2000-12-20 | 06:52:27

anxiety. bleh.

i'm a relatively anxious person. i say that because compared to my mom's almost constant state of worrying nervousness, i seem like a rock of gibraltar. but i do get anxious, too. probably more than i should.

i've had one full-blown, textbook definition anxiety attack. it was when i was dating vietnam. it was christmas time. i was waiting for a parking space at the mall. i had all kinds of pressure on me. relationship worries, teenage "stepdaughter" worries, and just plain old getting everyone in his and my family gifts in time for the holiday worries.

so i'm sitting in my car, waiting for a parking space and i start feeling weird. bad weird. like i was going to faint. i momentarily freaked out that i would faint and be left lying on my horn, blocking the already irritated traffic behind me.

fortunately, i got into my space ok and took a bit of a breather before i got out of the car. i wasn't feeling any better, though. i went in the mall and figured a cookie might help. for what dilemma could a cookie not assist one in?*

it was obvious i just had low blood sugar and needed a pick-me-up, but no...it didn't help. i was feeling worse and worse. i thought i was going to die in a mall. i mean, i love to shop, but i don't want to meet my maker on the fluorescently lit tile flooring sweeping between the gap and victoria's secret...please...a little dignity.

i was frightened about how i was feeling. shopping usually made me feel good. finally, at wit's end, i found a phone and called my mom who is a nurse. thank goodness she was home and knew just what was happening.

"you're having an anxiety attack. you're going to be fine. just sit down somewhere and breathe evenly and it will go away. when i worked in the emergency room, people came in with these attacks all the time thinking they were going to die. it's a vicious circle, because you panic about how you are feeling, which causes you to hyperventilate, which aggravates your symptoms even more."

my mom saved me. about 10 minutes later i was ok. a bit shaky, but ok. a year or so later, i almost had an anxiety attack on the freeway stuck in traffic. work was super stressful and the commute was killing me. i thought i was going to faint on the freeway. fortunately, the feeling passed quickly.

my mom got me some tapes on the subject. their main advice was about positive self-talk: "i'm going to be ok. i'm not dying. this has happened before and i made it through fine."

during the height of vietnam, i got a prescription for anxiety medication from my doctor, but i never took it. i didn't like the idea of messing with my brain like that. even though i know things like anti-depressants are so invaluable to people, i was leery of taking anything mood-related.

so tonight i had a mini-attack. not so much the physical symptoms as the thought symptoms. just a feeling of being overwhelmed and fearful about a couple arenas of my life--one of which is a very good thing, but a bit intimidating nonetheless. it went away after a bit of some of that self-talk stuff, but it's tough to deal with, you know?

the human mind is such a fascinating thing. the fragile chemical balance of it is amazing. how easily things can go awry and make us uncomfortable and even miserable. mood swings, depression, anxiety, ocd. our brains lord so much power over us gray matter minions.

as the woody allen joke goes, "i decided that my brain is the most important part of my body...but then look at what's telling me that."

ahaha!

*on a lighter note, your ad here wrote a great entry on cookie therapy. i indulged in some of that this weekend. an oatmeal raisin, chocolate chip and a snickerdoodle. now that's good medicine.

oh, and i just discovered chocolate-covered potato chips. recoil in horror as you might, those things are superb. salt and sugar, together at last! oh sure, the pretzel people have been doing the chocolate-dipped thing for years...but pretzels don't have the all-too-important grease quotient that potato chips do. don't worry, i won't go off the deep end with them...all in moderation, my dears. all in moderation.

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enough about gray matter, why not hop over to girlboy for matters of the heart? today is

bunni's turn.

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