Anxiety

It's interesting (I am always fascinated by this experience called 'humanity') how I can feel pretty chilled out right now, but be running in some high anxiety. It's becoming an issue for me. I feel like there was a time in my life before anxiety and panic attacks and adrenal fatigue, and it ended in 2012.

I'm coming up on my 3 year anniversary of finding out I had cancer. In some ways I think I'm ridiculous for being so sentimental about something that sort of.. came and went. In other ways, it rocked my world and changed me, and continues to, so it makes sense to acknowledge it.

It sure isn't helping me with all that's going on at home. I am feeling like we've let the boundaries slip and we're seeing the immediate result of that with the boys. I'm feeling very close to R, we are supports for each other in ways I don't think anyone could have possibly described. I'm feeling like I want to move in different directions with my life but nothing seems clear, so I do this little Elaine Benes brown-sweater-dance  not really going anywhere but looking very animated!

We're seeing a great therapist who gives us tools to manage the anxiety and feelings of overwhelm that we're both having. At the same time, I think I need to just unload.  I'm inclined to see someone at the HMO but I don't want to have to get diagnosed with something just to get care. Why can't insurance companies just value talk therapy without requiring a diagnosis?

I'm noticing some old anxiety patterns arising -

• an acute feeling that I'm about to die, or could die, in the situation I'm in
• planning ahead for what will I know will be my untimely death
• planning ahead for R's death
• imagining scenarios that are scary and terrible but not real, feeling the fear that comes with it before I can back off and remind myself it's not real
• insomnia, fatigue
• Blech. I hate this list. 

I think I'm having a hard time not feeling trapped by all that's happening, and that trapped feeling leads to anxiety. No panic attacks thus far, which is great. I also have to remind myself (because somewhere inside me, I do know this) that this is temporary, a way for my brain to cope, that it will shift - it always does. What pisses me off is that anxiety is like Hotel California in a way, you might get out the gate now and then, but it seems like you always come back. Suck.