Tag: panic

Float.

Float.

by themusingsofatwentytwoyearold ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

It’s been a while since I’ve posted. My anxiety has become pretty debilitating. Leaving little room for anything other than essentials. School work, sleeping, drinking (water, of course), and unfortunately eating. I feel like all of the rest of my time is taken up by panic attacks. It’s exhausting honestly- panicking all of the time. And it leaves little time for anything else.

I’m alone in the ocean, and I’m too tired to keep swimming.

My last therapy session, I had a conversation with my therapist which really stuck with me and is helping me beat myself up less for what feels like constant panic attacks.

We had talked about needing to slow down my panic, and so my therapist asked me what the warning signs of my panic attacks were, and I didn’t have an answer for her. She then told me that most people knew that they were about to panic when a feeling of anxiety developed. I then realized that this was the problem. I had no idea when I was about to panic because instead of getting an indicative feeling of anxiety right before a panic attack, I am literally anxious all of the time. Therefore, panic attacks feel random and unpredictable to me.

I also realized that I’ve had pretty severe anxiety as long as I can remember. I used to get so anxious about getting on the school bus every morning because it was unpredictable and I had no idea where I would be sitting. But I just thought that everyone got this anxious about getting on the school bus. Or field day. Oh my God, field day. Field day was my least favorite day of the year in elementary school. I wasn’t overly athletic, and I used to lose sleep in the months leading up to the big day. I was so worried about what people would think about me. In my mind, if I wasn’t excelling at something, I was completely failing at it.

The difference is that now, I’m recognizing this constant anxiety is not normal, and my brain is too exhausted to cope by itself anymore. That’s why the eating disorder developed. My usual coping mechanisms weren’t working, and so my brain decided to try something else. In the form of an abusive asshole named Ed. And now that I’m in recovery, and trying my hardest to not use Ed to cope anymore, my exhausted brain has absolutely no coping mechanisms. And so I spend the majority of my day suffering from panic attacks.

I don’t really have the time or energy to do much else. Staying afloat is hard enough.

And so I’m probably pinning an unhealthy amount of hope on my psychiatry appointment next weekend. While I know that getting anti-anxiety medication won’t be a magical solution, I’m hoping that it’ll at least give my brain a fighting chance in this battle which it is currently so terribly loosing.

And so if you’re reading this, and it resonates with you on any sort of level, my advice to you is this: you don’t have to swim, you just have to stay afloat; eventually, there will be a life preserver. (I feel like it’s important to note here that this life preserver doesn’t have to come in the form of medication.)

-X

Backstory.

Backstory.

by themusingsofatwentytwoyearold ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

I might have mentioned this before, but in my free time, I work in a planetarium. I’m still relatively new at giving Star Talks though (which are basically 40 minute astronomy lectures), and after my sixth ever show, a man came up to me. And he introduces himself by saying, “Great show, but I noticed two things. One, you said that the sun was 4.6 million years old instead of billion. Two, you said Galileo was Roman not Italian. At the beginning of the show you said you were an elementary education major, and if you’re going to be educating kids you don’t want to be educating them with misinformation.”

Now, his comments weren’t incorrect- I did have two slip ups. But his comments threw both my current job, and career aspirations into question- my anxiety sent my head spinning. I felt unqualified for literally everything. How could I be a teacher when I didn’t even know basic facts? And clearly I wasn’t qualified to be working at my current job.

Thankfully, this was my last show of the day, because I had a panic attack as soon as I got to my car. Quite honestly, with this one comment, I went from having an okay anxiety day (because if we’re being honest, I haven’t had a good anxiety day in forever) to collapsing and feeling panicked and anxious for the remainder of the day.

And this whole scenario just made me think about how incredibly careful you have to be with your words. This man had no idea his thirty second comment would send me into a panicked state of mind for the rest of the night. But it did.

You never know someone’s backstory. Maybe they just broke up with someone. Maybe they’re struggling with a severe illness- either mental or physical. Maybe they just lost someone close to them. Maybe they’re just point blank having a bad day. Or a bad couple of minutes. My point is, you have to be mindful of your words and actions. You never know what someone else is going through.

I have a sticker on my laptop that says “be kind anyway.” This is a motto which I find incredibly important, and do my absolute best to live by. No matter how someone is treating you, you should always do your very best to be kind anyway. Because you never know what that person is going through, or how they’re hurting. And honestly, hurt people hurt people. I think that there is hardly ever a case in which it is justifiable to be mean to someone. And I say hardly ever because there definitely are a few extreme exceptions. But for the most part, I believe that we, as humans, should do our absolute best to put out kindness into this world.

I apologize if this has come across as a little bit preachy. That was not my intention.

This whole experience has just really made me reflect on myself and my actions- I hope that I never unintentionally caused someone to have a bad day, or said something which was triggering. So I’m just going to continue doing my best to live by the words “be kind anyway,” and take a little extra care to be mindful of how my words and actions could unintentionally affect others. Because I know how badly that man at the planetarium’s comments resonated with me, and cut me, and I’m sure that that was not his intention. But yet here I am, still remembering every word of his comment three days later.

-X