I’m pretty selective about what I talk about on here, which is why I don’t have new posts every day about every silly little thing that happens to me and how it’s affecting my existence. But some days, like the day that I’m writing this, are just not great days. I have something called ‘generalized anxiety disorder’ which feels exactly as stupid and as self centered as it sounds. It’s affected me for a lot of years – most of my adult life – and is incredibly inconvenient and unpredictable. It’s cost me relationships, dates, jobs, apartments, and helped me miss countless parties and gatherings because I simply am rendered unable to leave the house.
If you don’t know about anxiety disorders, they’re dumb. They are. For me, it feels like I’m incredibly worried about [thing] or [circumstance] to the point that sometimes I can’t leave my house or (on rare occasions, the room I’m currently in). There’s stuff to take and doctors to see about it, but really it’s an untreatable thing that has no basis in reality. It’s just my crazy brain deciding that it’s more important to worry about everything all at once (essentially nothing specific, but all possible things that might happen) than it is to live my life.
Today was a weird combination of cold and crazy that kept me indoors all day. I woke up at 5AM, entirely unable to go back to sleep and was instantly worried about my performance at work, and have I scheduled all my bill payments for this month, and did I send the rent check, and just everything, instantly. At 5AM. I’ve also been battling a little sinus thing the last couple days, so that was in full force as well.
I spent about two hours in this soup of worry until around 7, when I decided I may as well just go with it and got up and made coffee and ordered breakfast and sat down to send some emails and schedule some stuff. Nothing really got better, I just kept finding additional things to worry about. Thought about leaving my house to go to the gym or to the grocery store, but couldn’t manage to find the courage to do either, and so stayed in and spent more time in front of the computer.
Near 4PM I thought I might nap and make up for a little of my lost morning sleep, but I lay entirely awake for nearly an hour before a couple friends began texting me about their days.
As of now, I’m thinking about maybe taking a bath and going to bed in the next hour or so because I don’t know what else I can do. I live a really great life – I have a fun job, I make enough money to pay my bills, I have good friends who understand me for what I am – but my brain sometimes decides that none of this is sufficient and the panic of failure becomes the only thing I can think about.
This isn’t a great entry. But it’s a thing that happens. So.
Tomorrow will be different.