anxiety

/ Alyxander James / 1 Comment

I’m writing this post on Thursday morning from my armchair at home, rather than from the bus. I have been feeling increasingly crummy every day this week, and this morning I finally woke up feeling definitively sick, so I’m going to work from home and keep my germs to myself.

So, this is going to be a short post today, because my brain is pretty foggy. Usually when I’m feeling like I have nothing to talk about, I go for some sort of list post. So…let’s go with three things I’m grateful for today:

  1. I can work from home. My boss told me I could just take an actual sick day if I wanted to, and I know that I technically can…but I’m almost out of sick time and I have to save my vacation time for Christmas travel. I’m glad to be in a position where it’s possible to do my job remotely when my body doesn’t feel up to commuting.
  2. Things are going better with my family. We’ve worked through the most recent round of hurt and seem to be closer to being on the same page, which feels nice.
  3. I don’t think I’ve mentioned it here yet, but thanks to the adjustments that were made to my med regimen over the summer, my anxiety is much better controlled. So much so, in fact, that I’m able to drink regular coffee again! It had been about two years since I’d been able to handle that much caffeine. As I sit here and sip my coffee this morning, I am grateful for that.

Coming Out

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Hello, dear readers! This blog post is going up late today, because I did not write it yesterday and also because I stayed home from work today to catch up on sleep and fight off the headache I woke up with.

I’m also not really sure what to write about this week. They still haven’t caught the perpetrator of the two shootings in our neighborhood that I talked about last week, so we’re still a bit on edge, trying to figure out how to navigate our neighborhood in a way that feels safe right now. Also, on a national level here in the US, things are pretty overwhelming right now. (If you’re a US citizen and haven’t checked your voter registration or haven’t registered to vote, do so now. We need everyone to show up and vote in November. Voter suppression is a serious reality in a lot of places right now, and voter rolls have been purged in some states as a part of that, so check your registration even if you know you were registered before.)

We did have the lovely experience on Monday of seeing our friend Heather Mae play a show in our neighborhood. We got to spend a while before and after the show catching up with her and hanging out, and that was great. Go check out her music if you’re not familiar with her stuff – she’s fabulous!

Yesterday was World Mental Health Day, and today is National Coming Out Day. So I think to close this blog I’m going to combine the sentiments of those two days and tell you a little bit about myself that you may or may not know:

I am queer. Queer is a label I’ve chosen because it represents so much of who I am. It describes my orientation – I’m attracted to all sorts of people of all sorts of genders. It describes my gender – I was assigned female at birth, but realized in my mid-twenties that that didn’t fit; I’m now living and presenting in such a way that I’m read as male by the world at large, but in my heart of hearts I really don’t identify with binary gender at all. Queer also describes my brain – I have Bipolar II Disorder and Generalized Anxiety Disorder, both of which I was finally diagnosed with 9 years ago, and which I’ve been medicated for ever since. A few months ago, I had to seek out a psychiatrist to get my meds adjusted – I was manic and anxious as hell for a solid month. It was miserable, and I still don’t know how I managed to get anything done during that time. Since getting my meds adjusted, I’m feeling much more capable of handling all of the anxiety that comes from life right now.

I choose to be out and proud about all of these intersections of my identity, but I can make that choice because I live with a great deal of privilege. I have safe, nurturing spaces where I can be myself. Not everyone is so lucky. If you’re struggling with whether or not to come out today, remember that your safety comes first, and that your identity is valid regardless of how public you are with it. I see you; you’re real. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. May we all work toward a world in which “coming out,” whether it’s in regard to sexuality or gender or mental health or anything else, doesn’t carry so much weight and fear with it.

Fears

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Friends, it’s been a week. And while I try to largely focus on the silver lining on this blog, I need to be honest with you – this week, there are several things I’m feeling scared about.

The obvious one, on a US-national politics scale, is that it’s looking likely that Brett Kavanaugh (who’s been accused by multiple women of sexual assault and who is clearly temperamentally unfit for the job) will be confirmed as a Supreme Court justice. It’s horrifying. (John Oliver’s take on all this is on point and wonderful. Long, but worth the watch.)

