All of this is my world.
Sep. 19th, 2010 02:42 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sarasvatiOh goody. An anxious/panic state today. Just what I need when I'm alone in the apartment, Rei won't be back until some unknown time in the future, and I can't leave because I don't have my keys.
Not that I'd know where to go if I did leave. The state I'm in right now, I'd probably just stand at the front door for an hour, telling myself that okay, this time I'll turn the knob and step outside, I can do this, really I can. Until I give up and sit down and cry out of frustration.
I feel twitchy, as evidenced by the fact that my hands keep clenching and unclenching and flapping. I feel unsettled, unbalanced inside, and only years of self-denial and learning to put on masks is keeping me from curling up in the bedroom and just letting myself cry it all out. But honestly, part of me is afraid of even doing that, because sometimes when I get really bad, I start to scratch myself and scrape skin off my arms or my face. Not often, but often enough to scare me into forcing those panicked feelings even further down to keep them from bubbling up.
It's a weird feeling. Outside, you might not guess it unless you know what to look for. Slightly widened eyes. Increased typos. The hand flapping thing. Feeling calm on the surface, but it's only a thin layer, and underneath, it feels like a whirlwind of screams is building up, dizzying and loud and frightening. It's dark in that whirlwind, and powerful, and hard to control, and it makes my skin twitch.
Also makes my Tourette's act up. Cue the head jerks and animal sounds. *headdesk*
Writing this helps. It's let letting the tension drain away, little by little. Not something I can rely on always, though, and it's not doing much to take away the constant feeling of anxiety, but it's letting the panic subside.
I have panic attacks. I've been having them for longer than I knew what they really were. After I learned about them, I got to look back on the past and see that I'd been suffering them since I was a teenager. They're scary as hell, and made scarier at that moment by the fact that I knew I'd had them for years without knowing it, and would probably continue to have them for many years to come.
When they hit, it feels like I can't breathe. Logically, I know that I'm breathing just fine. As an asthmatic, I've learned to tell what it feels like when my airways are constricting and filling up with mucus and making it so that every breath is a painful chore. That isn't happening with panic attacks, but it still feels like I can't breathe. The air feels too warm, and each time I inhale, it feels like I'm not actually getting any air into my lungs. It makes me breathe faster to compensate, like maybe the air will cool off and oxygen will return to it and I'll be fine again if I can just breathe quick enough to keep myself going a little while longer.
I start to hyperventilate. Even without the overwhelming sense of panic associated with the thought that you're slowly suffocating, hyperventilation is scary. My cheeks start to tingle, a little at first but them more and more until my lips join in the fun and draw themselves tight, like I'm pursing my lips and can't relax the muscles to make my face normal again.
This will keep happening until the attack subsides. I keep breathing and feel like I'm drowing, my face tingles and my lips purse, and I start to overheat and feel sick and twitchy. If I'm around other people (crowds really set the attacks off; there's a reason why I avoid malls in December), they all feel too close, and I start to think that they're stealing my oxygen. At the same time that everyone and everything feels too close, I start to feel incredibly tiny, and like I'm surrounded by a field of black nothingness that makes everything very distant.
Heaven help anyone who touches me unless they're within my very small comfort circle. It makes my skin crawl, and makes me want to hit them and scream, and I have to suppress that urge while dealing with the rest of my body going haywire.
Cold air helps. Not only does it nicely shock my system (assuming it doesn't shock my lungs into an actual asthma attack too), it takes away the feeling that the air's too warm and too depleted of oxygen.
When this happened when I was a teenager, before I knew they were panic attacks, I'd always chalk it up to the room being too warm or that I was just cranky and irritable because I was somewhere I didn't want to be. I remember one particular time, when my parents and I were in England for my grandfather's funeral, and we were all out shopping for clothes for my mother to wear to that funeral. It was a tense time already, and my father was snapping at my mother and my mother was upset and I was pretty much only be dragged along with them because they didn't want to let me go anywhere else or even spend a few hours with the rest of the family. I started to panic. Felt like I couldn't get enough air, like I was too warm, fidgety, and I wanted to shout and cry and run anywhere but there. I did none of those things. I stood quietly against a wall, trying to hide the fact that I felt anything because expressing that I wasn't happy with the situation would just make my parents snap at me. I suffered in silence until the attack went away.
