Then I got to thinking. MY ANXIETY ISN'T EVEN THAT BAD. I can't stand people with full blown crazy ruin their lives level anxiety. They drive me crazy, because I don't see how you can't control it. I keep mine tucked in a box where sometimes I will occasionally let it out to play. Or not play. Or make me upset. However it wants to have its fun.
I can't help it, but sometimes these random frenzies make me really hate myself. Regardless of how rare they are they make me feel pretty damaged.
When mine first started showing up I was in Junior High, of course, it pretty much was just labeled teenage angst or 'drama' or whatever. When it clearly wasn't. Tests, social events, report cards, friends getting sick around me, and the threat of detentions would send me into nervous tail spins. Then all my family and friends would think I was just being dramatic for drama sake when really I was actually legitimately freaked the fuck out. But I've always had a "just fucking do it anyway" sort of attitude. "You see that bridge...just cross it." So really I think that was the thing that saved me.
In college I had a couple big break outs of anxiety. One that lead me to see a counselor who basically told me I had test anxiety and who I told, "No...my anxiety has its own anxiety. There is no singular anxiety attached to me. It is growing on to itself. Your diagnosis is giving me a new anxiety called, 'Why did I waste an hour of my day in this office anxiety.'" I mean she didn't really give me any new techniques than those I was already using to try and curb the anxiety. Basically all she did was make me worried that I was truly broken because these previous techniques were no longer working for me. Really, what I needed was a hug. Those tend to really work when the panic sets in.
She was telling me about my test anxiety 2 hours before a test and I kept looking at the clock and counting how many minutes and seconds I had left to study. This is when I realized this would have to be our last session because I wasn't understanding myself anymore and she wasn't helping me understand why I was so broken.
Maybe that was my problem, that I thought I was broken. But I don't think having random bouts of anxiety that don't cause harm to others or yourself makes you broken. Considering the worse that happens during my anxiety attacks is that I curl up in a ball in a blanket in the farthest corner of a room and cry softly to myself. Or I curl up in a blanket next to someone and ask for a hug. I think it is because I seriously just scare myself when I start to become super worried about things. I scare myself when I can't remember if I locked this door, or closed the fridge, or sent that email. I scare myself because I suddenly feel as if my mind is going. When I know that it is not. I mean I have an excellent memory most of the time, it is the habitual things that slip. Those things that you don't even think about to do.
I think I just have anxiety of my own anxiety which is why I work so hard to conquer them. Besides my driving phobia I work really hard on the rest of them. I just try to take them one at a time. My social anxiety used to be pretty horrible, like to the point where I couldn't do anything 'normal.' Like have a conversation without running away or making up some elaborate lie in order to keep myself from having to be alone with whoever I was talking to. My senior year of high school I avoided a guy for literally 5 months because I found out he had a crush on me. Because I didn't know how to handle it.
I think a lot of the time I have trouble with people who label themselves as having a specific "anxiety." You don't have a specific anxiety...you have anxiety. Anxiety truly permeates your life. It becomes part of your world. You can't just pretend that you're somehow worse or better than any other person with a different specific kind of anxiety. We're seriously all on the same fucked up level here, folks.
When you start working on controlling or completely getting rid of one, watch it somehow grow on to you about something else entirely. My driving anxiety didn't show up until I had a really good grasp on my social phobia. I went from being totally awesome at driving to starting to randomly break out in cold sweats. "Did I remember to turn on the turn signal?" "Which way is this other car trying to turn?" "What if someone Tbones me when we're driving through this intersection and my passenger gets hurt?" "What if I hurt someone?"
Those questions started going through my mind, rapid fire, over and over again. EVERY SINGLE FUCKING TIME. I couldn't even pay attention to the actual fucking act of driving because I was too busy thinking about what could go wrong. Until one day when my brain overloaded and I just anxiety attacked in the car and hit a stop sign.
I just see it all as some elaborate challenge game I guess. I take on things. I like to conquer fears and make things better. Slowly. I feel like I can somehow fix all that I perceive to be wrong with me. I just need the right combination of opportunity, support, and emotional security. And somehow I always manage to get these things when I need them and then work hard on fixing myself. I guess I always saw living as a chance to become better at it. A chance to be happier, a chance to put the pieces together of something that is askew, a chance to find the right combination of things to open different doors.
I think too many people see my anxiety, or their anxiety as a weakness. When it really isn't. If you've got it under control where you can function on some base level enough to hold a job and hold a life somehow then I think you're pretty fucking brave. The only really scary thing about being scared is the capacity we have within all of us to scare the living fuck out of ourselves. I think, personally, that I can learn to fix the fear. And I want to, fix it all, eventually.
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