Falling

In January, I began to realize that the fact that I didn't feel like myself wasn't just because I was crazy. After mentioning it to my pediatrician (Baby Girl sees a doctor more than I do and my pediatrician had been telling me she wondered if something was "off"), then seeing my doctor, who prescribed yoga and a pill that gave me the worst migraine of my life the first (and only) night I took it, I ended up in head-shrinking.

My head shrinker never quite embraced the post-partum depression label that everyone else (including myself) had chalked my neurosis up to. It puzzled her that it could be that, because the hallmark characteristic is a failure to bond with the baby ... I had the opposite problem. I was clinging to Baby Girl for all I was worth - clinging to her to save me. She was the one who required nothing more than what I could give. Food, love and an occasional bath were all she needed.

Meanwhile, other things were spiraling rapidly out of control. Things at The Factory were bad. If I got up and did something more than pull on something clean and put my hair up wet, it was a good day. Sundays, previously a day of restful bliss, were angst-ridden and full of a sick panicky feeling. The Hobbit Hole stood neglected. Himself stood neglected. Stacks of mail went neglected. I didn't sleep more than an hour or two at once.

Sometime after the first grateful rays of sunshine began to unthaw The Frontier, my head shrinker and I discovered something - with the lifting of the heavy clouds and wet, salt-crusted days of winter, I was able to engage in a little more self-review. What I discovered led to a complete change in my 'label' and 'treatment' - Severe Anxiety Disorder, though it's debatable whether I fall further into the "panic" or "general anxiety" category - rather a mix of both.

The last two months I've spent trying to understand triggers, reduce stressors and free myself of something that has been present my entire adult life, but crippled me for 6 months. It has helped, some. I am realizing that if I am backed into the corner, I can't function. I can't think. I can't be coherent. All I hear is the rush of my heart pounding and the primal need to flee or get defensive or disappear.

But that doesn't mean I know how to FIX it. It is nearly impossible to explain to someone who hasn't had the feelings of anxiety so deep, so encompassing that the entire world spins as if you were on the Teacups at Disneyland and everything sounds like a sonic boom. Volume is magnified. Little things become huge stressors. It is a feeling of One. More. Thing. Everything is the straw that breaks the camels back, no matter how minor.

It is over the minor things I end up agonizing, over the very things that will help me get healthy from which I run. My head shrinker insists that meditation is the key, but I cannot be alone in silence for more than 30 seconds or the anxiety overwhelms me, attacks me, to the point of panicky breathlessness.

So I fill every spare second with action, with noise ... NPR or a book on CD while I'm in the kitchen, reading until I fall asleep, talking to Baby Girl when I'm at the grocery store, flipping stations back and forth and back again in the car. There is no silence, because I spend every second trying to drown out the rushing panic, the rising tide of anxiety that consumes me if I leave a spare inch through which it may be able to creep.

This week has been one of the worst in recent memory. I am falling - falling through a dark tunnel filled with chaos and noise and insanity and breathlessness. And I am trying to understand it.