Nyx's Journal

I have been an anxious wreck most of this week. I thought it was the stress/excitement combo of my upcoming trip, since while I like being other places I find travel itself rather nerve-wracking.

Today, however, I got my hair cut and now feel way better. If I was really making myself sick over nerves that my hair wouldn't look good, that is a kind of woeful commentary. (It does, incidentally, look good). Sometimes I feel like the less significant the issue, the more I stress about it. My reactions to my life are wildly disproportionate.

Of course, I could wake up tomorrow and have a total meltdown about what to pack, so who knows. I wish there were an easy way to pinpoint what is making me anxious at any given time.

As the savvy among you may have surmised from my absence, I've had a rough patch recently that's gotten in the way of me updating here. I seem to have developed an unexpected nasty side of social anxiety to go with the garden-variety stuff, as well as serious issues with going anywhere outside my 'known territory.' Needless to say, it's inconvenient at best.

However, that's not actually what I want to talk about right now. ( Read more... )

Normally, I love the Christmas season. I even suffer enforced time spent with the Extended Family (who mostly give me headaches) with reasonably good grace, because it's a price I'm okay with paying for a pleasant month or so. I love doing Christmas shopping, I love the lights, I love trimming the tree, I love the breakfast and dinner that I only get once a year, I love guessing what my gifts could be, I love seeing people's faces when they open the ones I got for them. I detest winter, but I love Christmas; I always have.

This year, I'm feeling distinctly Grinch-like. As I've said, my anxiety levels are high, and the busy nature of the holidays seems to just be aggravating it. Anyone who mentions that we're just over two weeks from Christmas risks sending me into fits of panic because I HAVEN'T DONE ANYTHING YET. I have no idea what to get my father– I've been fretting over it for weeks and still have no idea. I have plans for other people's gifts, but I've done nothing about it. Plus, there's the looming prospect of a family party, which I'll be avoiding– I don't intend to induce a seizure on purpose, which would be the likely result– but dodging gracefully involves excuses, a cover story, a planned subterfuge. My parents don't care, but everyone else will.

I'm stressed, in short, on top of the fact that my nerves are already a live wire. Also, how to explain away my absence and lack of job/general productivity to the relatives without ever so much as implying depression/anxiety might be at play...? This sort of thing is exactly why awareness is so important; bad enough to cope with the disease without also having to cope with the misinformed.

My therapist has been making noises of getting my psychiatrist to change up my meds again. I'm really not sure I like that idea, and not just because I'm getting sick of the constant switching– four meds over four months– or because of my general distaste for being super medicated.

Meds and I, we don't get along great. I started out on Cymbalta and (after a period of violently nauseous adjustment) it helped for a while. But only a while. Prozac left me numb and aggravated my seizures to intolerable levels. The lorazepam I take as-needed for anxiety does its job, but knocks me out flat for a good ten hours, so I prefer not to use it unless I have to. My current Pristiq/Deplin cocktail, however, actually seems to be working, and doing so without any adverse side effects (save for my irritation at the idiots who decided that square was a good shape for a pill). My depression has been under control for once; my mood has been stable and in line with my actual experiences. I'm even able to get things done, when I need to.

My anxiety, however, is decidedly not remotely close to being managed at this point, and the recent absence of major depression symptoms and/or episodes has left me fairly at its mercy. Whenever one half of the problem is being dealt with, it seems, the other takes the opportunity to invade my conscious all the more aggressively. The anxiety issues have led my therapist to bring up possibly switching me over to some kind of anti-anxiety drug instead of the antidepressants. The thought of switching is fairly horrifying to me– it's been so long since I haven't been feeling depressed 98% of the time, and I really don't want to go back to that place. But trying to cope with my current levels of anxiety is not exactly a great prospect either.

I always feel so ambivalent about psych meds. This is really not helping.

I had a nasty anxiety day yesterday, the kind of day where I am constantly aware that I'm bordering on a panic attack. The best metaphor I have for it is that it's as if I'm a kettle full of water on the stove– sooner or later, it boils and the steam has to escape in a whistling rush. The only hope is to turn the heat on the burner down.

Except it's really difficult to do that. It's one thing when anxiety is centered on/stems from some identifiable fear, even if it's a ridiculous one– my therapist and I have been working a lot on self-talk, and on calming those fears and letting them go. I still have a lot of work ahead of me to get good at that, but I'm improving, and to some extent I can quell the irrational panicky feeling. Yesterday, however, was the sort of anxiety that is utterly baseless and unfocused, just bouncing around inside me and leaving me restless and tense, a bundle of nerves.

In situations like that, the only thing I've found even remotely helpful is meditation. Sometimes I can calm myself enough, at least, to keep me from spiraling into any of the major physical symptoms I experience– panic attacks, seizures, ect. I felt proud of myself when I managed to remain okay-enough that I didn't have to resort to my anti-anxiety meds (effective, but they knock me right out).

Jittery dreams, though. Does anyone else experience that, I wonder? My dreams themselves become anxious and stressful sometimes during these flare-ups. They're also some of the few dreams I tend to remember.