I’ve said a couple times now that Summer makes me crazy.  Let me first just say that Summer always makes me crazy.  I’m a structure person and in order to remain sane and feeling good about myself, I need places to be and things to do.  Traditionally, Summer has meant a reduction in those things and even though the freedom is nice, it does make me a little crazy.  It’s hard to explain, but basically I don’t enjoy the burden of managing all of my own time.  It’s overwhelming to me.  I know it’s the opposite for a lot of people, but I cannot be creative or productive with wide open time and space.  I need defined limits.

The ridiculous thing is that I’m still working 55 hours and six days a week.  But, I went from having zero free time to a little bit of free time and it’s nice, it really is, but there are just so many things I want to do that I don’t know what to work on and too often I end up doing nothing.  And, there were a lot of things I didn’t have to think too much about when I was working 15 hour days.  Now that I have the time, they’re finding me, and I’m happy to be working through some of them and feeling bigger feelings than I felt when I had no time for them, but they’re overwhelming too.

All of the above I can attribute to my normal crazy mind, which I have come to embrace instead of always convincing myself that what I need is silence and peace.  Those are nice too and so is relaxation, but I had constant peace when I was in high school and it was boring.  The buzzing is part of who I am right now.

It’s the anxiety that’s the problem.  I’ve written about it before (here and here), but it got so much better last year when I was busy taking care of things and living day-to-day instead of worrying about things I couldn’t control.  It seems to have found me again.  It’s not as bad as it was before, but it just carries this blanket of angst and fear and stress and dread into my life that feels so heavy.  I consciously ask myself, “what is there to be afraid of right now?”  I have a million answers, but none of them are any good.

It’s only been the last two or three weeks that I’ve been feeling this way, and I keep thinking it’s just about to pass, but it hasn’t yet.  It’s starting to mess with my happiness.

The problem I always have with anxiety is that I don’t know what to do about it.  It’s quite mild, so I don’t think I need professional help, but I did need to at least talk about it here.  I feel very empowered and very excited about projects I’m working, and I hate to have this drag me down.

But, I remember something a professor said in a Shakespeare class I took as an undergrad.  Something like, sometimes you need to descend further into madness in order to get out.  The point was that sometimes you need to probe deeper and really let yourself experience something or even dwell too long on it in order to come out on the other side, rather than use all your will to pull yourself up by the bootstraps and keep yourself from experiencing whatever it is you need to.  I don’t know if that makes a lot of sense, but it’s meaningful for me.

On a separate and more exciting note, unless I completely wimp out (still a possibility), I’ll be posting something tomorrow that’s anxiety producing for me in a completely different way.  I’ll see you then.

It’s weird how life can surprise you.  By accident, it seems, you can become someone you never thought you would.  I guess I thought that getting older and gaining more confidence would put me more at ease, but instead it’s had the opposite effect.  I’ve walked further toward the crazy.

First I have to explain what might be obvious.  Like everyone else, I am full of contradictions.  Perhaps the biggest is that I am both a creative, dreamer, head-in-the-sky kind of person and a super logical, practical-almost-to-a-fault, organized and orderly kind of person.  It’s true that I’m dedicating my life to studying things that barely make sense and yet if you ask me the most efficient way to do anything, I can name it almost immediately.  It’s not that sometimes I’m the creative type and sometimes I’m the logical type.  I am always both.

So while my head might be in the clouds, my feet are firmly on the ground.  They used to be, at least.

I want to say it started about two years ago, but there were hints of it earlier.  When I was a senior in college, something happened to me.  I swear that I woke up on January 1st of that year with this restlessness I’d never had before.  You know how people describe me?  Calm.  Always calm.  I still appeared calm, but I had this new problem keeping my fingers and legs still.  I couldn’t fall asleep at night.  I chalked it up to anxiety about what I’d do after graduation.

I went off to graduate school and I guess for a year or more I was okay.  Then it was January of 2008 and the restless energy came back full force.  I was exercising a lot then, and I could never tell if the energy came from the exercising or if I was exercising because I didn’t know how else to calm myself down.  My life changed in a lot of subtle ways, but to me it seemed dramatic because it was happening all at once.  I’ve always been an introspective person, but suddenly I was overwhelmed with everything coming at me.  It’s like I’m a computer who has to process all of this data.  Previously, I had time enough to take everything apart and dissect it all in good time.  Now there was so much data that I couldn’t comprehend it all.  Instead I would focus in on very specific things, obsessing to the point where I sometimes had trouble remembering what had actually happened and what I had made up.

That’s when my feet left the ground.  I felt crazy.  My mind was racing all the time.

At the same time, I learned that I have high blood pressure.  My doctor thought for a while that I might be hyperthyroid, meaning my metabolism and everything else, including my mind, would be running in overdrive.  It seemed that there might be a medical explanation for the way I was feeling and I took comfort in that. When my blood tests came back and all my hormone levels were normal, there went my easy explanation.

