Panic Attacks

Anyone else deal with panic attacks?

I had one at work yesterday, and it was not a pleasant experience.  My panic attacks are definitely attacks.  Some people I've talked to describe panic attacks as creeping up on you and then you have the attack.  Mine are never like that.  Mine are more like a bus hitting me.  They are sudden and violent, and leave me remarkably shaken.

The attacks have been pretty intense lately and I decided that rather than suffer, I was going to be proactive and go back to therapy to try and get them under control. After my first session last night, it appears that I am also experiencing depressive symptoms.

  All the same, I've had great experience at this place before, and I am confident that things will get better with treatment.  So far, it's just been "get to know you" questions, but it was a pleasant session otherwise.  We'll work out the treatment plan together and hopefully that will help keep things under control.  It felt a little odd leaving last night without anything in place, but I must continue to remind myself that anything worth doing takes time (HINT HINT - readers asking for updates:  I AM WRITING.  I PROMISE!!!).

Leaving a therapy sessions is always fun.  The therapist usually says something like "Have a good week!" or some other cheery form of farewell, but I usually hear this in my head:

So, dear readers...SURVIVE. 

Life can be sucky

December was the worst month of my life. It will probably be the worst month of my life for the rest of my life.

First, my car broke down. That in itself wasn't too bad, considering what would follow.

My grandmother died. She was 99 years old, just fifty days short of her 100th birthday. The worst part was, I had to rent a car to go home for the funeral. The weather was terrible, and all sorts of family were coming in from all over for it. Even my Uncle Jack, whom I met for the first (and probably last) time at the funeral home. My uncle has not been to West Virginia for well over thirty years. He never came to see my grandmother, even though he was her firstborn son, and then he shows up at her funeral. Added to everything else, the person in the casket was not my grandmother. It was her body, but it wasn't her. Whatever made her my grandmother was already gone. The funeral didn't really make much of an impression on me. I don't cry at funerals. I'm sure I've upset some family members over my lack of reaction, but it wasn't her.

My twin sister and I were invited to say something. I warned the little ones in the family that they hadn't heard all of the stories about her yet, but they would. Grandma was the matriarch of our family, and I can already see all of us drifting away from each other. She was strong enough to hold us together; we cannot remain as we were without an outside force, and she was certainly an outside force!

This all happened right before the Christmas holidays. It only drives home my personal belief that the Christmas holidays were invented to torture me with frivolity. My entire family, both mother and father sides, were determined to make Christmas a time of too much food and too little quiet. It was rough, as my parents are divorced and both sides want me at a celebration of some sort. Frustrating, that, as I wanted nothing more than to be alone in my little apartment with Christmas carols playing softly in the background, a glass of wine at my elbow, and my own private little celebration taking place before I headed off to Midnight Mass. Instead, I got to watch Rudolph the Red-Nosed reindeer with the little ones before ushering them off to bed before Santa Claus could come, the whole while attempting not to break their belief. (I figured it out at eight...)

New Years Eve was a blessing.