slightly disappointed that I didn’t do more for my trust tutorial. I think I kinda expected myself to bounce back to total awesomeness after taking the entire day off yesterday.. Like.. the ENTIRE afternoon and night off. I must be entitled to something. Amirite? Haha.
Well anyway. I’ve been thinking (and reading this Mashable article about how Harry Potter is actually about PTSD). Well, regardless of whether or not that is the case — I… identify. With Harry, and his flashbacks. The author writes, “Every so often a friend will ask me what it feels like as a trauma survivor when you get triggered.” In response, he/she (I couldn’t be arsed to check) quoted instances in The Order of the Phoenix — just chapter one, when apparently Harry exhibits all the symptoms of PTSD:
- He hears a loud bang and he prepares to fight.
- He recovers, and shifts rapidly into a feeling of isolation, wondering if his friends care about him.
- He cycles through self-doubt — did he actually hear a bang at all? Is he overreacting?
- He distracts himself by instigating a fight with his bigger, tougher cousin.
Just to be totally clear — I’m not like that. I don’t claim to go “from heart-pounding fear to loneliness to self-doubt to anger to outrage, all within a few minutes.” That’s not me, I don’t claim to be a trauma survivor. At least… I don’t think so.
But I can relate to that. I still get instances, mostly in the throes of extreme exhaustion, perceived pressure (mostly deadlines and slightly-difficult-to-achieve expectations of myself), or when I’m in an outrightly drunk delirium (kinda like right now, huh). I still get instances, like these, where the panic and anxiety hits me like a vehement freight train going at full speed.
Allow me to illustrate: One minute I’m casually strolling across the tracks (don’t ask why). The next, a freight train comes out of frickin’ nowhere (again, I don’t know why) and hits me with a soul-crushing crunch that only I can hear. I’m stuck against the front of the train, going at — what? 80 kph? I don’t know how fast freight trains go. I’m whipped along against my will, my body plastered across the front carriage like a fly across the windshield, gasping desperately for air that I can’t suck into my lungs for some reason, listening to the awful howl of the wind and the even more awful thudding of my pounding heart, feeling dizzy and wanting to puke, with thousands of thoughts rushing through my oxygen-deprived brain at the speed of light. There’s Fear (when will this stop? Is anyone looking at me?), Outrage (how could this happen to me?!), Self-Doubt (maybe it’s because of something I did), Self-Loathing (yes, it is definitely because of something you did you useless sack of shit), Guilt (how could I have done such things?), Desperation (please, please, please. Make it stop.), Bargaining (I’m gonna give up on alcohol if this stops right…… NOW!)
……
……
……
……
But it doesn’t. It never stops when I wanted it to. It stops when it’s done with me, and not a moment before.
And just like that, after my demons are done with me, they just dump me on the floor and leave me there in a fetal position. I slowly lift my head from the invisible shackles of dread, completely exhausted at the ordeal, and I breath some good, fresh, breathable air.
And then I take another sip of this wonderfully good (and frankly quite expensive) scotch. And then … I continue. I continue with my life. I continue to pretend that this weird, invisible demon that I carry around isn’t recurrently haunting me, that I’m completely alright, that I’m not living with a shitty mental illness called Anxiety and whatever vestiges of its mate Depression that still remain.
Joanna. If you’re reading this. I’ve always wanted to explain to you why I broke down next to you in church for no good reason. This… is why. Dunno why I included this part, it just crossed my mind. (Lulz…?)