Entry 4-

I’m in a bit of rush this morning, I woke up late and I have little appetite. My cough is even coming back.

Anyway I am having some anxiety yet again, sometimes it feels like my anxiety and depression mix a little. It also doesn’t help that over here we are finally starting to feel the seasons changing. Normally I prefer winter/fall over summer but I actually just really dislike it when seasons change, I think anybody with mental health issues does as well.

Thankfully I find that distracting yourself is a perfect way to get over it. And an excellent distraction was yesterday’s job interview. It went well but I have to wait now for their response. I hope that they say yes because I really enjoyed the discussion we had about the position and I also hope that it is a paying job because that part was sort of not mentioned and they haven’t said much about it. My idea is that it’s unpaid because they can’t afford to pay their staff and only do volunteers. But still, I’m hopeful.

And then even if that doesn’t work out I still have a good boost just from doing the interview. I feel more confident, comfortable and interested in looking for work once more which I’m sure will lead to employment in the soon to near future.

Since my episode this weekend that led me to come find this website and seek other forms of help I have still remnants of the anxiety, I do still feel a bit disoriented, jaded if you will and lost. Certain thoughts about my future make me feel rather uncomfortable and spring up these exact ideas. I think my problem in the long term is I think too much about the end of my life and it gives me these episodes which prevents me from enjoying the present. You cannot help yourself by spending your time worrying about the future and what’s to come it will only make your problems worse.

Furthermore, my therapist did recommend that I start looking into some natural remedies for anxiety, ones which don’t have many side effects and aren’t habit forming. Thus far I’ve just used calms forte exclusively to help me get a good night of sleep when I had a bout of insomnia but outside of this I’ve really just realized on my thought replacement therapy to help me get through anxiety. I think anxiety is a multifaceted problem and as a result somethings can help some of the time and other times they simply won’t work.

But in the long run I have been getting nowhere in my life and I need to focus on this. My anxiety is a long journey of recovery that won’t go away overnight. I think I need to make sure that I get a job, get some money, move out of this house and start to establish my adulthood, stop living so child like. Then I can meet someone and I’ve got a better shot at fighting anxiety I think. I’ll have more responsibilities that won’t allow me to avoid trains, appointments, etc. which will reinforce my recovery from anxiety.

It’s kind of confusing and I know this post is awfully negative but more so than that it’s real. In the long term anxiety really doesn’t matter, because it doesn’t matter how we feel rather it’s what we do that counts. And I don’t want to die knowing that I spent the later portion of my life running from life because of my feelings. In fact I’d like to know I learned to act in spite of my feelings at least maintaining productivity. I don’t know anymore if this all stemmed from marijuana exposure or alcohol abuse in my younger days (though it could likely be that I just had this dormant inside of me and those self destructive periods of my life brought it all out) but this is the only life I have. As long as my cardiologist said I’m fine, my heart palpitations are benign and I’ll do my best to keep from worrying about that. Only time will tell, and for now, all things considered, I do have a good starting point on my road to recovery.

Finally, I will end with today’s worry thoughts, so that I can keep them here and go on about my business the rest of the day. I will exercise meditate finish what’s left of my lunch and go shopping.

I woke up late, my day is over, though it may feel like that that isn’t necessarily true, I still have a ton of things I can get done and I will do my best to go to sleep earlier tonight and wake up on time tomorrow. It’s difficult right now because I don’t have a job but at least I’ve gotten better at regulating my sleep schedule. This is also partly not my fault anyway because the day before I got no sleep since there were a million helicopters in the sky which woke me up (before my interview I might add). It sucked and it made yesterday hard but that’s history now. I will return to a healthy regular sleep cycle.

I have no apetite, I’m too skinny/thin/underweight, what if I pass out if I leave the house. I absolutely can leave the house, even though anxiety and depression regularly make people lose their appetites I also have to consider that if my body really was in desperate straights and needed nutrition my stomach would be growling and I would feel an intense hunger. Instead of worrying about the last meal that i didn’t eat I can begin preparing for the next meal and go about my business until I’m hungry.

But my father always shames me for not eating enough. Well that’s too bad for him. Again, if I was hungry I would eat but I’m simply not hungry. I refuse to eat in order to please somebody else, the only reason I eat is to serve my body which right now is telling me that I’m not hungry. Surely it has enough to work with right now. I also can’t care too much about what other people tell me I should do.

What if I don’t get the job I interviewed for yesterday? Well then that’s another one down but again it gave me a second wind so to speak on job hunting. Even if I don’t get this one I know have more motivation than before to keep looking which will result in work at some point because it’s basically just a numbers game.

I haven’t left the house yet, I must leave the house in order to feel good. Well once again I’m not actually going to just feel good because I leave the house, I will a  little but walking along never makes my anxiety disappear and I shouldn’t even be striving for that. With a feelings based goal I will never get better this way. It’s a vicious cycle of feeling well and unwell. Instead of hanging on the idea that I must do certain things to feel good, I should think of it as I must do certain things because they need to get done. Leaving the house and regular exercise is important but I should avoid putting the pressure of “how I feel” on these activities. Instead, I will just leave the house when I need to and feel all sorts of ways about it, not paying too much mind to that.

Now I appear to be out of what ifs/worry thoughts. I hope this means that I’m decreasing them through this worry journal. Thank you for taking the time to read through my journey, I hope it helped you as much as writing these ideas out helps me!