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A 'Glitch' Called Anxiety

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“Something is wrong. Nothing works anymore. My meds are broken. My brain is broken!”

I literally cried to my therapist over the phone while sitting in the parking lot of Starbucks. These feelings of intense irritability, anxiety and everything in between hit me hard, leaving me wanting to cry for no reason other than the mere frustration of feeling this way.

Why do I feel this way? What has changed? Why did my meds stop working? Were the feelings coming from my brain so strong they exceeded the limitations of my coping mechanisms and the various medications I am on?

I couldn’t help but question everything about my mere existence in those moments when I was crying to (let’s be honest, at, I was crying at) my therapist. I wanted things fixed, and I was exhausted with my own questioning, my own futile attempts at trying to fix what I didn’t understand.

You see, I was trying to fix my own mind. Mine. The one I was born with, the one that learned how to read, how to write, how to do math, remembered choreography and recited poetry. This wonderful organ that can do so many incredible things.

Yet, there is a glitch in mine. Apparently, a glitch called anxiety. It causes my mind to go into a vicious and exhausting cycle of what ifs, whys, overthinking, overanalyzing and over-everything, leaving me feeling like someone took a Rolodex and spun it except it just doesn’t ever slow down.

That’s what I wanted. I just wanted everything to stop or pause to give me the space to process the feelings. Yet, the feelings and whatever it was that was contributing to the feelings were all coming so fast I couldn’t keep up. It comes down to the fact that I just couldn’t cope.

Fortunately, I have an amazing therapist, who in the span of about 10 minutes, was able to get me calm enough to wipe away my tears, start my car and drive to work. I had what we in the biz call an anxiety flare-up. You know, you’re going along just fine, and then, seemingly out of the blue, your world is turned upside down and inside out all at once.

Apparently, that’s the thing with anxiety. It’s always growing and learning (kinda like our minds) and latching onto things we don’t realize. Yet, the power we have over it is the ability to cope with it. With lots of talk therapy and sometimes the help of a little medication to give us the space we need to process, we can and will make it through to the other side.

Friends, we will see each other on the other side. We can do this together.

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Image via Thinkstock

Originally published: January 6, 2017
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