I have shared a lot on this thing. This is my personal journal. I have also sorta faded from posting as often as I have because it feels like writing here results in more negative drama than I would like. I am trying to focus more on positive things.
Right now my stress levels (as mentioned multiple times already) are through the roof! I need to find a job. I need to find grounding. I need to find myself again because I have tried wearing so many hats that none of them fit anymore. Going to school for 2 careers only led to confusion. Trying to please other people has led to disaster. Looking for greener grass has led to anxiety. Past regrets and mistakes have become this creature always at my back scratching me and cutting me.
I’ve known I had a problem with anxiety that went back to 1996. I can almost give you the date when something inside of me cracked and the fissure kept growing for a long time. I had a lot of things to help me hold it together, mostly my optimistic youth and a lot of friends I loved and counted on. But something happen when those things broke too.
My interpersonal relationships are hard to maintain and I feel like my connections to people are lost in something related to this feeling of Chaos I bring with me all the time. It is this perception that I somehow instinctively see the cracks in people and examine them to death and sometimes bring it to the attention of that person thus bringing that chaos into their world.
In 2009 I lost a good job to this issue and I went to see a doctor eventually and was given a medication to help with it. It has been a great equalizer and over time the medication has evolved but the anxiety has too. It has become much worse and came with depression that occasionally put me in a hole from time to time.
I am dealing with this mental illness and I have never said anything about it before in the blogs posted here. It is anxiety and depression and I am dealing with it. It has made some of the irrational decisions I have made, bad choices, and kept me from finding comfort in my own skin. My weight issues have been holding me back and my age are all feeling like bricks on my shoulders.
No one is out there who can help me and I try to help myself. That whole Burning Man principle Radical Self Reliance has been my credo and I refuse to need anyone to exist. I rely on someone and I can bet that person will let me down anyway.
I am writing this posting to talk about this subject here for the first time. It was years ago someone told me they were impressed with how much I put out there and how honest I am. I have been lying to anyone except family who has been reading this because you don’t know what is going on.
- I suffer from severe anxiety; to the point where it is literally debilitating and cause me to freeze up, lock down and shut off more than panic attacks. I have been in treatment with a doctor for more than a year and a half.
- I suffer from severe depression where I sometimes drop into a hole and can’t see out.
- I take a mild medication to keep it under control; Wellbutrin and Clonapan.
When someone recently made a lot of angry posts publicly claiming I was mentally ill it hurt pretty deep. There was truth in it, but this is a world where using those words is a condemning as telling someone you are a felon or a child molester. There is this shroud that because you have issues that you have chosen to deal with that it is your fault.
I am a good guy. I have a good heart. I have courage and I have character. I am brave and I believe in justice. Your baggage cannot be my baggage and visa versa.
