I think I just did….for the first time in a while…I mean, not that I've exactly been having anxiety-free days lately, but…it has been a while since I had an honest-to-God panic attack…so, was it a panic attack and/or a bout of severe depression homing in on me for the first time in a while…if so, I need to blog about it RIGHT HERE, RIGHT NOW even though there were umpteen different other things I wanted to do right now instead of this, but if the f!@#king demons of panic and depression just started within the last few minutes to go full-throttle on me for the first time in a while, these monsters have to be exposed RIGHT HERE, RIGHT NOW, because if I tell about them here…it somehow is a way of ""fighting back" against them..not sure how exactly, but it is… not to mention the possibility that other people might read this and come to my aid and help me fight back against them, and if there is one thing that the cowardly menaces that anxiety attacks/depression don't like and that has any chance of putting any fear in THEM, it's when someone fights back against them–and especially when that someone has friends to help attack them; they don't like being ganged-up on…..

So…let's break it down: What was the feeling I just felt a few minutes ago?….I felt gripped by fear, paralyzed by it….I'm pretty certain I felt numbness in my toes and fingers…I stood there, just staring staright ahead, and, really, I do want to beleive that I'm overreacting, that it's all my imagination or whatever, but for a moment, I just stared straight and head and I'm fairly certain that that dreadful concoction of fear/anxiety/depression overtook me at once, and with it very brief dreadful visions of ending up in the hospital again(but that's not going to happen again; I've decided I'd rather die than end up back there), of pills by the side of my bed that I might need to swallow to get away from these relentless beasts once and for all….so all that just overtook me, and hey, might even still be there as I write this, but has kind of been pushed to the "backburner" for now as I write like a maniac here to desperately express exactly what I'm feeling( maybe reasearchers can use this blog one day to analyze what exactly goes through someone's head when this kind of thing happens, or some crazy S$%t like that)…and the things that had seemed to be fairlyt effective in working recently to counter any potential onslaught of anxiety/depression?…For that brief moment a few minutes ago, they didn't..what kind of things were those that I'm referring to?… Uh, I don't know, it's kind of fuzzy at the moment; I guess things like "laughing it off", having a sarcastoc, kind of, oh "go F–k off" kind of attitude about it, DBT skills(or what little of it I have been able to comprehend since I started taking the class), telling myself I'm over-reacting, that I'm worrying too much, that I'm being too hard on myself–a blend of all three of those…NONE OF THOSE worked a few minutes ago whereas they had before…

Okay, okay, now let's try to figure out what triggered it…WHAT IN THE BLOODY HELL TRIGGERED IT?!?…1.Overwhelmed at all the different things I am trying to do online here at the moment(about somehwere between 6-10 at the moment–I have ADD–or at least that's what the doctors told me one time in the past–too in addition to all this other annoying bs, so that makes it extra hard to focus to organize, if I can use that as an excuse)?...2.Frustration with myself that I am once again not going to meet my "goal" as far as time of departure here during this particular internet session and to finally (try to) go to sleep?—> which in effect leads to me wanting to be enraged with myself for even having this much time to be online in the first place, which means I don't have enough of a "life", unlike so many hard-working, responsible, sound-minded people I know, which brings back those old familiar feelings of wondering if all I really am at heart is a lazy underachiever, etc. and it all interweaves, and it ALL intertwines…3..fear that I'm not going to follow-through on my pledge to go back to school this fall? And that even if I do, no matter how f$%king important it is to me, no matter how hard I tell myself that I WILL try and do my damndest to pass whatever class/classes I'm going to take–even if it's that one I took four times and dropped out of four times because I was on the verge of flunking it each and every time because for the life of me, I could NOT get the material to sink in through my FREAKING SKULL, that I WON'T put in the necessary effort?.. That I'll allow the usual stupid distractions to do me in, that , which will lead to me flunking or dropping the class before that can happen, which will lead to feelings of guilt and shame for wasting the money of someone who is likely going to help me pay to go back to school, and which will also once again mean that I'm stuck on The Road to Nowhere in my life, and which could lead to more depression…Oh my Todd, why even BOTHER TRYING to go back to school AT ALL this fall, right??? What's the use? Why even bother trying to potentially better yourself in life, huh? No really, why go through all the aggravation of having worries on top of worries; just decide once and for all to not even try to go back to school–yeah, just stick with the status quo, sure, sure, that's it Todd, because, afterall, you have failed at other times in your life when you tried to make drastic changes, so it's inevitable it will happen again, right?…sSo yes, let fear of failure rule your world once again…see, so THAT all intertwines and interweaves in my endlessly racing and worrisome mind as well–see how one thought leads to another?!? See how it's all a domino effect? See how my F!@king brain never shuts up?!? God bless it–what does it take to just make my mind shut it's freaking yapper!?!?….4. It was something about the internet, the internet,,,what was it about the internet,…oh yeah, I think I remember…started to be overcome with feelings of guilt/shame/panic that I have let the internet occupy way too many hours of my life in the 14 years or so that I have been exposed to it, leading to a bad addction and misplaced priorities and more "underachieving" in its own way and maybe even lost jobs, etc..thinking, thinking, going back to first being exposed to it via WebTV in the last 90's to the present…did doing so lead to my decision to take a "sabbatical" from working out after having done so consistently for the better part of approx 10 years leading up to that?…Did doing so cause me to lose at least two of the seemingly umpteen different jobs I have had all the years I have been exposed to it?….

