Anxiety

Source - I love the quote they put on this blog -
"I now view Anxiety as an unwelcome visitor with no purpose other than to side swipe my self esteem."

This week, I had the shocking realization that I am still very.. very.. very.. fragile.

That something like dumping $1,500 into car repairs quickly sends me over the edge.

The edge of anxiety.

Anxiety and I do not have a good relationship, but anxiety is always in my life.

Anxiety makes me unable to eat. It makes me nauseous with no appetite. The no appetite gets to where it will dawn on me that it’s been 3 days, and I haven’t eaten.. anything. The nausea makes it difficult to even brush my teeth. I can’t count how many times I have fought with my tooth brush, trying to brush my teeth through dry heaves, only to throw up what little stomach contents I have..in the sink. Then I have to start the whole brushing teeth fight all over again.

Anxiety makes me unable to sleep, think, or concentrate.

This week started out like every other week. Running on sheer exhaustion, just trying to get through the day, hoping to make it to the weekend.

Then started the car problems. In stepped the anxiety of how the hell I am going to pay for this? Followed by disappear and feeling completely alone and lost.

To a “normal” person car repairs is just a fact of life. To the widow in me, it is a catastrophic event.

I spent this week trying to force feed myself, trying to get my anxiety under control, trying to sleep at night, trying to not let my anxiety drown me in its smothering ways. Nothing I did worked. Everything just kept piling up in my head.

Then I had the realization of how fragile I still am. 34 months after my husband’s death, I am fragile.

The car repairs left me in a crying heap on my kitchen table. I was looking around my house thinking “this wouldn't be as hard if Seth was still alive.”

In stepped the “holy shit, I am so alone in all this it’s insane.”

I reached out to a friend, trying to find comfort, and was told “It’s not the end of the world.”

Sure, it’s not the end of the world. Not being able to pay my mortgage or having my anxiety take away my appetite is not the end of the world, but in that moment, it was the end of MY world.

Then I went off the deep end. I completely shut down.

I focused on:

-         - Get up

-          -Go to work

-          -Get your work done

-          -Try to eat without throwing up

-          -Drive home

-          -Shut the world out for the night

-          -Go to bed

-          -Rinse and repeat

When I go into complete shutdown mode, life becomes a series of moment by moment. Minute by minute. Just trying to survive without going complete ape shit on someone. You could ask me what I’m doing after work, and I would just look at you with a blank stare.. because.. well.. that’s 4 hours from now, and I can only think about this very minute. I can’t think about 240 minutes from now.

Anxiety is not my friend. Yet it’s a constant reminder of what I have been through and what I am still going through. I am dropping weight at an alarming rate, all thanks to my not friend – anxiety. Sure, losing some weight isn't a bad thing, but I am quickly approaching too thin, and I can’t stop it. Anxiety won’t let up and give me my appetite back. I haven't set foot on a scale to see just how much weight I have lost due to this anxiety episode, but it's a lot.. my "skinny" clothes are falling off at this point.

I have resorted to what my counselor has always told me “With anxiety, eat whatever your body wants. Even if all you want is one candy bar a day, eat that. At least you will be eating something.”

Last night, I turned to my comfort food. The one thing I can always eat no matter how bad my anxiety is. Smothered burritos. For the first time in almost a week, I had a full belly.

I realized I have become cocky. Thinking I am no longer fragile. That “life happens” won’t send me over the edge. I was wrong. I was cocky. I have this messed up vision of what I can handle.

Maybe I need a new tattoo, on my wrist, where I see it with every hand movement I make, that says “Don’t be cocky.”

It would be a constant reminder that I will never be the same person I was before.

Lost

Photo from here

There are days when I am still astounded that he hasn't come home.

6:30 pm rolls around and I find myself listening for the distinctive note of his car pulling into the driveway.

I find myself looking for him in the shed, expecting to see him fixing something on his workbench.

My brain hasn't worked out that he is gone.

I am like Red Dog, searching high and low for the one he loves. Searching faces and seeming to ask "have you seen him?" Going from place to place, determined to find the person who he loved above all others. Never stopping.

On the day Greg died, I looked for him in the faces of the policemen, expecting them to tell me where he was ... when they had already told me where he wasn't.

I searched the faces of his friends.

I search for him every night in my dreams .... and sometimes I find him.

I found him in my dreams last week and I asked him WHY he had to go. (That question that we all wonder: WHY did they die, WHY are we left here without them, WHY they were taken long before their time???)
In the dream, he just carried on making a sandwich and explained (as though repeating himself for the umpteenth time) that "there was a car accident".

....and even though that is the truth of it, it doesn't seem to stop my subconscious mind from searching for him every day and every night.

Because I have lost him, and I still have this desperate need to find him.


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... I know the word "loss / lost" annoys a lot of widows and I want to assure you that I do know exactly where his body is, but "lost" is a word I often use because it describes how *I* feel as well.

melancholy bed linens

Written three years ago. 17 days after Jeff died...

I have been sitting in the rocking chair in my room for a period of time each day staring at our bed and crying. I am trying to muster up the courage to wash the sheets. I tell myself, "Jeff would laugh at this. He'd think I was being silly and sentimental. They are just sheets. They aren't him." But he slept there. There are 'Jeff germs' on them.

I 'saved' the sheets from the bed in the spare room because of the same reason. They are folded neatly, with his towel he used that morning, the clothes he passed in and the clothes I was wearing that day in my closet. Do I need to add the sheets from every bed in the house? No, but it is hard to do.

He slept with Olivia for a time the night before as well because she was crying. I'm having a hard time washing her sheets too.

I sit in the chair and tell myself, "You can do it. They should be washed. You have other things that Jeff touched too." Then I sit there and sob.

I usually wash the sheets once a week. It's driving me nuts....But I don't want to wash him away.

Everything that changes in the house takes me farther away from him. I have a hard time dusting because I heard that dust is made up of 85% skin cells....some of those cells are Jeff's.

I have a box of hair in my closet along with the clothes and sheets that I'm hoarding. The day he died, my sister and I scoured the house looking for hairs in the bed, the bathtub and on the floor. I didn't want to lose anymore of him.

Am I crazy? Please tell me that I should wash the sheets. Tell me it's okay. He would want me and the kids to be on clean sheets, right? I'm just being silly and sentimental, right?
I think I've lost it.