Let it beeeee, let it be. Let it beeee, let it be.

I’m a cuticle biter. I’ve revealed this in a former post that I am too lazy to go and link for you. Trust me, I’m a cuticle biter and sometimes my mind tells me that I need to just tear my fingers up and gnaw my fingers to the bone.
On my last visit to Redding, my mother looked at my fingers and said, “You get that from your grandma Conner, she was a biter too.” Great. Is there a family member that has a good trait I can pick up on? Perhaps an great-great grandmother that knew how to figure out the winning lottery numbers?

Yesterday was my first ‘Managing Anxiety and Panic Disorder’ class. I had avoided the last two sessions because honestly the teacher’s voice drove me nuts and I didn’t think I could spend 6 weeks listening to him mumble his way to a cure.
This first meeting was a joke. No, okay…I’m not being fair. Perhaps for people who just started dealing with anxiety, this class might be very helpful. For someone who has been coping with panic for years, it wasn’t helpful at all.

He went over some of the things that you feel when you’re in the middle of a panic attack. Then he went over what our mind is telling us.
Me being the outspoken one said, “What my mind is telling me right now is that I am sitting in a room with one door, no windows and at any point someone can come into this room with a gun and kill us all.”
To say the room fell silent is an understatement. His squeaky magic eraser pen came to a halt and he looked at me. “Do you really want me to write that on the board?” He was seriously scolding me for saying it out loud. Like I was trying to scare people!
I then said, “I’m sorry, but that is what my mind tells me in every room, every store, every restaurant that I go into. What happened at Virginia Tech is my panic ‘disorder’ realized.”
He wrote on the board, “no way to escape.”

My worst fear that causes so much anxiety in my daily life was summarized to ‘no way to escape’.
I’m sorry, but I will escape. The fun part of having what I have is the strength to know that in any situation I will live through it. If someone comes into the restaurant that I am in and decides to pull out a gun. My ass knows what to do, where the other doors are. Before I am seated, I have already lived what could happen.
Yes, it sucks to always be living for the worst possible scenario everywhere I go.

In the middle of the first class he informed us that he would be ‘triggering’ an anxiety attack so he could teach us how to ‘breath’ through them.
Yes, I opened my mouth again. “You’re going to trigger an anxiety attack in class? In front of other people? Do you realize how many years we have been in social situations and had to hide them?”
I’m sorry.
Yes, I share my stories with you all, but really you only get to see the after-the-fact written word of what I went through. You don’t see the fear, you don’t feel the fear, you don’t feel how much pain my body is in the next day after an panic attack.
This man wants me to have an anxiety attack in front of strangers? OH HELL NO. It wasn’t until last year that I allowed Shaun to finally see how bad they are. I let him hold me as I cried in PAIN and listened to his words that everything was going to be OK. I let all the fear inside of me out and cried harder than I had cried in a million years. I told him everything I was feeling and it scared him. He took the next day off work and stayed with me so I could rest. Every muscle in my body hurt and my chest and throat were raw.
They aren’t always that bad. I have managed to find a way to get through them without them getting to that point, but sometimes, my mind won’t allow me to and I have to just freak the fuck out.

I came home after the appointment extremely pissed off. I don’t know why. I think it might be the sunshine he was trying to blow up our asses about how we were all going to be cured by learning how to breath.
His cure to the whole thing was learning how to breath. GOT IT. I know how to breath. DEEP BREATHING. Got that too, had 3 kids, I know all kinds of breathing. IN WITH THE GOOD, OUT WITH THE BAD.
Maybe it was being in a room with only one door and a doctor who though I was crazy that someone might come in and kill us. Trust me, when it happens, I’m using his body as a human shield and I will whispering in his ear, “Breath through this asshole!”

Yes, as you can see, I’m dealing with anger issues as well as anxiety issues. I went in believing that there was hope for me and walked out realizing this man has NEVER in his life dealt with anxiety or panic attacks and all the stuff that he is saying is all just text book.

I had to put on fake nails the other day because my thumbs are raw from gnawing on them at night. It makes it hard to peel the skin from my fingers with fake nails on. It also makes it very hard to type, that’s why you have been getting the lame posts. Sorry.

SPF this week will be “FRAMED” Show me your favorite frame, framed picture, a frame you have been coveting in a store or online, or get creative and show us your version of ‘framed’.

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