Today: Anxiety

There's a line from a song that goes:

"Insanity: I can feel the knives inside my brain
I stand alone at the threshold of my pain."

And if you replace the first word with Anxiety, that's how I feel today.

I could have guessed this was coming. What with everything yesterday, I totally spaced taking my anxiety meds not once but twice. And so...

It starts right away, as soon as I open my eyes. I don't want to get out of bed. The bed seems the only safe place for me, really. But I know I have to get up so I convince myself it won't be all that bad just to get up and peruse the Internet and have a cup of coffee.

My stomach is churning and my brain is churning. My shoulders feel stiff and tense and I can feel a scream building in my throat, just behind where my Adam's apple would be if I had one. Even my ears feel tense. I swallow and I get no relief. I try to breathe and feel as if I'm slowly being strangled. When I take a deep breath I begin to shake and pant like a dog or an unbroken horse.

I go to my desk with my coffee and that's all right for a while, chatting with my internet friends--the only friends I have, really. Then I begin thinking that spending so much time on the Internet is really wasteful and dumb and I begin beating myself up for it. That makes the anxiety worse. I begin to think of ending the session and doing something useful. My breath comes in gasps. Those knives in my brain are twisting and there are words there: words I can't quite make out but I know they're berating me for being lazy, among other things. They often call me a liar. It's like a constant buzzing in my ears, or like ny brain is infested with flies. Everything I do is wrong somehow. I just want to curl up in a corner. I want the buzzing to stop.

Finally I manage to get up and eat some breakfast. I take my morning meds. I tidy up the kitchen, shaking all the while. Then I begin to think about getting dressed and the shaking gets worse. There are so many steps to getting dressed and I don;t know if I can handle them. There's washing. Do I just wash my face or do I take a shower? I know my hair needs washed because I haven't been able to accomplish that in a week or so--eeeww--but if I wash my hair it will just get sweaty again if I manage to do anything like go out for a walk or do Pilates. I fully have intended to do Pilates today but right at the moment I don't know if I can. Even popping the DVD into the player seems like too much. It's a decision and I can't make decisions.

I don;t get dressed. I sit down and play a computer game and smoke. Then I write this. I still feel sick at my stomach and I don't know what to do. Everything seems so difficult. So full of consequence. If I get dressed without washing my hair I have to do it later because tonight is my radio show and I can't go out of the house looking like this. If I wash my hair I can't really do anything active, which I ought to do because I've been so inactive all week. Can I do Pilates without getting dressed? That seems wrong somehow in a way I can't define.

So I come here and write this and it doesn't help. It doesn't make me feel any better, setting this down. I wonder if anyone will read it. I wonder if people will think I'm crazy. I wonder if I think I'm crazy. I don;t really, but this anxiety is too much.

I think I willl not get dressed just yet. Maybe later...