In local-to-me news, two men in my neighborhood were shot in the head with the same weapon over the last few days. One was an older gay man walking his dog around 10am, and the other was an orthodox Jewish man walking near the lake late in the evening. Yes, I live in Chicago, but this feels different from past instances of gun violence in our neighborhood, which have historically been either gang-related or connected to muggings. There’s no telling at this point if these homicides were specific hate crimes or the result of a more generally misanthropic hate, but I admit I’m worried about how gay I might look walking down the street.

The world is often a terrifying place these days. I’m trying to look for bright spots to push back the dark. So here are some happy things that happened this week:

  • We went with friends to see Cameron Esposito on Friday. It was exactly what we all needed.
  • A couple we’re friends with had their baby on Saturday, which has inspired me to knit some baby things. They knit up so quickly!
  • I went to the dentist. This is generally not a happy statement, but it was the first time I’d been since moving to Chicago six years ago. No cavities in these teeth!

I’d love to hear how you’re pushing back the darkness this week, friends. (Or if you’re not, I’d love to know what I can do to sit with you in the dark a while.) Hang in there.

Progress

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Yesterday, I finally had my psychiatric appointment to discuss adjusting my meds in an effort to better manage my anxiety. And I’m pleased to say it went well! The psychiatric nurse practitioner and I talked about my past diagnoses and mental health history. Based on that, he gave me a couple of options that we could pursue, and respected my choice between those options.

Thankfully, the first step is simple: I’m just increasing the dose of one of my meds. If I feel in six weeks or so that that’s helping, then that’s where we leave it. If I’m still feeling like I need more help, we’ll look at adding an anti-anxiety medication to the mix. I’m hopeful that this first adjustment will be sufficient, and while I feel a little silly for taking so long to pursue this, I’m mostly just glad to have a plan. I’ve also finally come down from my most recent bout of hypo-mania, so I feel like I’m in a more stable spot to work out of, which is nice.

Here’s to (hopefully) better anxiety management!

Anxious All the Time

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My brain, at its best moments, could be described as “quirky.” Generally speaking, I know how to work with my mental quirks. I have systems in place to keep them from turning into anything more serious.

Possibly my least favorite of these quirks is the ever-present hum of anxiety in my head. I’ve frequently described mania as feeling like I have a head full of bees. They’re generally very busy, and sometimes something happens to make them particularly agitated, and they sting. That descriptor applies double for anxiety, really. Except instead of generally peaceful regular honey bees, anxiety bees are like killer bees, which will follow whatever upset them for an absurd distance compared with most other bees.

Metaphors aside, I’ve been really struggling to keep my anxiety under control lately. My usual coping mechanisms are falling short. Nothing seems to make much of a difference anymore.

This isn’t a new problem, exactly: I’ve noticed the frequency and severity of my anxiety increasing over the past couple of years. But I think we’ve finally hit critical mass for what I can reasonably manage on my own.

At the advice of my therapist, I got a referral to a psychiatrist from my doctor. I’ve been on the same doses of the same medications for about nine years; maybe it’s time for a change.

I was supposed to have an appointment today, but unfortunately, the doctor had to reschedule. Thankfully, I only have to wait a couple more weeks. I am nervous – messing around with meds can be a traumatizing process. But I’m hopeful that it’ll be worth it in the end.

Sleep Deprived

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It’s been a long week.

I am manic, and have been for a couple of weeks now. The first week or so was fun – I got excited about a lot of things and felt connected in ways I hadn’t in a while. The second week was not so fun. I was super anxious, and struggled to keep panic attacks at bay.

This week has also been less fun. The worst of the anxiety has waned, although it’s still buzzing beneath the surface. The bigger problem this week has been around sleep.

There have been a lot of late nights this week, for a variety of reasons. They’ve left me completely exhausted. However, when I’m finally able to lay down to sleep, my brain decides to kick it into high gear. It just. Won’t. Stop.

Rarely is it buzzing about anything of consequence. It just starts shouting about whatever random shit pops up as I’m attempting to drift off. I try to focus on breathing, but so far that hasn’t been especially successful. Even when I do sleep, I have really weird, vivid dreams that don’t leave me feeling rested; as soon as I wake up, my brain is back to running in circles.

