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| Do I look crazy here? I look kind of angry so that'll do. |
The
last few weeks have been full on. My
anxiety got the better of me, which hasn’t happened for ages, but when it does
I feel like I’m drowning; totally out of control. Most of the time I’m at peace with my
neurosis. I learnt some really effective
techniques years ago and spent a lot of time and energy implementing them till
they were like second nature. But
sometimes things just hit that critical mass and bam, it’s like a switch is
flicked. The techniques stop working and
logical thought is subsumed by relentless, brain jarring chaos.
It
wasn’t so much a single event that triggered the switch as one shit thing after
the other. First my housemates announced
they were moving out, and fuck did they have a lot of stuff to move. The colossal nature of the task apparently
getting the better of them, they transformed into. Ahem.
Less nice people. And we copped
the brunt of the niceness decline big time.
Combine that with the mountain of shit being moved out of our tiny
house, and you get stressful sitch number one.
I
moved to my parents’ to escape being impaled by a trampoline or something. And so did Tom. And so did my sister, coz she’d had a fight
with her housemate. So now we were all stuck in the house
together again and trying to make the best of it when work became
suddenly and infinitely harder. Trying
to learn a new section on an insanely busy night with no help from anyone who
has a fucking clue how to do it equals MORE STRESS.
I
had a fight with my sister. And Tom’s
mum. Snails ate our rocket.
I
entered a major writing competition, and right on cue myself started hating on
myself. Why are you even
entering? You don’t stand a chance with
this piece. It’s incoherent and overly
earnest! And then it was late and we
had to hand in the lease to take the house over and that was late and I got a
traffic fine and an extra shift which I had to rush back from Wang for….. Cue
meltdown.
When
it happens, I loose agency over my own mind.
I can no longer elect to shut the nagging, niggling voices up. On top of that, they go into overdrive, and
cease to make sense. I’m worried about
anything and everything at once, but instead of a capable, organized voice
sorting out what I should prioritize, there’s just delirious, nonsensical
mile-a-minute chatter, which in its discernible moments utters things like, OH
FUCK MY LIFE IS OUT OF CONTROL I’M LATE, CAN’T AFFORD FINE, AM SCARED OF MY OWN
SISTER, OH FUCK OH FUCK OH FUCK. Not
much gets offered up in the way of a solution.
The
problem is, when the roller coaster starts, I don’t have the faintest idea how
to stop it. The techniques I apply to my
milder, everyday anxiety seem ludicrous in their flimsiness, and I just feel
like a moron whimpering, ‘Excuse me, calm down!’ over the infernal racket. I can’t write, which is the worst, with that shit
going on in my head. Writing gives me my
sense of purpose so when I’m not doing it I feel like a useless oxygen sucker
who shouldn’t be here. I start thinking
that I’ll never be able to pull myself out of it, that I’ll never write again,
and those thoughts just feed into the problem and create a self-fuelling
anxiety tornado. Which eventually
creates panic.
During
this latest bout I found myself on the floor of my parent’s lounge room making intermittent
loud heaving noises. Mum came in and
looked at me. I said I was beyond help
so DON’T EVEN BOTHER. Mum gave me two
valiums, probably because my hysterics were unnerving her, and after a proper
sleep I started to feel better. So
basically, the answer is valium. Just
kidding! I don’t know what the answer is
but it usually seems to ease up after a while.
We’ve
moved back into Footscray now, with new housemates and a fresh start. The chatter has subsided and, at least until
next bout, I’m still not crazy.
