sometimes i am shocked at how messed up my mind is. i wonder how many more days, months, years will pass before it will stop playing tricks on me. i wonder if it's taken fifty years to get to this state of mind, will it take fifty more to get it straightened out?
what, you may be thinking, is she talking about now? it's my old buddy, my lifelong companion, that friend i don't recognize even when it slaps me in the face--anxiety. i suppose a more acceptable name is stress, but it's more than that. and in the last few years, it has become, at times, overwhelming, while my inability to talk about it has stayed as a constant, which, if i were a math whiz, would look something like this formula:
anxiety x 50 years = some really weird stuff going on
for example. i think i've mentioned in previous posts my propensity to count. no? okay, well, for as long as i can remember, i've been a counter. i count my steps, count seconds while waiting for time to pass, but i'm not usually consciously counting. the counting is simply going on in my mind while other thoughts come and go and life goes on. however, during times of high anxiety, the counting is replaced by other weirdness. for example. certain anxieties are apparently best dealt with by a heightened awareness of vertical lines all around me--telephone poles, street signs, fence posts, siding on buildings, and on and on. another example. my response to certain other anxieties is an increase in my awareness of church steeples and a compulsion that demands that i count those steeples. did you know there are at least 74 steeples on the east side of I-15 from payson north to the salt lake county line? and another example. sometimes, the only color of car i can see, are the white cars. did you ever notice how many cars are white and how many of them can be in a group at an intersection before you finally see a blue or green or red car? and if you include the off-white or silver cars, it can be overwhelming.
yeh, weird. i know. even though i know it's weird, it still happens during certain anxious times.
but even weirder is the effect that anxiety can have on me physically. four years ago, during a particularly stressful time, i experienced severe pain in my left side, both in my back and around to the front, and was diagnosed with shingles, although the required rash that is the confirmation of a diagnoses of shingles never appeared and the pain lasted for months. and then two years ago, after my stay at uni (which, duh, was another extremely stressful period of time), i felt severe pain in my right side and was diagnosed with kidney stones. i never passed any noticeable kidney stones, endured countless tests, and eventually the pain subsided.
this past week, the pain returned to my left side. it was every bit as intense as it had been during the 'shingles' and the 'kidney stones', and the combination of the pain and the realization that it would last for three months, led me to the emergency room in tears this morning. the er doc and nurse were incredibly sensitive and showed great empathy. because it was an emergency room and because i had just completed a cross-country flight, which could have caused blood clots to form in my legs that could have broken free and traveled to my lungs, the doc ordered a scan, which was, of course, negative for clots. after i explained that the shingles, kidney stones and blood clots all felt the same and did not respond in the normal way to the treatments and tests, i asked the doc if anxiety could be the cause of the pain. could my mind be so pained and my normal method of behavior so unwilling to deal with the anxieties that the best my mind could do was to order my brain to tell my body to hurt? the doc indicated that the mind is a powerful thing and agreed with my theory. then he ordered pain medication to help with the intense pain, an anti-inflammatory to help with the pain in my ribs, and my anti-anxiety medication as needed until my next appointment with my therapist.
if i were a cursing woman or at least a woman who curses in print, i would definitely be asking wtf? how messed up can this get? on the bright side, this bit of insanity only happens during certain anxiety-producing situations. and until this week's physical pain, the anxiety seemed to be diminishing. but holy cow, how looney must i be to have a mind that creates physical pain to represent emotional pain? how pathetic. however, if i can learn to deal with the counting and vertical lines and steeples and white cars anxieties, how hard could it be to deal with this pain in the side crap? seriously.
lest anyone reading this post think that anyone but me is somehow responsible for this madness, please, lose that thought immediately. this crazy is mine. all mine. don't even try to take it from me or i will never be able to work it out.
one last thing. let me say that i am so glad for this forum where i can write, and in writing, heal.
and think about that ocean cooling your overheated skin, soothing you, calming you. I have not felt so calm in years. It was perfect.
