Yesterday was a day of ups and downs. My mother gave me some leftover Xanax that she had (I've taken it before, so I knew I wouldn't have any ill effects) and my doctor called in Clonazepam. I took the Xanax and was mostly okay at work all day, then filled the prescription for the Clonazepam when I got out. I ran a few errands, including picking up some food and toys for the new kitten, and I thought, "I'm only doing nice things because I feel guilty about my horrible thoughts." Now I don't even know if I mean any nice thing that I do. I have no idea if my logical mind is even correct anymore. I met up with a friend last night for a couple of drinks and we had a good time, and for just a little while my fears were mostly quieted, but I couldn't be sure if that was because I had had a beer. I don't want the only time when I'm feeling okay to be when I've had a drink, because obviously that's not always going to be an option. Then I started freaking out that I'd turn into an alcoholic.

Again, I'm always worried about what I think could happen, not of anything I've actually done. I've always wanted to have children, but now I'm afraid that I'll turn into one of those mothers who drowns their baby in the bathtub. The thoughts are so strong sometimes that I'm so scared I'll lose control. I don't have children – I haven't even had an actual "boyfriend" in about five years. I feel like either other people can somehow sense how crazy I am, and they steer clear of me (talk about paranoid), or that "God" (I don't even know if I believe in that anymore) is somehow keeping it from happening because He knows I'd do something horrible. I can't ever seem to convince myself that I don't want to do anything like that, even though I'm sure the thoughts wouldn't scare me if I did. I ordered the OCD workbook online and started reading a bit of it yesterday, and it actually confirmed something that I'd always suspected – OCD takes your worst fears and turns them into obsessions. So anything you fear is pretty much the opposite of your personality. But logic is very hard to come by right now. My fear is so strong that it won't let anything else in. I don't understand my thoughts and feelings. They're so jumbled that I don't know what I actually think or feel. I don't know what is just the OCD talking and what really is me. I'm losing sight of who I am, and that is truly frightening.

I'm still very worried about becoming paranoid. As I mentioned in a previous blog entry, I was watching Scrubs yesterday, and there was a patient on it who suffered from a condition that made him believe that everyone around him had been replaced with impostors. Of course, it was supposed to be funny, and if my mind hadn't already been screaming with fear, I probably would have thought it was funny. Instead, though, I found something new to worry about. Since the whole world already seems so remote to me, it wasn't hard to imagine everyone in my life being an impostor. I have a very vivid imagination, so of course I started looking at everyone I knew, and for a little while I was thinking, what if they were impostors? What if I started believing that? And I actually looked at everyone I knew and thought, "No, this really is my mother, this is my boss, this is my coworker." I suppose if I truly believed it, and I were honestly paranoid, I wouldn't be willing to talk and interact with them the way I always do. I wouldn't care anymore if people thought I was crazy. But just having that fear in my head was enough to make me think that I honestly and truly was crazy. When I'm in the throes of my anxiety, I could probably convince myself that the sky is purple if I tried hard enough. Does anyone else ever go through this, or am I the exception to all the rules, the one who truly is crazy?

It's Christmas Eve. I'm scared, and I'm angry. Christmas used to be my favorite time of year. The anxiety has robbed me of that. All I want is to enjoy my time with my family and friends, and I'm not even sure I can do it. I feel so disconnected from life, and I don't even know if I believe that I'm part of the world anymore. I feel like I'm stuck in this hellish place in between sane and crazy, where I'm just lucid enough to understand that I am insane; in a place between reality and fantasy, where I'm still close enough to the world to see it and touch it, but not be in it anymore. Last night I had a very strong thought that I really wanted to just go crazy and get it over with. I thought, if I were truly crazy, I wouldn't know it. I wouldn't care. I could sit in my padded room in the mental hospital all day and make finger paintings and I would be perfectly content with my little world. I see "normal" people around me all the time and I'm so jealous. I think of myself as so much less than them because somehow they're able to go through difficult things in life and they don't fall apart. But not me. All I want in the world is to be normal. That's it. I wanted to be "extraordinary" once upon a time, but not anymore. I'd give anything to be the sort of person who can live in a cabin up in the mountains, to have all the outside stresses people face taken away, and to feel the sort of joy people feel just by waking up in the morning and feeling the sunlight hit their face. But after where I've been, I feel like I'm too scarred to ever have that happen.