About Me Going Crazy Which Happened Recently

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.