jump…

I don’t normally watch television during the day. It’s not because i’m ‘above’ watching daytime television, it’s mostly because it causes more anxiety than I can handle.

The commercials that start with, “Are you in debt over your head and feel like your drowning in creditor calls? WE CAN HELP!”

Call it denial or avoidance, but I can’t handle listening to these types of commercials. My heart starts to race and every single stupid purchase i’ve made in the past month or two begins to flood over me.
Today I turned on the television so I could erase all the ‘Scrapbooking’ shows I Tivo’ed thinking that MAYBE someday I could actually be a person with enough creative powers to pull one off. I have resolved that I will never be a scrapbooker. I will also not be someone that will be able to build a house with my bare hands so I deleted all the ‘do it yourself’ shows on building and plumbing.

There is this show on some local channel called ‘Starting Over’. It’s about a bunch of women with issues living in a house and working through them. I had caught an episode of it a few years ago when I had lost the remote and was too lazy to change the channel. I hated that show. I wanted to slap all the women and tell them, “THAT IS THE CHOICE YOU MADE!! QUIT COMPLAINING! START LIVING!!”
Today, I left it on for background noise while I surfed the internet in search of a way to avoid actually doing something to better my life.

“It’s NOT the issue. The issue is how you’re going to DEAL with the issue!” the woman on TV preached.

Huh?

I turned around and started watching. This whole show was PACKED full of things these women needed to know to survive in the real world. I didn’t NEED to watch this show because lookie here…real world…me…surviving. Or was I?

The words, ‘Denial’ and ‘Avoiding’ kept popping up and everytime I would hear it, this lump in my throat would just bob up and down.
This woman needed to take responsiblity for the life she had created to be able to fix it. She had to not be afraid anymore.
NOT AFRAID ANYMORE? is that possible? Do people actually get up every day and not have fear standing behind them?

I try not to write too much about it, I try to joke about it in hopes that it will make it better, but the truth is…anxiety eats me up ALL the time. Someone used the term ‘crawling out of my skin with anxiety’. The perfect description for me is more like, ‘Feeling like my heart is going to explode and if I just pull my hair and clench my teeth it will make the ache of this go away.’ My anxiety HURTS. My shoulders feel like I have been carrying a backpack full of bricks. If anyone touches them, It makes me want to hurl because it is like someone is putting salt into a wound.
Xanax isn’t a fix-all for my anxiety. If it were, I would pop those suckers like Tic-Tacs. I am the fix-all for my anxiety. I know this. I’ve read all the self help books. Pretending that I have it all together for awhile seems to work, but like all games…I stop playing and then it comes crashing back…bigger.

How to ‘get it together’ and ‘keep it together’ seems to be the question I keep asking myself.

At the end of the show, the woman that was always afraid was told to jump in the pool. She couldn’t swim, but they were not going to let her drown. It was to show her, ‘get over your fears head on.’ and then ‘move on’. It’s not the ‘issue’ it’s how you DEAL with the ‘issue’. Focus on the dealing with it.

I cried when she finally let go and jumped.