Anxiety

As far as I know, the only people who are aware of this are my immediate family. This isn't something I have comfortably opened up about to hardly anyone, even my closest friends. Although, I did have to talk to some teachers about it, which was not a fun experience. Bleh.

Anxiety is something I think I've been struggling with since at least 9th grade. That's at least when I started to notice my phobia of crowds. Since then it has been getting progressively worse until last summer when it blew up. Now my anxiety and resulting depression have gotten to the point that it's effecting my school work to such a degree that I may not get the scholarship I've been working for since sophomore year. There are many assignments I missed. Yesterday, I stayed up until one in the morning finishing them up so I could turn them in today. The rest of the night was spent crying, panicing, and trying to get myself relaxed enough to fall asleep. I even took a hot bath in an attempt to trick my body into being relaxed. That was around two in the morning. I didn't fall asleep until 3:30.

The whole night I was talking myself in and out of going to school today. If I did, at the very least I could turn in missing assignments in my important classes and thereby save my grades. Hopefully. When morning came and I was awakened by an overly cheerful phone, I still hadn't made a decision. In the end, I didn't go to school today. I resigned myself to being a failure for this term and even drafted an email to send to all my teachers. Tomorrow, my brother is going to go to school for me to turn in the assignments so I don't fail. He's really nice.

This is something that I am aware isn't a big deal. All I would have to do is talk to my teachers and turn stuff in, then I could probably just go home if I needed to. But the very thought of it brought me close to vomiting or passing out, depending on whether or not I was standing. I used to be able to do stuff like this, and that's where most my frustration comes from. I feel as if as I'm getting older, I am only digressing, and it's not even in a way that makes sense.

Most of my anxiety comes in regards to school. Why? I have no idea. You'd think it would be because of the three college classes I'm taking, but you would be wrong. My college classes don't cause me hardly any stress. It's my lower level classes that stress me out. Honestly, my theory for this is because with my college classes we have to move at a fast pace and don't have time to waste on dumb projects that make me uncomfortable so I don't always feel like I'm wasting my time in those classes. They also don't make me feel degraded when I try to find a loop hole out of a project I don't like. That's just a theory though.

Also, you'd think work would be stressing me out too since I have to work so many hours right now and I'm a manager and it sometimes lessens my sleep . . . well, actually that's not really true. Even if I didn't close on weekdays, I'd still go to bed at midnight. But the point is the mesh of responsibility I have now and the fact that I don't really like some of the people I work with and that I sort of despise my job should be stressing me out, but it mostly just bugs me. I think it's just that since I'm a manager at work, I feel like I'm in control. I'm not as in control at school.

We had to go talk to my counselor yesterday to figure out my schedule for next semester so I hopefully won't miss as much school. The way it is right now, we've scraped my classes down to the bare minimum and I won't have to go to school at all on B days. We'll see how that works for me.

So far, I feel as if nothing we've tried is making me any better. I'm on three medications (I should be on four, but I'm scared of clonazapam), and I can't tell if they work for me. My dad's probably going to schedule me for an appointment with a therapist too. It's driving me crazy.

The worst bit is, I have no idea what causes this. I have theories, like I've said, but none of them really sound right. How are you supposed to fix something if you don't even know what the problem is? Ick.

Anyway, I don't really know why I'm writing this. Probably because I'm at work right now and I'm really bored. I'm not even sure how many people actually believe me when I tell them this is a problem. Some might assume I'm over exaggerating or just looking for pity since I do like being the most miserable. Believe what you want, but I can promise you that this is most definitely a problem, and it really, really sucks.