Things got better.  I started calling the weird energy and obsessions anxiety.  I tried to deal with it on my own.  Things got worse.  I wrote a post about it.  Hearing I wasn’t alone made a difference.  Things got better, so I didn’t seek help.  Things got a lot better.  Things got a little worse and then better again.

When I say crazy, I don’t mean in the sense of the mental health stigma we have in our present culture.  I mean that I actually felt a little out of my mind.  At least for a girl who’s always had her feet planted so firmly on the ground.  And it’s been really hard for me to make sense of it, because I’ve never heard anyone talk about this before and, quite honestly, I would have figured myself for a person affected by depression and never this very mild mania at the complete other end of the spectrum!  Depression has left its mark all over my family for generations and so I was on guard for it, but this snuck up on me.

I can no longer describe myself honestly without mentioning this–whatever it is–but it’s hard, because I have such trouble understanding it myself.  Talking and writing about it makes me feel better.  It does scare me a bit, because there is such a big difference between being non-crazy and being crazy, but the gap doesn’t seem so wide between being a little crazy and out-of-my-mind crazy.  Considering the medical history of my family only makes me more nervous.  And at the same time as all of this, I must admit to finding it all a little amusing.  I don’t always mind being a little less calm and predictable than I used to be.  Plus, self acceptance is a much better place from which to deal with the anxiety when it sometimes becomes a problem.

I’m not sure if I’m ready to write this post. I don’t know quite what to say. My mind hasn’t wrapped itself around this issue yet. I’m not even sure if it is an issue. But, I’ve been dancing around it a lot on the blog, which means it’s certainly on my mind. Actually, it’s starting to control my life.

I think I have an anxiety problem. I immediately want to say, “but it’s not a big deal!” I haven’t had an anxiety attack or anything. Even the word problem sounds too serious. But, it is a problem, and it’s been a problem for more than a year.

I keep thinking it will get better when I finish this project, when I finish this semester, when I find a job, when I finish this semester, when I apply to PhD programs, but all of these things have come and gone already, and though the anxiety has lessened and intensified, it hasn’t gone away. It makes sense to worry about these things, but I find myself anxious almost all the time, even when I’m not sure what I’m worried about.

I also keep thinking that I have the ability to make it better all by myself. If I just focus. If I just stop procrastinating. If I exercise more. If I take it easy for a while. If I take some deep breaths. If I finish everything I’m worried about. But, I have tried and tried, and though the pull yourself up by the bootstraps mentality still holds some hope in me, how many times can I try and fail before it’s stupid not to look somewhere else for help?

To be honest, I don’t even know if what I’m experiencing is anxiety. I keep saying that I’m in a funk or feeling down, but that makes it sound like I’m depressed, and that is not what this is. I’m closer to manic, but not that either. The smallest things are stressing me out, it feels like my mind and body are racing, I think about everything all the time, I always have this feeling of fear and dread in my gut, and I can’t ever get enough done to calm myself.

I can survive this. I’ve been doing it for quite a while now. But, I can no longer believe that things will get better on their own, and it seems that if I don’t do something now, I’m going to reach a breaking point eventually.

But, the real reason I decided to write this post right now, even though it seems like I should wait a while, is that I had a very scary thought today. Two scary thoughts actually. I thought that I didn’t want to get help, because I didn’t want to admit to other people that this is a problem I can’t handle alone. And, I don’t want to consider medication, because I don’t want to be a person who needs medication. I couldn’t believe these thoughts were even in my brain as I was thinking them. I am appalled at myself. I have always been utterly confused by people who think that psychiatric illness is a sign of weakness or embarrassing in anyway, and even more so by people who refuse drugs that might really help them. I guess I think differently when I’m the one in question. But, the thought of stupid ideas like these stopping me from getting help if I need it really scare me.

I’m also concerned with the way this is affecting my body. My stomach is always in knots, I often lose my appetite, my mind races when I’m trying to fall asleep, I feel almost jittery sometimes, and suddenly out of the blue, I have high blood pressure for which there seems to be no medical explanation.

I guess I don’t really know what to do because I keep going back to the thought that it really isn’t that bad. Honestly, truly, it really isn’t. And, stupid fear aside, I don’t think I need medication. But, I really don’t want to live like this anymore, and unless I pack up and go home, there’s no future ahead for me that doesn’t involve a heavy work load and a lot of stress. I’d be better off facing this now instead of later when I reach a crisis point.

As part of my benefits package at work, I can have a few free sessions with a therapist. Maybe I should talk to someone about this. I’ve never tried that before.

If you have some experience with anxiety, or even if you don’t, I’d really like to hear from you. If you don’t want to leave a public comment, you can always email me at writetoreach[at]gmail[dot]com.