Anxiety and Guilt

bad day for me today. I woke up later than I would have liked and still wanted to pull the covers over my head and hide. moved slowly through all my morning routine and could barely get dressed (if you call natty old sweatpants and a t-shirt dressed...). Couldn't stop thinking of all the things I meant to do today, SHOULD be doing and the more I thought about them the worse I felt.

anxiety like a lump in the pit of my stomach. sweaty palms. it's a body sensation, no thought to it, just "run away, run away." Apparently the thought of all the things I meant to do--like going downtown--triggered my flight or fight response. Apparently this is part of PTSD and I'm just going to have to live with it happening from time to time. So nothing got done.

and to make matters worse there's the guilt. my therapist says I feel guilt when I don;t do something I think others want me to do or do something I think others don;t want me to do, but the only person putting pressure on me today is me. unless you count the ever-present societal expectation that a person should be a certain way. or maybe it's my belief that other people think I should be a certain way? I don't know.

guilt feels like...fear to me. not good to say a feeling feels like another feeling, but that's as close as I can get. it feels like the fear of being punished. So does anxiety. so I wonder if for me anxiety and guilt are somehow inextricably linked. Like feeling a whip across your shoulders. In school we used to call it "the hunched feeling."

Sometimes, like now, I get these horrible moments of deja vu and I'm sure something bad is going to happen. I see myself writing this exact blog and I know I've seen this scene or montage before and then something bad happened. like a phone call telling me my husband has been in an accident or something--that's what I always expect. It's just a moment then it's gone but the fear remains.

I have no more thoughts about this, but I was trying to write a blog and I think I succeeded in that. So I'm done now.