![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
blue_sprucei finally got a notification in my inbox about it.
It sort of feels like a perfect little picture of my life, actually: really easy things that are supposed to work right the first time getting screwed up, showing up late, & me not really knowing what's going on.
I keep thinking about that moment of illumination when I read the wiki page for "general anxiety disorder," the moment I realized that there might actually be a name for how I'm feeling these days -- and that I maybe don't have to feel like this at all.
Sometime last year I read an interview with Ira Glass, the host of This American Life, and he talked about how the only time in his whole life that he can remember not having at least a low-grade anxiety thrumming away as the background music to his life is one time when he took ecstasy. I told that story to my then-housemate and she was like, man, that's sad. It sort of brought me up short: I had just read it and felt a vague sense of camaraderie, a casual oh, you too?
There's been a bunch of times during the past year when I've joked to people that I think it wouldn't be hard for me to get a doctor to agree to give me anti-anxiety medication, but the past few weeks haven't really felt like a joke. They've been exhausting and breathless and obsessively circling around a tired litany of fears: I can't, and what if I fail, and this is too hard. And yet at the same time it's hard to imagine asking someone for professional help. Partly, I think, because the way I've been feeling the past few weeks is a difference in degree and not in kind to the way I've experienced the world for my entire life, and jumping off of that thought, a.) I've got some really great coping mechanisms already and b.) who wants to think that their whole life has been abnormal? Abnormal enough to warrant therapy and medication?
I mean...I didn't think Ira Glass' story was sad. The parallel, of course, being that I don't see my own story as sad. That I don't really feel like I need fixed.
But it's true that I'm exhausted with the effort of trying to box up all the things I worry about. I'm tired of feeling sick and breathless and -- worst of all -- unable to concentrate. I like my brain, and the worst thing about anxiety (for me) is feeling like you no longer have access to the ability to think things through in a calm & rational manner.
--
It doesn't help that I think I also fit the criteria for Seasonal Affective Disorder &/or maybe minor depression...
Written out like this it seems so black and white: you need therapy, and maybe some pills, missy. But in my head it still doesn't feel like that. Maybe because, like I said earlier, this all feels like a difference in degree rather than kind. It isn't new. I've dealt before; I can deal now.
I don't know, I don't know, I don't know. I think that if I don't start tending back towards normal by spring I might need to talk to someone. I just know that I don't want to do anything about it right now.
It sort of feels like a perfect little picture of my life, actually: really easy things that are supposed to work right the first time getting screwed up, showing up late, & me not really knowing what's going on.
I keep thinking about that moment of illumination when I read the wiki page for "general anxiety disorder," the moment I realized that there might actually be a name for how I'm feeling these days -- and that I maybe don't have to feel like this at all.
Sometime last year I read an interview with Ira Glass, the host of This American Life, and he talked about how the only time in his whole life that he can remember not having at least a low-grade anxiety thrumming away as the background music to his life is one time when he took ecstasy. I told that story to my then-housemate and she was like, man, that's sad. It sort of brought me up short: I had just read it and felt a vague sense of camaraderie, a casual oh, you too?
There's been a bunch of times during the past year when I've joked to people that I think it wouldn't be hard for me to get a doctor to agree to give me anti-anxiety medication, but the past few weeks haven't really felt like a joke. They've been exhausting and breathless and obsessively circling around a tired litany of fears: I can't, and what if I fail, and this is too hard. And yet at the same time it's hard to imagine asking someone for professional help. Partly, I think, because the way I've been feeling the past few weeks is a difference in degree and not in kind to the way I've experienced the world for my entire life, and jumping off of that thought, a.) I've got some really great coping mechanisms already and b.) who wants to think that their whole life has been abnormal? Abnormal enough to warrant therapy and medication?
I mean...I didn't think Ira Glass' story was sad. The parallel, of course, being that I don't see my own story as sad. That I don't really feel like I need fixed.
But it's true that I'm exhausted with the effort of trying to box up all the things I worry about. I'm tired of feeling sick and breathless and -- worst of all -- unable to concentrate. I like my brain, and the worst thing about anxiety (for me) is feeling like you no longer have access to the ability to think things through in a calm & rational manner.
--
It doesn't help that I think I also fit the criteria for Seasonal Affective Disorder &/or maybe minor depression...
Written out like this it seems so black and white: you need therapy, and maybe some pills, missy. But in my head it still doesn't feel like that. Maybe because, like I said earlier, this all feels like a difference in degree rather than kind. It isn't new. I've dealt before; I can deal now.
I don't know, I don't know, I don't know. I think that if I don't start tending back towards normal by spring I might need to talk to someone. I just know that I don't want to do anything about it right now.
Unsolicited advice
Date: 2015-02-03 01:46 am (UTC)My experience has never been that taking a benzo changes me--I am still an anxious person, and I still tend to see everything very black-and-white and be a perfectionist and worry about failure all the time. But the benzos dial it back a little, like "Oh, now I'm only spending 25% of my energy worrying rather than 40%." They definitely only make a difference in intensity, but man, I am so much more functional when my anxiety is at a lower intensity!
On the other hand, a lightbox for SAD is something that you can get your hands on without a diagnosis and without dealing with the mental health system. So it might be reasonable to try using one and see how much that helps, if you don't want to see a therapist or a psychiatrist right now.
Re: Unsolicited advice
Date: 2015-02-03 03:53 pm (UTC)And thanks for the info about the lightboxes. I just spent a little time reading about them online & i might try to get one.