Quote:
Originally Posted by BombayBadboy
Atak,
thnx for the elaborate answers so far. Great read. Anxiety is something that seems to be a recurring theme in your posts. Thoughts on that subject in general and some of your anxieties in particular? Do you think you can get rid of them?
I get anxious, as in panicky, feel like I can't breathe, want to run away, over a few particular things:
- I can't plan trips. I can barely pack a suitcase; doing so can take hours of avoidance, including literally leaving the house a couple times just to calm down. Or sometimes staying up all night. When it's time to make plane reservation to bring my boy to see me, I sometimes will have to call my mother and ask her to talk to me to keep me calm as I make them on line (or she'll do them sometimes, though I always give it a try first). I think it's because I get overwhelmed by the feeling that 'll get them wrong, but I'm not sure why that particular thing. In general I avoid planning, but the anxiety attacks are an extreme case.
- I get agitated when there's loud background noise, usually either music or background conversation, when I'm trying to concentrate on something, usually conversation (not background). After some periods of that, usually an hour or two, I start feeling compressed and scared, and usually have to leave wherever it is I am. However, this doesn't always happen — it's partly a function of volume, but there seems to be a random element too.
- When I'm pretty down already I get random panic attacks, or predictable panic attacks due to being around strangers. I have to be in pretty bad shape for these to be at all common, but it can be debilitating For example, last spring when I told POG that I was having trouble and wouldn't be playing ww for a while, I found myself unable to go to the grocery store because doing so would involve talking to the checkout person and I was afraid to. And a couple months ago I had an attack of agoraphobia in the airport — my solution was to bury my head in my iPhone (playing ww) and pretend no one else was around.
Everything I described above is fairly recent — I think my first one was when I was a 2L, so we're talking about the last third of my life. I haven't really gotten used to them.
Note, also, how outside my normal character they are — 95% of the time I'm about as confident as humans get, but here I'm talking about being afraid of pretty non-threatening stuff. This, in turn, makes me annoyed that I have this weakness; it also means that when it's getting bad but not yet horrible, people with me often have a hard time believing it's real unless they know me pretty well.
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Looking this over, two additions:
- The background noise doesn't have to be loud — any combination of distracting sounds over a long time gets to me, and can cause me to leave. Background music or TV is almost always bad for me, it is just a matter of how long.
- When I'm stressed about something, particularly planning-type issues as noted above or feeling like I'm disappointing people, there are sometimes other physical symptoms — old injuries will flare up. Right now I am limping from an old lumbar injury from weightlifting; a trip to the chiropractor will fix it, so no big deal if I can find the time, but what's interesting is that I'm pretty sure it came from all the strange things that have happened in the last week.
Last edited by atakdog; 11-20-2009 at 01:27 AM.