Terrification: The Weight of It

Well here I am again, stuck inside the loop of Terrification. I hope you’ll all forgive me for not being regular in this endeavour, at least not yet anyway. I am really hoping that once I get going and put my thoughts out there that it will not only help me, but someone else too. Just knowing that I’m not alone is a huge help sometimes and I am hoping that is the same for others.

Full disclosure, it’s been so long, I had to go back and read my previous blog post. As I said, I am in my terrification loop and really struggling with it right now. I have those thoughts of I am not enough, I don’t do enough, I am not worthy, I am a terrible wife, I am a terrible friend, I am a terrible sister, daughter, and so on. I have been and am feeling extremely low and sometimes pretty dark. I am doing all of the things. I spoke to my doctor and my medication has been increased, which at first made me feel defeated. I was finally able to titrate down from a really high dose and now I am going in the opposite direction. I know that this is not a bad thing in my head, somewhere in there anyway. But another part of my head wants to beat myself up for not being able to stay on the lower dose. I am looking for the wins or trying to anyway. Wins like, I got out of bed each and every day; I made something to eat; I did a load of laundry; I washed my face and brushed my teeth. Yes, washing my face and brushing my teeth are wins some days. So is getting out of bed. 

You see, before I was diagnosed with anxiety and depression I walked around each and every day with a knot in my stomach that I thought was normal. I would push myself through each and every minute of each and every day until my body simply couldn’t do it any more. Then I would not be able to get out of bed for days. I couldn’t explain why. All I could say is that I didn’t feel good or I felt off. A lot of the times I would end up with a migraine or nausea or both and then I didn’t feel so guilty for not getting out of bed because I could pinpoint a reason and actually say it out loud. The problem is that, for anyone who hasn’t had a migraine, felt nausea on its own on a regular basis, or nausea from a migraine, or experienced extreme anxiety, depression or any combination thereof, it doesn’t make sense. If it doesn’t make sense to someone, all it does is cause frustration and in some cases even anger. The problem with that is that it makes the person who is struggling feel even more guilty and then the loop of depression leading to anxiety or the anxiety leading to depression gets even worse. In my case, that can make me feel even lower and darker.

That frustration and anger can also be a story that I made up in my head. I do it quite often. My husband is working all day, long days, like 12 - 13 hour days. I try to see the wins in my day when I am struggling and those wins sometimes are very small. Then I tell myself that the wins are not enough. I tell myself that when he gets home and sees that I have not done much that he is going to be upset with me or worse yet, disappointed in me. That I cannot handle. That feeling of disappointing someone. I am not sure how it’s okay to disappoint myself or better yet, abandon myself, but to disappoint someone else, especially my husband, is unbearable. Then the shoulds come in. I should do better, I should try harder, I should be able to do this, and so on. The shoulds are one of the worst kinds of punishment I do to myself. It’s like perfectionism for me. I should be able to do it all like other people or like I think other people do. I should be able to keep up with day to day life. I should be able to be the perfect wife, blogger, yoga teacher (something I aspire to do and have purchased the courses but not yet been able to complete), Al-Anoner, ACA’er, CoDA’er. I should be able to do it all. 

“Where did that come from? I should be able to do it all.” Why do we have to do it all??? Why can’t doing something, just something be enough??? Well this could be another tangent if I let it. For now, I am going to say that shoulding myself is one of my character traits that I would really like to improve on, erase completely if I am being honest, but I know logically that that is not possible. Logically I know that there are going to be ebbs and flows in life. I just wish those ebbs and flows didn’t feel so intense sometimes. For today, I am going to continue to question the "shoulds" that roll around in my head. You know...that hamster wheel. I named my hamster Henry. What did you name yours?