I got pretty good at pretending that nothing was wrong. That all changed about 3 years ago, though, when I started having panic attacks at work, and ended up being hauled off in an ambulance because nobody, myself included, knew what the hell was wrong.
A kindly ER doc explained. I've been coping with that explanation ever since.
(I remember when one panic attack got so bad that I was hysterical, crying until I felt sick and numb, and then I felt so terrible about the numbness that I'd start to cry again, until I started to laugh at how absurd that was. Rei found me like that, and tried to get me to tell him what was wrong, and all I could do was laugh because of the irony of wanting to say that I couldn't say anything, and that would just make me start crying all over again. That, I think, was the worst moment of my life, and I'm thankful that incident was situational and doesn't tend to happen when this nebulous dread starts floating through me.)
The problem with forcing myself through things is that it isn't always the best option. Some people, I know, will praise the strength I've shown in keeping myself stable when all I want to do is run and hide. But doing that is an enormous drain, and stresses me out, and that builds up over time. I strongly suspect the increasing panic attacks at work that I just mentioned were due to the stresses of having to hide so many other things about myself, forcing myself through crap on a daily basis.
Working in a call centre when you've got a hearing comprehension problem is the pits. I had (and probably will have to again) to focus extra hard on what people said, because I couldn't read their lips to help me out. If I let my guard down, I'd probably be diagnosed with selective mutism stemming from an anxiety disorder, because my first reaction when I'm in public is to not say a damn word, and sometimes even when people talk to me and I can understand them, it's hard to say anything back. Words catch in my throat, and it's easier to say nothing at all. Sometimes I haven't been able to talk at all, and then I pull my deaf act and look apologetic until they go away. (Can't look strangers in the eye while I'm doing this, either, not from shame but because, well, often I just can't bring myself to look people in the eyes without feeling profoundly uncomfortable.)
So going through hearing and speaking problems in a call centre, a job that relies on me hearing and speaking, is not easy. But I did it because I didn't have a choice. I had to force past my comfort level, had to force past any blocks I had, because keeping a job relied on it. And at the end of each shift, I'd feel tired and sick and desperate to get out of there and into a place in which I could be comfortable.
It's easier when Rei's around. Rei's a comforting presence, allows me to talk in public and to smile and whatnot. I can do that stuff when Rei's not around, but it requires a lot of effort that most people don't appreciate. They can't see the trouble I go through just to appear remotely normal.
There are also plenty of days where just going out of the apartment is a chore. I love the outdoors, in the sense that I love nature. I love being surrounded by trees and plants and walking through forest trails. But going out sometimes is very difficult. It's not just that I didn't want to go to work. It goes beyond that. Sometimes I'd want to go out, to take a walk or see a friend or something, but I couldn't summon up the willpower to do it. It would get in the way of things I wanted to do. Going outside, where strange people were and where people might look at me, just sometimes gets to be too much.
This, too, was something I struggled with much longer than I knew the name for it. It didn't help that I seemed to spend my school years being hounded by never-ending groups of jackasses whose greatest delight was to torment me. But depression hit, and going to the activities I still enjoyed was a chore (it was easier to plod home most days than to stay at school to go to choir practice), and I developped a paranoid feeling that every one of my friends were only hanging around me in order to get information about me to laugh about later.
And yet weirdly, I can still manage to do things like the public acting performance I did last year. I'm not saying it was easy, but the hardest parts were in dealing with the people in my group whom I didn't know. The acting was easy. I had fun. For that little while, I wasn't me, and not-me didn't have those problems to deal with. Not-me was a caricature of a gang member, fighting mimes and singing rewritten songs from Disney's Beauty and the Beast. Getting myself to the start of the performance was hard. The performance itself was easy.
Sometimes I wonder if the reason I haven't found a job yet is because somehow prospective employers find their way to this journal, connect it with me, and see that I talk about crappy physical and emotional health, and that (especially after this entry) I come across as a total basket case.
Not being neurotypical is fucking hard! So few people make allowances for it, and so many will tell me to just get over it, or will see the times I pushed past it and think that I can do that for everything without having to pay a price for that effort. It's no wonder that my ideal job is one where I can work from home and write. In my comfort zone, no need to interact with people unless I feel up to it, relying on the words my can fingers say instead of the ones my mouth can't, no need to pretend I'm normal in order to avoid inconveniencing or outright scaring others.
The panic has pretty much gone, thankfully, but I'll still be a lot happier when Rei gets home so that I won't be alone anymore. Until then, slightly ironic music will help keep me focused.
