mental health confessions

I have mentioned before to a few select people that I live with anxiety, but I have felt the need to tell more people now, I live with anxiety.
Am I functioning? absolutely.
Does it affect my every day? yes.

I think a lot of it can be attributed to our lives for the past few years. For so long, we have been so poor, and have had trial after trial, we were in what I like to call "crisis-solving mode", which is an extended period of panicking, essentially.

The thing is, once you've been in a state of panic for months on end, it makes it very hard to turn off that panic switch. Whether it was being unable to pay our bills, being dropped from medicaid, missing an important deadline at school, having the car completely die, or receiving death threats... life has been pretty non-stop for a long time.

And in some ways this was a good thing. It pushed me towards my PhD, and helped me learn early on that in order to have stability and peace we would need for me to get a higher education.

But now that things are starting to line up, I just cannot turn off my panic switch. Little things are panic-worthy, or in my mind, they must be panic-worthy because in the past, everything has been panic-worthy.

One of these days I will be able to re-train my brain to accurately asses perceived threats and actual threats. But today is not that day. Today is the day that I had a panic attack in the car because Jeff and I arrived late to the move theater. But today is also the day that I can fully admit that was silly, and move forward to a new day with more hope for less panic.

now here is an adorable picture of me tickling maddie. it has nothing to do with this post.