Okay, okay, let's TRY a quick counter to all of the above factors that might have conspired to trigger what might have been a spel(or what I damn well hope was merely a spell) of panic/depression….1. If you don't get to them all right now, you can try again later; if you don't get to all of them period, you know that you'll at least get to the ones that really matter–have faith in yourself that you will. 2. It's just not something that you can afford to beat yourself up over–you just simply can't. You are NOT an underachiever, you DO have a life–you have a HISTORY of showing that you are a hard-worker, and you WILL be again. In time, you will get settled, you will have less time to spend online, you will WANT to have less time to spend online, and the sleeping thing has more to do with insomnia issues/a bad pattern you unintentionally got into(ie it wasn't your freaking fault!) when you were battling a horrifically painful UTI in December and January that cost you hours of hours of sleep against your own will because you would be in such excruciating pain to the point you were unable to sleep; you were getting to bed at a fairly reasonable hour before all of that happened. Oh, and there's also the possible you-might-for-some-crazy-reason-be-afraid-of-the-dark(!)-at-least-when-it-comes-to-sleeping-factor that seems to have mysteriously emerged in the months since the UTI that…you…can't quite grasp what in the hell it is, but it apparently is…something. 3. You are going to do what you need to do to go back to school–you already HAVE gotten the proverbial ball rolling on that, and you're going to get a step closer to it on Friday–baby steps, baby steps—DON'T PANIC–you're doing what you need to do–and once you are back there in the fall, is there REALLY any doubt that you will give it anything short of your best?!? Did you not put your heart&soul into it ever since you were diagnosed with the ADD/learning disability after flunking out of school at Mizzou(that's short for Missouri University to those of you not in the know) some years back? Yes, you did..(well there was one semester where..maybe I didn't quite..wasn't there?…) eh, shut up–you did even that semester, and you'll put your heart &soul into it again. It means to much to you not to. HAVE FAITH. 4. Yeah, you spend too much time on the internet–yeah, it wouldn't hurt to cut down. But as bad as it is, it could be worse, and there are enough times when you are concientiously realizing it needs to be a non-priority.. Not going to go into details on that right now….no, your obsession with it didn't lead to your decision to take a sabbatical from working out–that decision was made before you ever became exposed to life on the WWW, and there were burnout and financial issues that played into that decision, with the latter issue being one that still affected you years later and still does. No, you didn't lose your jobs because of obsession with the internet. There were punctuality issues with the first one that you are thinking about, punctuality issues that you have strugggled with well before you ever knew the internet existed, punctuality issues that you generally got straightened out eventually there, but yes, resurfaced again, but DID HAPPEN to coincide with an increasingly growing genuine loathing and hatred for said job(which, in retrospect, was probably leading you down to a bout of depression at that particular time as well). As far as the second one? Remember, there were three shifts a week out of the five each week that you did not have access to the internet and you held up fine mentally during those shifts until The Depression of '09 hit; also, you did NOT have punctuality issues with this particular job. Try to look at it this way: when your depression was at its absolute worst from May' 09-Dec. 2011, you had virtually NO interest in going online except for the occasional heart-wrenching blog you would compose on myspace; look at your desire to be on here now to do more than just blog as an encouraging sign of recovery…..

Epilouge: Okay, okay, so I just tried to counter the factors that triggered the panic attack, but….at this moment, it's not helping.,…at this moment, I'm worried…at this moment, I'm "panicking" that I had what-I-think-might-have -been a panic attack, and at this moment, I'm distraught that I'm once again not going to meet my goal, and that I didn't get to all the things that I wanted to get to no matter how insignificant they might be, whereas this stuff didn't seem to bother me before….Was it a panic attack I had and a bout of depression that accompanied it? Was it just a minor relapse? A frightening figment of my imagination? I get down on my knees and pray with all of my might that it was just that… and not a god-forsaken sign of things to come…

ANd I get down on my knees and pray…we don't get fooled again.–The Who