Anxiety Disorder

Many people don’t know this about me, or would never know if meeting me, that I have extreme anxiety and panic disorder. When I was younger, I never understood the word “anxiety”. In ignorance, it sounded like a bunch of psycho-babble bullshit. I never really felt anxious when I was younger. It pretty much all started after I had left “Braiden”. Psychologists agree that certain personality disorders can be triggered or become much worse after I traumatic event, and in my case rings true.

After returning home from Montreal after 6 months, my behavior was erratic. I wasn’t sure what to do with myself. I moved back in with my parents and I knew that I wanted to get back in touch with my family and spend time with them, for it was in Montreal that I really learned the importance of a good family, which was definitely my family. But I also became lazy and unmotivated. I tried to go back to school but dropped out, not being able to be somewhere the same time, several days a week. I indulged in a short affair with a complete loser. He had a kid that he couldn’t take care of, didn’t have a job or aspire to have one, mooched off of me and his friends to party and get drunk most days. I indulged in it perhaps, because it was the first time I could start to learn my boundaries with men, without the fear of losing them, as it would not have been a big loss.
I remember one time, I was driving to work and I started to have a panic attack out of nowhere. I could hardly breath, I felt like world was ending, and I could barely drive. I was crying, and finally I made it home. I went to my mom as she always knew what was going on, or how to help. It was then that she told me that she had read in insurance reports from about a year and a half previously, that I had something I should check out. I had no idea what she meant, I thought she was talking about something physical, like cancer or something. And when I sat at the computer, waiting for her to tell me so I could type it into google, I was surprised to hear the words, “Borderline Personality Disorder”. What the hell was that?
I typed it into google, found a wikipedia page, the source to all higher learning, and learned all about it. Going through the symptoms I found that I had felt every single one, and that it made my life make so much more sense to me. I finally had something tangible with which to compare my life, decisions, and experiences. My mom had waited so long to tell me because when I was gone, her and my dad attended sessions for people who had family members with Borderline. They all told them not to tell you, but instead urge you to go to therapy so a professional could tell you in the right way.But I’m not like that. I’ve always been self-aware and thirsty for the truth. Finding that out was like a giant slap in the face. A wake up call to all the things I was doing without even aware that I was doing them.

It’s been just over a year. I’ve read several books about it. Ones with funny, and all-true titles like, “Get Me Out of Here”, “I Hate You, Don’t Leave Me”, and “Sometimes, I Act Crazy”. I’ve tried to understand where it comes from, if it’s neurological or environmental, what treatments are, what symptoms are. The word borderline is used because the disorder is one part neurosis and one part psychosis. Neurosis is a class of functional mental disorders involving distress, but no hallucinations or delusions. Psychosis involves delusions, hallucinations, personality change, bizarre behavior, and inability to interact with other people. From my understanding, borderline can be genetic as well as environmental.

To help you get a better idea of what this is, Borderline is characterized by the following symptoms: 1) Frantic efforts to avoid real or imagined abandonment. In this case my frantic efforts involve leaving and moving around. 2) A pattern of intense and unstable relationships characterized by alternating between extremes of idealization and devaluation. 3) Identity disturbance: markedly and persistently unstable self-image or sense of self. 4) Impulsivity in at least two areas that are self-damaging. 5) Recurrent suicidal behavior, gestures, or self-mutilating behavior. 6) Affected instability due to a marked reactivity of mood (intense episodic dysphoria, irritability, or anxiety usually lasting a few hours and rarely more then a few days). This symptom I have strongly. 7) Chronic feelings of emptiness. I also experience this symptom strongly. 8) Inappropriate intense anger or difficulty controlling anger. 9) Transient stress related paranoid ideation or sever dissociative symptoms. I have this symptom a lot as well.

It’s been an incredible six months. I can’t believe my progress, but I am also becoming fearful of the future. One part of me thinks, I’ve gone this long, I can do it for longer, and the other part thinks you’ve gone this long, much longer then usual, so any day now could be the day you fall apart.
Having an anxiety disorder, especially with being Borderline, can be tireless and endless. One minute you can be totally happy and at peace, and then the next minute you feel like tingle in your body, and your mind starts to drift towards what you’re suppose to next, until your paralyzed with an anxiety that makes it hard to breath, and move, and function. Then, you’re mind goes somewhere else, temporarily distracted, and things ease back to a comfortability. Sometimes this happens for seconds each time, or minutes, or longer, and each day is an unpredictable “what-am-i-going-to-feel-next”. There’s not much stability for someone like that. I’m capable of stability, and that might heal me. But my decisions rarely allow me to be stable. How do I break that cycle?
I’ve developed this nervous tick. I’m constantly fiddling with my hands. Obsessing, really. I’ll start by taking my thumb in the other hand and using my fingers to press along the outside of the entire nail, feeling the texture, if it’s rough, or if there are little pieces of skin. I squeeze my hands together. I press down on the tip of the nail and feel the pressure on my fingertips. I write a lot and get painful calouses on my index finger and I like to take a pen and go over the top of the tough skin, pressing down on it which causes that good-hurt feeling. Then it get’s irritated to I wash my hands and put lotion on them. This helps me deal with anxieties.

(To be continued at some other random time…)

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