I've been looking at apartments, but have yet to act on any of them. I hope to begin my emailing campaign sometime today. Otherwise I've been working on cleaning up the apartment to try to get it available for someone else to move in to. Speaking of which: Does anyone want to move into our apartment for 2 months?
I've also switched medication again. I'm now on Cymbalta, which is not an SSRI, but something else (I'm unsure exactly what it is, but I know it helps with the reuptake of dopamine rather than serotonin, so maybe it will help me?). I've been taking it for two days, and it reaches saturation around day 3 or 4. Celexa takes about a week to fully leave the system. So, I guess I'll find out the effects of Cymbalta in ... five days? Here's hoping it works.
Otherwise, my life is quite boring.
I wanted to talk about my anxiety - it's been a little worse lately, and I've wanted to write about what I go through, in the hopes that my friends and family who read this may understand a bit better what I go through when my anxiety gets bad.
I'm going to be writing this in parts, otherwise it will end up being one single huge post.
First off: I've always had problems with anxiety. Looking back, it was obvious that I had problems. At the time, I figured the fears/worries/etc that I had were normal, and if not normal - at least they weren't too far from the norm. Now I know that my reactions to a lot of things was very very very odd. I sometimes wonder why my Mother never did anything about my anxiety - I don't believe my Dad knew about what I was going through.
The earliest memory I have of disabling anxiety started when I was in or just about to start sixth grade - shortly after August 11, 1999, the day a tornado hit downtown Salt Lake City. My entire life up to that point I had been told and reassured and reminded that: "A tornado couldn't happen here, the mountains and tall buildings would prevent it" and that Utah didn't have many tornados anyway, and they occurred in the desert, salt flats, and more open areas. After the tornado I began having trouble sleeping at night. I became worried that some horrible disaster would occur while I slept (tornado, earthquake, fire, etc) and I would lose my family. I became hyper-aware of any Bad Thing that could possibly ever happen.
Soon my anxiety shifted to solely concern earthquakes.
The Salt Lake Valley sits right next to a fault line (I can't even read that article without anxiety, obviously this is still a problem), which has tendrils that go underneath most of the valley. I believe my Junior High School was (is) situated on one of these faults. There hasn't been a large quake in a good long while. I believe that we're supposed to have a large quake every ... I think 5000 years, but I could be wrong. Anyway, we're supposedly overdue for The Big One any year now.
This was driven into my head all through Grade School, and some more in Middle School. It never scared me, until the tornado. Suddenly the abstract idea of an earthquake happening became real. And everything I was being taught in class became terrifying.
I had a hard time getting to sleep. Any movement - even slight - of my bed was enough to make my heartrate raise and get my adrenaline going. I became more and more tired as I got less and less sleep. I didn't talk to anyone about this. Even the counselor I saw later that year.
The nightly fear and anxiety continued until February 2001, when a decently large earthquake hit Seattle, Washington, and only one person was killed in it. However, I still have nights where I have trouble falling asleep due to anxiety or fear about Something Bad Happening.
Almost a year and a half of having trouble sleeping, and the only help I ever got for it was a poem my stepdad would tell me - almost every night.
If there's a worry under the sun
There is a remedy or there's none
If there be one, hurry and find it
If there be none, nevermind it
But I couldn't just forget my worries, or ignore them, no matter how much I tried.
What should have been a serious warning sign that something wasn't quite right with my brain was ignored, brushed aside with poems and blessings. Looking back, I honestly feel like I was being ignored, and that I wasn't being taken seriously.
Part Two: Cars and Tests
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