As a result, it’s now Thursday and I feel like I’m just barely holding it together. I know this is a temporary state, and I’m talking with my therapist and doctor to see if there’s anything further I can be doing. But right now in the thick of it, I am not having a great time.

At least the weekend is almost here!

Winter Blahs

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I am having a very blah sort of week. I’m not sad, exactly. I just feel very unmotivated, and tired, and nothing sounds like very much fun or like anything I want to do. All I really want to do is hibernate.

It wasn’t until I was on my way to therapy on Monday that I realized that this is probably a weird instance of the depressive side of my Bipolar cycle sneaking up on me. Usually when I’m heading into a depressive episode, I can tell – I feel really down. But “down” doesn’t feel like the right word for this. It’s just…blah.

It was a struggle to get anything done at work last week. It was a struggle to write my song for songwriting class (and my goal was actually to write TWO songs last week). It was a struggle to get myself to show up for my volunteer shift and for the social things I’d committed to doing (even though all of those things ended up being fine). I had a minor breakdown last Thursday evening, because I got home at the end of a long day, and even though I’d made a plan and knew what I should get done, none of those things actually happened. I got things done, but none of them were things on my to do list, and I felt like an enormous failure.

Since I was able to identify this as depression on Monday, it’s been a little easier – if not to find motivation or give-a-damn, at least to sit quietly with the blah-ness of it all and recognize that this, too, shall pass. Yesterday the sun was out, and I had the same revelation I do every time we get through a cloudy spate of days and come out the other side into sunlight – I am incredibly affected by the weather. I should probably definitely be taking vitamin D.

In the meantime, I’m finding ways to cope. I’m listening to a lot of Dar Williams (even when I’m not listening to Dar Williams, my brain’s playing The Christians and the Pagans or The Babysitter’s Here or When I Was A Boy). I’m taking time to write down what I’m anxious about. I’m thinking a lot about the Starfinder game I’m going to start playing soon. I’m dreaming up new tattoos (even though I can’t afford a new tattoo right now). I’m celebrating the fact that I pushed my credit card debt down under the next $1000 since making a payment last week and getting a disputed charge taken care of. (I’m trying not to be disappointed that I haven’t gotten farther in the process of paying it off.) I’m trying to remind myself that while yes, I probably should be reading and knitting and writing more, the fact that I’m not doing it right now does not mean that this is what my life is going to be like forever. Once again: this, too, shall pass.

Plans

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After I posted last week about my word of the year being “Action”…I promptly caught the cold from hell and lost several days to that nonsense. I was out of the office for three of the last five work days, and spent a lot of time annoyed by the fact that I couldn’t breathe through half my nose and kept waking myself up coughing. But I finally (FINALLY) and starting to feel more human again, so now I feel like it’s time to move forward with starting 2018 (a little over a week late, but hey, who’s counting?).

I’m continuing PT for my knee, which is helping a lot. It also makes me whine a lot, because the exercises are HARD (but feel like they shouldn’t be). I’m working on being more gracious about it and grateful for the progress I’m making.

Songwriting class started this week, and I’m trying to hit the ground running, so I have a shot at hitting my goal of 40 songs written this year (twice the number I’ve written each of the past two years).

I’m working on anxiety coping mechanisms in therapy. One of the things I’m trying this week is writing down my anxieties, in the hopes that getting them out of my head onto paper will make it easier to talk myself down. So far it seems like it’s helpful, but it’s only been a couple of days, so jury’s still out. I left my session this week with several ideas to try, though, so if this doesn’t work out, I have other options.

One of the things I want to do a better job of this year is actually planning out my weeks. There’s a big part of me that hates the idea of being boxed into a rigid schedule, but I also recognize that I’m more productive if I have a plan. If the only way I will make time to write songs or read books or whatever else I want to do is if I block out time in my schedule every week, then that’s what I need to do.

I’m trying to keep my goals reasonable, to not bite off more than I can chew in the first two weeks of the year, because I don’t want to burn out. Finding the balance there is a challenge.

