Anxiety & Me

Before meds, starting in my teens, I experienced prolonged bouts of severe anxiety and panic. Sometimes it interefered so badly with my sleep that I hallucinated during the day. I avoided drugs and alcohol as a teen because I feared being out of control; I took my friends home, I was the designated driver before they existed. In my thirties I found medication. Whew.

In the meantime, I worked, married, became a nurse and had two children just thirteen months apart. I knew I just had to wait long enough and all would be better, sometimes that was hard to believe but I did believe it. Some days I still wait, but it is a different thing now, the waiting, a quieter thing.

When my kids were little, I had a scale to rate my anxiety. It was tied into feeding the children. Panic tries to make sense of itself by attaching to more understandable concerns, when it came to my kids it was food. So, I would open a can of fruit.

Mild anxiety= This can may be contaminated, the children could get botulism, this is my problem not thiers, the fruit is fine. I give it to the kids.

Moderate anxiety= This can may be contaminated. Botulism is a rare but awful thing. This is my problem and shouldn't affect the kids. Well, I will eat what they eat, if it hurts them, it hurts me.

Severe anxiety= The fruit might be contaminated, I should be cutting up fresh fruit for them anyway, this stuff isn't acidic enough to kill botulism. This might be my problem but why risk it? I throw out the can and wash my hands and find something else for the kids to eat.

Extreme anxiety=Don't touch a can.

Even in my panic, I found this scale a little amusing, knowing it was a random scale based on my ability as a nurse to get over-involved with thoughts of contamination.

Then again, to tell the truth, I don't use lots of food from cans, tomato paste, or sauce mostly and I am going to, this year,(at least this is the plan now) do some home canning for the first time in my life.

If something should happen to me... (I just remembered that, when young and filled with fear that i was about to die but knowing better i wanted, just in case, to put a note in my pocket that said "Don't think I didn't suffer!", that way if I did drop dead they wouldn't say "At least she didn't suffer." i never did put the note in my pocket, but i sure wanted to)