My Anxiety

 As I mentioned in my last post, I am prone to overthinking and thinking all the time.  One of the consequences of all of this thinking is that I become prone to anxiety/panic attacks, alternating with bouts of depression.  I had one such attack just last Friday morning.  I woke up about two hours early to the sounds of rain.  I tried to go back to sleep using my usual techniques, but it wasn't working.  I didn't have anything too pressing on my mind.  I finally found someone who advised me on my plans for going back to school.  I had no pressing issues about my forthcoming jury duty, although I would receive news about both later on that day. It could have been a premonition of sorts.  I tried my regular calming thoughts, but they are making me more jittery, not calmer.  I didn't really fall back to sleep, and I stayed in bed until my normal wake-up time.  I watched some news, checked social media, had breakfast.  The usual.  By the time I went to work at nine, I was more-or-less myself, but barely.  See, I have known triggers that can set off these attacks:  changes in my routine, even minor ones can start them off; loneliness, even by not being around people at all, not just by myself; and talk of death and dying, destruction and endings.  Regrets aren't as frequent a trigger, but they can still bring them on.  I've been this way even since I was a child.  For instance, one time in third grade, school was let out just before a half-day due to the water being off.  We were sent home early in a light rain.  I didn't get to see my best friend that day.  We were in separate classes that year, so I only really got to see him at recess.  That was also the year that we began to drift apart.  Anyway, when I got home, I didn't feel like doing anything.  Nothing was on television.  I felt so wrong.  I even tried to throw up once, just so I could feel something.  Maybe get the bad emotions out of me.  By the late afternoon, when I would have been home anyway and my shows were on, I was feeling better, and I was myself again by the time my mother came home from work and dinnertime.  Second and third grade was when I started to get panicky about death.  Things were better for a few years, but college brought my first bad attack as an adult.  It was 1992, about a week after my birthday.  I had been playing a new video game for much of the afternoon into the early evening.  It was getting me pretty wired up.  Just before bed, my mother mentioned hearing about the son of some celebrity committing suicide on the news.  For some reason, that got me thinking about mortality, and I started to get an attack.  I barely slept that night, just so consumed with worry.  I was lucky that I didn't drive to the college that day.  As it was, I stopped my mother from passing a slow car just as a coal truck would be speeding by.  Maybe another premonition?  So, I went to my classes, without really talking to anyone.  I only had three widely spaced classes that day, so I had too much free time by myself.  I tried to do some work, by my literature class had me reading quite a few morbid stories lately, so it was just another trigger.  I would have talked to someone, but my closest friends there had transferred out the previous year, and I had made the conscious decision not to get too close to anyone new, as I felt that I wouldn't be seeing any of them ever again.  Somehow, I made it through the day.  I managed to talk to my mother a little on the way home, and I was calmer.  We decided that I should make changes to my schedule.  I would go out with her on her lunch break once a week on my only non-conflicting free time.  She would also come and pick me up soon after my last class on Friday and take me somewhere with more people, so I wouldn't have to wander around a nearly deserted campus for an additional ninety minutes.  It still took me a few weeks to start feeling like myself again.  (I've mentioned by big 1996 attack many times before on this blog, so I'll skip it this time around.)  I started developing techniques to help me calm down.  They mostly still hold up.  I try to go outside or into an air conditioned room. I always feel better when I'm colder.  I try to walk or pace.  Later on, I added weightlifting and other types of exercise.  When my body is active, it allows my mind to focus on a problem, so I  can come up with a solution. Since I haven't met any new close friends since high school, I sometimes imagine myself talking to them, especially when I have problems that I can't talk to with anyone else.  I frequently have done this just before I go to sleep.  Fairly recently, I found that going to the bathroom can help.  I'm not sure of the exact cause-and-effect relationship between the two, but if it helps... When Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the final book in the series, came out, I read it all in one day.  I finished fairly late,  and was still a little hyper when I went to bed.  I couldn't stop thinking about how this was the end of the series.  It wasn't about not having a guaranteed top seller or that there would be no more books, but that Harry got a happy ending in an epilogue set in the future.  Why couldn't I have a happy ending?  I fretted over my problem for hours it seemed, before I finally went to sleep.  It was still worrying me for much of the morning, and nothing could slow my anxiety down.  Until I made a quick trip, that is.  After that, I became calmer, and was okay by that afternoon. I should be fine, for the moment.  As I said at the start, I don't really have anything really big happening to me right now, but all of the little stressors are starting to add up to something almost big.  One of these minor stressors has been the string of posting about deaths showing up in my social media, particularly of parents.  It happened to one of the people I considered "close," at least in my mind.  He had returned to the area for the first time in I'm not sure how long for the funeral.  Yet I didn't try to go.  I missed what might be the last and only opportunity to see him, all because of my aversion to death.  For goodness sakes, he was one of the few people I messaged about my latest failed application to my favored grad school program!  I waited a week before I felt I could tell my mother.  I should have tried to go.  I didn't realize how I "betrayed" him until I began composing this post in the days after this last attack.  I haven't been able to have my "talks" ever since, not even with other friends.  All because I mentioned that fact in last week's post.  I failed to mention that regrets are a trigger for me too.   What I need is just to physically talk to someone, get everything off my chest all at once.  Yet, I have no new close friends.  I never got around to figure out how to do so as an adult, how to socialize.  Let's face it.  I don't even know how to "adult."    I am still getting around to learn text.  Email.  Phone calls.  I can barely even make face-to-face conversation any more, outside of basic transactions, and even then I'm weak.  My biggest wish, maybe in the next year or two, would be to get those friends together in the same place and the same time so I could just be with someone.  To say, "I need your help.  I need your support and understanding.  I need you to teach me to be a man, a better man.  I need you to help me remember who I am, for I have be broken and lost for so long.  I need to know that I am liked, to be loved."  At the very least, I will be able to move on and let go of this past anxiety.    But the hope for more?  That's why I wrote this.  A chance to heal, and clear the air of my problems.  Composing this post initially made me a little nervous, but actually writing it has calmed me a lot.  I hate that I have to be so open, almost anonymously like this, but I will use whatever means I can to get better.