Oh look, Rei just walked through the door!
Not that I'd know where to go if I did leave. The state I'm in right now, I'd probably just stand at the front door for an hour, telling myself that okay, this time I'll turn the knob and step outside, I can do this, really I can. Until I give up and sit down and cry out of frustration.
I feel twitchy, as evidenced by the fact that my hands keep clenching and unclenching and flapping. I feel unsettled, unbalanced inside, and only years of self-denial and learning to put on masks is keeping me from curling up in the bedroom and just letting myself cry it all out. But honestly, part of me is afraid of even doing that, because sometimes when I get really bad, I start to scratch myself and scrape skin off my arms or my face. Not often, but often enough to scare me into forcing those panicked feelings even further down to keep them from bubbling up.
It's a weird feeling. Outside, you might not guess it unless you know what to look for. Slightly widened eyes. Increased typos. The hand flapping thing. Feeling calm on the surface, but it's only a thin layer, and underneath, it feels like a whirlwind of screams is building up, dizzying and loud and frightening. It's dark in that whirlwind, and powerful, and hard to control, and it makes my skin twitch.
Also makes my Tourette's act up. Cue the head jerks and animal sounds. *headdesk*
Writing this helps. It's let letting the tension drain away, little by little. Not something I can rely on always, though, and it's not doing much to take away the constant feeling of anxiety, but it's letting the panic subside.
I have panic attacks. I've been having them for longer than I knew what they really were. After I learned about them, I got to look back on the past and see that I'd been suffering them since I was a teenager. They're scary as hell, and made scarier at that moment by the fact that I knew I'd had them for years without knowing it, and would probably continue to have them for many years to come.
When they hit, it feels like I can't breathe. Logically, I know that I'm breathing just fine. As an asthmatic, I've learned to tell what it feels like when my airways are constricting and filling up with mucus and making it so that every breath is a painful chore. That isn't happening with panic attacks, but it still feels like I can't breathe. The air feels too warm, and each time I inhale, it feels like I'm not actually getting any air into my lungs. It makes me breathe faster to compensate, like maybe the air will cool off and oxygen will return to it and I'll be fine again if I can just breathe quick enough to keep myself going a little while longer.
I start to hyperventilate. Even without the overwhelming sense of panic associated with the thought that you're slowly suffocating, hyperventilation is scary. My cheeks start to tingle, a little at first but them more and more until my lips join in the fun and draw themselves tight, like I'm pursing my lips and can't relax the muscles to make my face normal again.
This will keep happening until the attack subsides. I keep breathing and feel like I'm drowing, my face tingles and my lips purse, and I start to overheat and feel sick and twitchy. If I'm around other people (crowds really set the attacks off; there's a reason why I avoid malls in December), they all feel too close, and I start to think that they're stealing my oxygen. At the same time that everyone and everything feels too close, I start to feel incredibly tiny, and like I'm surrounded by a field of black nothingness that makes everything very distant.
Heaven help anyone who touches me unless they're within my very small comfort circle. It makes my skin crawl, and makes me want to hit them and scream, and I have to suppress that urge while dealing with the rest of my body going haywire.
Cold air helps. Not only does it nicely shock my system (assuming it doesn't shock my lungs into an actual asthma attack too), it takes away the feeling that the air's too warm and too depleted of oxygen.
When this happened when I was a teenager, before I knew they were panic attacks, I'd always chalk it up to the room being too warm or that I was just cranky and irritable because I was somewhere I didn't want to be. I remember one particular time, when my parents and I were in England for my grandfather's funeral, and we were all out shopping for clothes for my mother to wear to that funeral. It was a tense time already, and my father was snapping at my mother and my mother was upset and I was pretty much only be dragged along with them because they didn't want to let me go anywhere else or even spend a few hours with the rest of the family. I started to panic. Felt like I couldn't get enough air, like I was too warm, fidgety, and I wanted to shout and cry and run anywhere but there. I did none of those things. I stood quietly against a wall, trying to hide the fact that I felt anything because expressing that I wasn't happy with the situation would just make my parents snap at me. I suffered in silence until the attack went away.
I got pretty good at pretending that nothing was wrong. That all changed about 3 years ago, though, when I started having panic attacks at work, and ended up being hauled off in an ambulance because nobody, myself included, knew what the hell was wrong.
