My Anxiety and "The Office" Cocoon

Sometimes the pain of your childhood catches up with your middle age reality and forces physical aches and tension in your body and your mind that paralyze and traumatize your entire being. Yet-you must get up. You must go to office, come home and make dinner and put a smile on your face. You must be present for your family, must provide comfort, love and compassion to the ones you love and who love you. Some days this is called survival and no matter how much therapy you have had and how far you have come-sometimes a smell in the air, a song you hear or a line of a movie will hit you like a mack truck driving straight into your gut and remind you how truly broken, sad, alone and unprotected you once were. Once you open that vault, it’s like a wound being pulled open again, and you know you have to let yourself feel, let yourself get through it, and that you will make it to the other side-but it still breaks the heart of the little girl inside of you every single time.

Right now, it is about making it through to the other side. You think if only there were something to take the pain away-just for a moment so there was some relief, just one night of sleep not interrupted by the brain that never stops working and finds that the best time to remind you of your most heartbreaking and most vulnerable moments is at 4am...but you have read enough and lived long enough to know that the magic pill moment lasts for less than a blink of an eye and after that blink you end up even worse. So... you suck it up. You cry in the car; you cry in the bathroom. You listen to sad songs to help get the pain and fear out and then you write long melodramatic blog entries to try and free yourself from your aching shoulders, pounding head and the lump always in your throat.

This is anxiety and it sucks. It really sucks. You could be in a grocery store, checking off items on your list and suddenly it is taking every ounce of strength you have to just keep pushing the cart and make it through check out. All you want is to be in your car, with the heat on to feel safe and warm in order to get it together enough to drive home. Once home, every part of your being wants to find a heavy blanket and wrap yourself in a cocoon and watch endless episodes of The Office until you feel human again. BUT there are groceries that you bought that have to be put away and a family that is relying on you. So-you push through. It is painful and it is exhausting and when the kids have gone to bed, you say goodnight to your spouse and finally make your way upstairs, where you can finally place yourself in your cocoon and cry silently and softly with The Office playing in the background until your body and mind -now literally exhausted in every way possible-finally delivers the sweet relief of sleep.

The next day you awaken, happy you pushed through it, you made it out the other side. Part of you feels slightly hung over from the heaviness of it all. It will take 2-3 days to get back to feeling like your real self-the self that is confident, happy, smiling naturally, who knows she can handle whatever comes her way...but until she is back in that place, she treats herself kindly and with kid gloves. It’s a shitty cycle that is not cured by Prozac or Zoloft...you tried them all and while they help others you are one of the small percentages that they just make numb or in some cases, made it worse. So-you breathe, you recognize and avoid triggers, but sometimes the anxiety still finds you and gets you. When that happens you just need to find your way to the other side and while it is really awful and painful in so many ways, you are at the very least comforted knowing that like the other 764 thousand times before, you will come out on the other side. This was my day today and it was really fucking hard, but I know that tomorrow will be better.