I'm a mostly happy person. I almost always have a smile on my face, but as high as I can get with my happy....I can sink equally as low with my not happy. When I'm mad, I'm not just a little mad, I'm COMPLETELY PISSED OFF. When I'm sad, it's not an "I'm a little melancholy today" kind of thing...it's more of a "the whole world is closing in on me and I can't take it" kind of thing. It's all or nothing with this girl. As great as it is that I do generally feel that happy almost all of the time, it really SUCKS when I don't. I choose not to medicate myself because I didn't like the way the meds I tried, made me feel. I am also not a fan of taking pills. You can ask my mom about the first time she tried to get me to swallow a Tylenol and ended up getting so fed up with me that she threw a glass of water in my face (I'm endearing like that). Believe me, I don't see anything wrong at all with pills, in fact, I think if they work for you, that you absolutely SHOULD be on them. They just don't do it for me. It helps that these lows don't generally last long. Sometimes a day. Sometimes a few hours. I usually just wait for them to blow over. So the depression...that I can get past. The thing I can't, the thing that will almost always suck me down into a bottomless pit of despair...that's the anxiety. The anxiety can come from anything. I'm a high strung person, so it's probably not surprising I suffer from it. It comes out of nowhere and it sucks the wind right out of my sails. It usually starts with a slightly faster heartbeat. I ignore it. Next thing, I feel like I've had too much caffeine....I get a little jittery and my heart feels like it's racing a little. Oh no. Not again. Then I get a headache and it feels like I tried to swallow a golf ball and it's stuck in my throat. There isn't really anything I can do to make the feeling go away. I usually want to just crawl under the covers until all the bad stuff is gone. Maybe I'm behind on a bill and I know it and it's nagging at me. Maybe I had a dream where a serial killer was chasing me and I couldn't get away. Yes, it can come from something entirely fictitious. It's there. And it's not going away. The first time I experienced it was in college. I remember waking up and feeling like I couldn't breathe. Like an elephant was sitting on my chest and my lungs were about to collapse. That feeling spiraled into a full on panic attack. I went to the doctor back then because I was also battling a long and severe depression at that point. He gave me a magic little pill. XANAX! I could finally sleep. I didn't wake up thinking that the whole world was collapsing in on me. I finally had a way to control that panic. Then, as I always do...I quit the follow up. So now, many years later....here I sit. Heart racing. Hands jittery. Golf ball in my throat. Maybe it's time to pay the doc another visit.
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