A kindly ER doc explained. I've been coping with that explanation ever since.
(I remember when one panic attack got so bad that I was hysterical, crying until I felt sick and numb, and then I felt so terrible about the numbness that I'd start to cry again, until I started to laugh at how absurd that was. Rei found me like that, and tried to get me to tell him what was wrong, and all I could do was laugh because of the irony of wanting to say that I couldn't say anything, and that would just make me start crying all over again. That, I think, was the worst moment of my life, and I'm thankful that incident was situational and doesn't tend to happen when this nebulous dread starts floating through me.)
The problem with forcing myself through things is that it isn't always the best option. Some people, I know, will praise the strength I've shown in keeping myself stable when all I want to do is run and hide. But doing that is an enormous drain, and stresses me out, and that builds up over time. I strongly suspect the increasing panic attacks at work that I just mentioned were due to the stresses of having to hide so many other things about myself, forcing myself through crap on a daily basis.
Working in a call centre when you've got a hearing comprehension problem is the pits. I had (and probably will have to again) to focus extra hard on what people said, because I couldn't read their lips to help me out. If I let my guard down, I'd probably be diagnosed with selective mutism stemming from an anxiety disorder, because my first reaction when I'm in public is to not say a damn word, and sometimes even when people talk to me and I can understand them, it's hard to say anything back. Words catch in my throat, and it's easier to say nothing at all. Sometimes I haven't been able to talk at all, and then I pull my deaf act and look apologetic until they go away. (Can't look strangers in the eye while I'm doing this, either, not from shame but because, well, often I just can't bring myself to look people in the eyes without feeling profoundly uncomfortable.)
So going through hearing and speaking problems in a call centre, a job that relies on me hearing and speaking, is not easy. But I did it because I didn't have a choice. I had to force past my comfort level, had to force past any blocks I had, because keeping a job relied on it. And at the end of each shift, I'd feel tired and sick and desperate to get out of there and into a place in which I could be comfortable.
It's easier when Rei's around. Rei's a comforting presence, allows me to talk in public and to smile and whatnot. I can do that stuff when Rei's not around, but it requires a lot of effort that most people don't appreciate. They can't see the trouble I go through just to appear remotely normal.
There are also plenty of days where just going out of the apartment is a chore. I love the outdoors, in the sense that I love nature. I love being surrounded by trees and plants and walking through forest trails. But going out sometimes is very difficult. It's not just that I didn't want to go to work. It goes beyond that. Sometimes I'd want to go out, to take a walk or see a friend or something, but I couldn't summon up the willpower to do it. It would get in the way of things I wanted to do. Going outside, where strange people were and where people might look at me, just sometimes gets to be too much.
This, too, was something I struggled with much longer than I knew the name for it. It didn't help that I seemed to spend my school years being hounded by never-ending groups of jackasses whose greatest delight was to torment me. But depression hit, and going to the activities I still enjoyed was a chore (it was easier to plod home most days than to stay at school to go to choir practice), and I developped a paranoid feeling that every one of my friends were only hanging around me in order to get information about me to laugh about later.
And yet weirdly, I can still manage to do things like the public acting performance I did last year. I'm not saying it was easy, but the hardest parts were in dealing with the people in my group whom I didn't know. The acting was easy. I had fun. For that little while, I wasn't me, and not-me didn't have those problems to deal with. Not-me was a caricature of a gang member, fighting mimes and singing rewritten songs from Disney's Beauty and the Beast. Getting myself to the start of the performance was hard. The performance itself was easy.
Sometimes I wonder if the reason I haven't found a job yet is because somehow prospective employers find their way to this journal, connect it with me, and see that I talk about crappy physical and emotional health, and that (especially after this entry) I come across as a total basket case.
Not being neurotypical is fucking hard! So few people make allowances for it, and so many will tell me to just get over it, or will see the times I pushed past it and think that I can do that for everything without having to pay a price for that effort. It's no wonder that my ideal job is one where I can work from home and write. In my comfort zone, no need to interact with people unless I feel up to it, relying on the words my can fingers say instead of the ones my mouth can't, no need to pretend I'm normal in order to avoid inconveniencing or outright scaring others.
The panic has pretty much gone, thankfully, but I'll still be a lot happier when Rei gets home so that I won't be alone anymore. Until then, slightly ironic music will help keep me focused.
Oh look, Rei just walked through the door!
