all in all, it’s been a pretty get-things-done kind of day for me. not the most exciting, but i can breathe now. i got my rent situation straightened out (letter with rent check evidently didn’t get delivered at all to my landlord, which is bad) free of charge, bought dog food, put gas in my car (finally), got signed up for my marketing class (class was full online so i had to talk to marketing chairperson important guy who makes things happen), got my meal plan, got groceries, and most importantly, ate lunch with my long lost best friend ry~ry who i haven’t seen in ages. it was a nice reunion and we have class together twice a week now. i think that will help me out having her around again.
i’m not sure if i’m being affected by seasonal gloominess and that’s what’s making me depressed or if i’ve just had an ongoing crappy extremely irritating stretch of depression. i’m anxious all the time, i feel panicked all the time, at times i have to remind myself to breathe because i’ll realize that i’m completely tensed up and taking short, not-so-frequent breaths that makes me feel even more stressed out, when i really shouldn’t have anything to stress about.
i came home from class and my initial plan was to change clothes (i was not dressed for 28° weather at all), go get loki’s food and get some gas, drive to campus, and do dorm runs for tech. support since it’s the beginning of the year and that’s what we do. what did i do? i came home and cried for nearly an hour. i’m kind of glad laura wasn’t here, because if she was, i wouldn’t have cried, but i think it needed to get out. i get so anxious that it’s the only thing left to do, it seems, and if i have any other outlet it would be to scream at the top of my lungs. unfortunately, these walls are not made for that. the neighbors would come beat down my door.
i was reading some things online that my aunt and uncle and a writer and some students wrote about my cousin’s suicide and it shocked me in some ways because i never realized she and i were so much alike in our symptoms. this scares me for obvious reasons and it is really unnerving when i think back to when i was 11~ish and she was 7-8~ish and she told me that she wanted to be like me when she grew up. it scares me to think that we both suffered from the same issues, although hers became far more severe than mine have, and the only thing that comes to my mind is “what if that happened to me?”
Corey’s parents, family and friends also say she suffered from depression, she was compulsive about her looks and sometimes put pressure on herself to succeed.
this part in particular is what really got to me. last year during my spring semester, i barely left my apartment. i didn’t like to go outside in public, i didn’t like to go to class (most of mine were larger so it was like walking in front of a crowd), it was hell forcing myself to do anything. i felt hideous, worthless, and like i had nothing going for me. the only release i felt i had was going to fort bragg to see adam because that was the only thing that made me feel better where i wasn’t so self-conscious and i was comfortable. i was so depressed that i stopped going to classes for over a month, i couldn’t convince myself that it was worth being seen by everyone, i hated myself for getting the bad grades that came from that, which made me feel many times worse because i had been an A and B student since the beginning of college. living alone in a studio apartment was probably one of the worst things i could’ve done for myself, without realizing it, and i knew i had to get out of there. that’s when adam and i moved in together. it helped tremendously being around him and making new friends, but it certainly did not fix the problem. i had bad grades on my record, didn’t make much money at the job i was working at, and when adam left, i felt myself falling even farther.
moving into a new apartment was helpful, i had loki, and a “new start” it seemed. i had to re-take the 4 classes i had let go earlier that year, but it had to be done. i had my friends in boone, got involved with on-campus activities/clubs, and tried to stay as busy as possible.
staying busy, i’ve learned, keeps it at bay, but when i get home at night and sit idle in my room on the computer, that’s when my mind starts to wander and i start thinking about the most awful things. i ultimately make myself feel like shit, worthless, and question what i’m even doing with my life. up until recently, i knew exactly what i wanted to do out of college, but after a lot of thinking and questioning about what really makes me happy, i have no clue at all what i want to do when i graduate. that’s a scary feeling and when i combine that with my obsessive compulsiveness about nearly everything in my life, stress that i seem to create for myself, classes, worrying about every little thing, it drives me almost insane. and that’s when i lose it.
a lot of times i worry about me and adam. he says he’s here for me and that he wants to help me through my problems, but in the back of my mind i am scared that my frequent outbursts and anxiety attacks might grow old and he might not know what to do anymore. articles like the one i linked in the last post really give me hope that he can help me through it. half the time, i don’t know where they come from. we went to a christmas party with a bunch of his friends in massachusetts and upon leaving a bar, i started having flashbacks of something that happened over the summer, started thinking about it, got really panicked, and made myself so stressed that i made myself sick to my stomach, threw up in the backyard, and had to have adam’s friend drive us home. i felt HORRIBLE and GUILTY and like a piece of shit for letting that happen. or like new year’s eve, we were at a party with our friends, it was late and i was tired but still okay, and the tears started flowing.
if things like that happen when we’re around his friends, that makes me even more self-conscious because they probably think i’m nuts. unless he’s explained to them that this isn’t a joke and it is a real problem, they probably have no clue what’s going on, think i’m crazy, and then i get even more self-conscious when i leave because i look back and wonder what they might be thinking, and the things they might say to him when i’m gone. i know it sounds weird but these are the things i think about and worry about. there isn’t a day that goes by when i don’t absolutely hate myself for it.
on top of stressing myself out, the inevitable happens. stress creates physical problems as well. it will make me stop eating or overeat or eat chocolate for a week, it will make my face break out worse than ever, it will turn my stomach in knots. that happens, i lose it because that’s like the straw that broke the camel’s back. i’m so freaking compulsive about the way i look and if i don’t feel presentable and even make-up can’t cover it up, i feel like crawling in a dark hole and never coming out. i think adam is slowly figuring that out the longer we’re together. last winter when we had been staying in the barracks, my stress had wreaked havoc on my face, i got angry and upset and all kinds of irritated when i couldn’t fix it and i threw my flat iron across the room. he’d been standing over me trying to get me to hurry up to go eat, when all i wanted was for him to quit looking at me because i felt like the swamp monster and would rather curl up in a ball in bed and not eat for the next week while my face cleared up. it gets that bad.
i don’t know why i am writing all this and it took me the better part of an hour to get it all out. i feel better, though… and that’s all i really care about at this point.