High Functioning Anxiety

****Disclaimer- beware my bared soul, and also there’s a lot of swearing*****

Hello avid readers, it’s been awhile. I started school again in September, and my class this semester is “Legal Research and Writing I.” Try not to be too jealous. Needless to say, I don’t feel much like blogging when I’m focusing on professional writing after the kids go to bed. Throw in being busy at work (hooray!) and having a lot of house stuff done getting ready for winter, and here we are.

Let me tell you a story, about a mom who woke up to a suspiciously wet dog on Saturday morning. Char woke up at her usual time and was reading in my bed for a while then disappeared to go play in the family room. Then I heard her getting water in the bathroom, I assume she needed a drink. Nope. Turns out she decided Orion was “too muddy and smelly and needed a bath.” So she wiped him down with the washcloth, “and he didn’t like it much.” Shocking. He does in fact need a bath, but that’s for another day. Then later that day I was doing laundry and my new dryer was giving me a rejection and stopping with damp clothes. So I finally googled it at night (first mistake) and it’s a rejection saying my vents are 80% clogged. So big dryer fire risk. So then I’m googling “how to clean your dryer vent” videos at night (2nd mistake). Then I’m taking the girls to Home Depot the next day to look at vent piping….. yeah long story short I finished all my laundry and finally got to call around Monday to have someone come out today. So today the patching of my foundation was finished up, front steps repainted, basement steps and walls fixed/patched/cleaned/repainted, and while the vent guys were here they also steam cleaned my front carpet and family room couch.

You might be asking yourself, how does that title match this story? Because I have anxiety ALL THE TIME. You might be saying to yourself, you look like you’re doing so well! Look at everything you’ve accomplished and everything you’re doing! You’re rocking this! And I thank you, please keep telling me that to help me pull myself up all the time. But the truth is, I’m not fine. And it took me a LONG time to realize that I wasn’t, and accept that it’s okay. I’m working on it. Bob helped me with it for a long, long time. I see a social worker who knew both Bob and I, and it helps to talk to someone that knew him when he was sick and understands cancer dynamics. I work 4 days a week currently, because 5 still stresses me right the fuck out. I take medication that has been amazingly helpful in just tampering it down. When Bob was sick I was running at about an 11 out of 10 all the time. I wasn’t sleeping. I wasn’t eating or eating well. My own health suffered because of some thyroid stuff, so I gained weight when Bob was losing it. It was awful.

Anxiety and depression can be related, but they aren’t the same. Of course I’m depressed, I’m a widow at 35, but I don’t have clinical depression. I do have anxiety. I worry about things I can’t control. I over prepare and in the process get completely overwhelmed with simple tasks, like a weekend vacation. I physically can not handle my kids screaming up and down the hall with the dog. I want to crawl out of my own skin. That doesn’t mean they can’t run and scream outside, or at a playground, or something like that. But in a confined space? Pass. And let me make it clear, if I could let stuff like that go I totally would. I love worn out kids, and the best way to wear them out is to let them run. I would love to not have to worry about this stuff. (Bob used to tell me “then just don’t worry about it,” to which I’d respond, “I’ll get right on that, I knew I’ve been doing something wrong all these years…”)

The thing about anxiety is that I know that I’m being unreasonable when it’s really hard on me. I know that it will pass, and I’ll laugh at myself a little or roll my eyes. I’ll have fun on our trip, or the girls will make me laugh about something completely nonsensical. I always know I’ll make it to the end of the day, and I’ve had my worst day so nothing will be worse than that. But I always have this fear in the back of my head that something will go wrong. Bob was healthy until they diagnosed him with stage 4 cancer. With NO SYMPTOMS. Seriously? And then there’s me, who is a hypochondriac by nature, and who was always sick besides. Now I literally do not have the time to be sick. (Hear that body??) But with the girls I wonder if I’m under reacting now to what might be wrong. What if I miss something again? What if something happens to them? What if something happens to me? This is what anxiety is. It doesn’t have to make sense to you, but it’s real for me.

At the same time, Bob helped me see there is nothing “wrong” with me. Anxiety doesn’t make you wrong, like you aren’t completely terrible for having it or completely crazy for all these thoughts. And you can be loved for exactly who you are, there’s nothing you need to “fix.”

Today Bob’s company dedicated a tree to him, with a little ceremony and there’s a bench in front of it. There were a lot of people there, and it was extremely overwhelming and amazing at the same time. All these people for Bob. I asked for a red maple, like the trees in our front yard. I wish I could visit it more, and as much as I mentally tried to prepare myself, I wasn’t prepared. Yesterday when I told the girls we were going to daddy’s work to see a tree they planted for him, Char got really excited and asked if Bob would be there. I balked. Usually I can handle it, but I just stumbled through “No honey, daddy died, he won’t be there.” Paige’s current phrase for everything is “Daddy died.” There’s no way to stop a 2 year old’s catch phrase, it’s just what she talks about and what she hears. She will say it and then go looking for pictures of Bob throughout our house (or try to get to my phone). I can handle a lot of things a lot of the time, but make no mistake it is really fucking hard. I can do my work, I can get my school work done (with the help of lots of venting buddies last week with my midterm, thanks guys!), I can make sure the girls and I are all taken care of. My contractor told me last week that if my house were a car it would be a lemon because of all the shit the previous owners did badly or flat out wrong. I told him today I’m making it into lemonade. I have to remind myself I love this house. We loved this house, it was our dream. And I now have the means to fix it. I’m a grown ass educated 35 year old woman. I can do this.

So I’ll keep going to my social worker. I’ll keep talking to my friends. I’ll keep taking my medication for anxiety and the ones that also help me sleep. Maybe I won’t feel like this forever. Maybe I will feel different tomorrow. Maybe I won’t. But I know deep down I’m not really alone, not entirely. I feel like our family was cheated in the worst fucking way. Just because there’s nothing I can do about it doesn’t make me able to stop worrying about it.