Sunday, December 1, 2013

Hypochondria:

Chronic anxiety is a lot like depression in that no one really understands that saying positive things garners no result in improving the plight the sufferer is experiencing.

You may be asking yourself, Who are you to tell me how to not improve someone's bad day, and I will reply simply by saying, trust me.  I am someone who has chronic anxiety.

It is really that simple.  The first time my anxiety began to manifest itself was at the tender age of 11.  My mother decided that she would go on a three week long sojourn out west to find herself, and that was a great and beautiful thing, except the fact that I had a complete mental breakdown when she left.  To this day I am not sure if it was just coincidence, or if her leaving was merely the straw that broke the camel's back.  I think it's safe to say I was a pretty nervous little wreck of a kid, but as opposed to really feeling emotions throughout childhood, I sort of picked up on what everyone kept saying I must be feeling, and then tried to make a self-facsimile from their descriptions.
Unfortunately, I had been having "feelings" all along, and I just thought I wasn't having them.  When my mom left, I guess those feelings decided to parade throughout my psyche in the form of crippling anxiety.

Now, when most people describe a period of time in their lives that may or may not have been mentally challenging, I generally hear a lot of things that I experienced during my breakdown as well.  This isn't about a pissing contest to see "who is the most crazy."  I have no idea what childhood was like for any of you.  All I know is what I went through.  If any one has experienced the same thing, I am truly, truly sorry.  Because it was unpleasant.

First there were the nightmares.  The nightmares started it all, and got me worked up so that I had the pleasure of the physical panic attack in the middle of the the night. 

The best way I can describe it is like this: Have you ever been awake in bed at night, and all the lights are off, but an outside light is casting a shadow in your room that is sort of scary?  And at first it is only a little scary, but then you keep staring at it until it gets extremely, exceptionally, undeniably scary?  Finally it is so scary you can't take it any more and you walk up to the hat hanging on the door catching the light from the streetlamp and you go AHA! And the shadow ceases to be.  And your fears are subdued because AHA reality has finally taken over your paranoid imagination.
Well, having chronic anxiety and panic attacks is that scenario, but instead, the shadow you keep seeing is just in your mind.  So you are fixated on something that is imaginary in the first place.  But the problem is, even though you are scared to death of the mind-shadow, there is no way to be like, AHA! JUST A SHOE!  Or, AHA! TOOTHBRUSH!
You KNOW in your heart it is just a shadow, but the concrete moment of confrontation just can't happen, because there is no physical way to shine light on whatever is in your head.
Unless...you tell somebody about what you are feeling.  Really, the best way to eliminate a stupid, paranoid anxiety is to just say it out loud to another person.  Because that person can be like, OH! You have a MIND SHOE/TOOTHBRUSH/HAT and your crazy streetlamp brain is tricking you!
Unfortunately, you can never know for sure if THEY know for sure what they are talking about.  What if they only think it is a shoetoothbrushhat when in reality it is an evil, wicked beast intent on devouring you and all your loved ones?
So your moment of relief is oftentimes overwhelmed by your inner knowledge that you have to just trust this person to be able to identify scary objects.

Unfortunately, this identification often results in mockery.  And it isn't that anyone means you any harm, it's just that to them, your conviction that you are being hunted by monsters is kinda silly when it is extremely obvious to them that you were just seeing the broom hanging out of the closet.

Thus, you are laughed at, and you are constantly under the impression that no one can ever for sure guarantee that you aren't about to die. The best thing to calm anxiety is time.  Time truly stands as a marker against fear.  The longer your fears fail to manifest into realities, the stronger your conviction that perhaps they were brooms after all becomes.

Which brings me to hypochondria.  After grappling with anxiety so powerful that I experienced violent physical reactions to even the most mundane of experiences (eating at restaurants, brushing my teeth, spending more than 1.2 seconds alone at any time,) my body finally got sick and tired of shaking constantly and puking after every meal.  I think my body became so annoyed by my mind that it sort of short circuited my ability to feel fear for a while.  I grew out of the dissociative feeling that had been preying on my consciousness for so long.

During my adult life, I experienced bouts of anxiety, but generally with good cause.  I never really considered that I was experiencing a return of my head-shadows-condition because I always had a REASON to feel so damn freaked out all the time.  Life was nuts.  My brain was doing everything it could just to keep up with day to day requirements.  It never got so bad that I broke down again, though.  So I figured, yeah.  I am over it.  I am strong.  Things are okay upstairs.

Now that college is over, now that I have a stable job, now that I have a nice apartment, and all the trappings of a good life, one would imagine my days of anxiety would be long, long gone.  But it appears that this was incorrect.  The "good life" as I imagine it, is in fact the root of my anxiety.  Without constant obstacles to
 overcome, my brain has decided to invent new ones to play with.  The head shadows return, with full force, by way of an inventive new avenue.  Hypochondria.

And no, I don't mean to say that I think I have colds when I don't, or that I sneeze and assume I have a sinus infection.  No, no, no.  It means that I have bouts of insomnia, night after night, an inability to sleep, and a need for constant self-medication, because I am convinced I am dying of rabies and don't have long to live.
I called the Health Department.
It sounds funny, right?  It isn't, really.  It is sad, actually, that my boyfriend had to hold me while I fought away shuddering blasts of nervous shakes and psychosomatic pains and fevers because I had convinced myself that a small animal bite had resulted in my inevitable death.

Not having health insurance, my inevitable need to simply see a doctor finally became so overwhelming that I forked over the cash and went for it. 

But the problem with hypochondria is that a part of you knows how ridiculous it is for you to even wander about whether or not you are dying in the first place--and thus you have no desire to see a health care professional about it at all.  From the get go I could have simply gone to a minor med and had myself checked out, but I was so ashamed that I resolved over and over that I had no choice but to quietly die.
I finally convinced myself to go only because of my fear that I had spread my rabies to my loved ones.

Yes, the Health Department laughed at me.  My doctor laughed at me.  My friend who is a nurse laughed at me.  Everyone that I encountered with some credibility scoffed at my unfounded fears.

And I started feeling okay about it eventually.  But the hypochondria beast does not want to die.  No.  It must latch on to the next best thing.  A genetic disease I could have manifest at an older age because of a corneal graft I received as a youngster.  Pneumonia because I had a cough for a couple of weeks.
Now, AIDS, because I saw a movie about a guy with AIDS.

You see, I know how ridiculous it all is.  I am a perfectly healthy person.  In fact, compared to the people around me, I am an exceptionally healthy person.  SO WHY DO I CONVINCE MYSELF I AM DYING?

I have no idea.  I wish I could perform my own tests at home, for free.  But then I would just constantly test myself.  In the rabies scare I ended up buying a thermometer and proceeded to take my temperature every hour for two weeks.  Not literally.
But close.

I really need something to do, something to keep my mind from wandering.  I suspect that if I was able to just go to college every day for the rest of my life, I would be happy as a lark.  Alas, I don't have that option.

I am open to suggestions.  I don't know if my relationship will continue to survive my chronic anxiety.  Especially not "AIDS."