The Sky is Falling

Some days are just not my days, and Tuesday was one of those days.

Everything that I had been working so hard to juggle flew out of my hands and smacked me in the face. Or at least, that’s what it felt like. The truth is that a lot of things I hadn’t been dealing with (and had been hoping would just go away on their own) reared their ugly heads and demanded I deal with them all at once. I could have avoided this situation by asking for help. I could have avoided this situation by dealing with things when they came up instead of pushing them to the side, plugging my ears, and singing “la la la la can’t hear you” over and over again. I could have avoided this situation by adulting more than once a month.

But…

(There’s always a but)

…I have this really annoying friend who’s always with me. It’s been with me my whole life and it constantly tells me that I can’t do the things I want or need to. It drags me down, keep me scared and under it’s power. Its name is anxiety.

Having anxiety can feel like being blindfolded. It can feel like being in a video game and not knowing how to use the controllers…or even what you need to do to win. It can feel like your brain is a crowded restaurant, you’re the only waiter, and everyone is yelling at you. It can feel like the walls are shrinking in on you, your clothes are too tight and your body is too small for your organs. It can feel like you’re trying to run up an icy hill while carrying a dozen eggs. Mostly it just feels like your out of control. All. The. Damn. Time.

When things pop up in my life that intimidate me and make my anxiety flare, I push them aside and tell myself I’ll deal with them once I’m comfortable. Sadly, I’m never comfortable. There’s always an alarm blaring, an inner monologue scolding me, impending doom bursting out of my chest. And the more I push aside because I can’t deal with it immediately, the worse it gets. Eventually I get so overwhelmed I break down. I’m trying very hard not to live my life like this, but it’s an old habit, and you know what they say about old habits.

I’ve had increasingly destructive coping mechanisms over the years. Mostly, I’ve coped with food. You don’t get to weigh as much as I did (or still do for that matter) without having an unhealthy relationship with food. Briefly I changed from food to exercise, but exercise requires so much more effort than food, so that didn’t last long. Then there was the very dark time in the last two years when even food didn’t work. No matter what or how much I ate I never found relief. The anxious roiling feeling inside me got worse and worse until…well…I hurt myself. I’m not proud of this. I actually have a lot of shame around that time in my life. I’m hoping that by talking about it, by admitting that sometimes the feelings inside me are so massive and terrifying and immense that I actually have to cause myself physical pain in order to stop feeling them, I’ll keep myself from doing it again.

So, Tuesday, when all the things I’ve been putting off and trying to forget attacked at once, when my anxiety level hit an all time high, I was very tempted to hurt myself or eat myself stupid. But I didn’t. I’m not exactly sure what was different this time, but I took a breath, I asked for help, and I made a plan. After hours of working on my problems nothing was solved exactly but I felt better, and within a day (and with a lot of support from my mum) I was able to handle the major things that were causing me trouble.

There’s still stuff I need to deal with. There are still a lot of question mark in my life at the moment. I still feel out of control. But I’m not panicking, and, more importantly, I’m not doing damage to myself. Anxiety may forever be part of my life, but it doesn’t have to control me. Like any destructive friendship, I’ve realized I get to decide how much I listen to it and how much of my life it gets to control. I’m doing my best to break up with anxiety and put up my emotional umbrella when the sky starts falling.

Oh, and bonus points: I didn't talk about serial killers in my job interview today. Not even when I was asked to talk about something from history that I'm fascinated by and have done extensive research into. Score one for me!