Sometimes Self-Care Looks Like…

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We’re less than one week from Christmas. On Saturday, my partner and I will get up at an ungodly hour of the morning and drive to Minnesota, where we’ll spend a week with family. (Incidentally, there may or may not be a blog next week, on account of the holidays.)

As 2017 draws to a close, and I find my life in a relatively stable place overall, I am allowing myself some time to more closely examine the areas of my life that have long been neglected in favor of what felt like more pressing crises.

One of those areas is anxiety management. I have Generalized Anxiety Disorder, so I’m no stranger to anxiety, but with the current state of the world, I’m finding the coping mechanisms I have aren’t sufficient. I’m also noticing where my anxiety is affecting other areas of my life – how it makes me shut down around conflict, how it destroys my productivity at work, how it keeps me from enjoying social situations that didn’t used to be a problem. I had my first visit with a new therapist on Monday. Sometimes in therapy in the past I’ve had trouble articulating why I was there, and what I needed, but this new therapist was able to sort of draw that out of me and help me frame my goals for therapy more solidly than I’ve been able to in the past. I think things are going to work out well with them.

Another area that I’ve been neglecting is more physical. There are a lot of aspects of my physical health that I am not great at paying attention to, but I’ve been having particular trouble with my knees lately, as a joint issue I was diagnosed with in high school has flared up again. It’s done this occasionally over the years, but now my right knee has been swollen and stiff for a month, and my left knee is getting sore from compensating for it. Thankfully, this time when it flared up, I made an appointment with my doctor right away, who referred me to a physical therapist. I had my first PT appointment yesterday, and it was kind of miraculous how much of a difference a single, half-hour appointment made. I have instructions to do some stretching exercises every few hours during the day for the next couple of weeks, until my next appointment, and it’s encouraging to see progress on the first day.

Sometimes self-care looks like finding a new therapist, even if the process of finding a new therapist is, itself, kind of anxiety-inducing.

Sometimes self-care looks like making that doctor’s appointment that probably should have been scheduled months ago.

Sometimes self-care looks like knitting selfishly after working on a rare unselfish project for a couple of months. I knit my nephew a sweater for Christmas, and while it was fun and it looks super cute and I think he’ll like it, there’s something immensely satisfying about working on a sweater for myself with tons of cables (which is far and away my favorite type of project to work on).

The holidays are rough for a lot of people, for all sorts of reasons. My own holiday is looking like it’ll be bittersweet – I get to spend time with all sorts of people I care about, which will be lovely, but my 15-year-old dog (okay, she’s my parents’ dog, but we got her the summer I turned 14, so she’s still my dog) is not doing well, and it’s almost certain that next week I’ll be saying goodbye for the last time. I’m already sad, thinking about it, as much as I’m grateful that I will get one last chance to see her. Sometimes, for me, self-care looks like blocking out some time in my schedule to process the feelings I don’t have space for, say, at work. Which is all to say that this is a time of year where self-care is particularly important, and that self-care is going to look different for everyone.

I wish all of you the happiest holidays you can manage, and I hope you all find ways to take care of yourselves through the rough patches.

Anxious Days

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I’m having an anxious week, and I don’t really know why.

It might be the regular stress of the upcoming holidays.

It might be the minor (but still stressful) drama and health issues happening with my team at work.

It might also just be my brain.

In any case, my body decided yesterday that it was a great time to develop an eye twitch. And not just one eye, but both, sporadically, all day. Obviously I’m a huge fan of this development.

There have been bright spots this week, mostly revolving around music – a songwriting classmate’s concert, meeting new musician friends, having the new song I’d talked myself out of liking go over okay in class on Tuesday. Unfortunately, all of it has been underpinned by this frantic activity in my brain.

It’s not even that I’m anxious about some specific, concrete thing. (I guess that’s why they call it Generalized Anxiety Disorder.) I just can’t get my brain to shut off.

I’m also really, really tired. These two things are probably related.

I feel like I’ve been drinking excessive amounts of coffee – I’m jittery, my eyes are twitching, I feel wired and like I’m crashing simultaneously. Only, I drink decaf coffee these days. This appears to be entirely fabricated within the confines of my brain.