This is my first blog, sometimes I just fill the need to get everything out, not really for anyone to necessarily see, but for myself. I think blogging could be theraputic for me and I think I am going to start attempting to do it regularly. I'm going to start this off with a little background on my life with anxiety.

My entire life I have been what people called "high strung," even as a child I remember freaking out at the slightest things, having a really hard time dealing with change and living my life according to my "rules," at least that's what my dad called them. My anxiety didn't become life altering until my senior year of high school, I started skipping school, sleeping long hours, and gaining weight due to eating for comfort. Around this time I also began drinking on a regular basis, something a therapist would later diagnose as self-medicating. Following high school I recieved an academic scholarship to LSU. I made it four years at LSU, slowly attending class less and less, first losing my scholarship and eventually failing out of the engineering program all together. I stopped going to class because I began having panic attacks, being in large groups of people was just unbearable.  I also was drinking heavily anytime I was dragged to bar, party or football game, I even was issued a disturbing the peace ticket following a party one night.  I moved back in with my parents and went to see my first therapist. I was diagnosed with generalized anxiety and mild ocd. At this point I was not in school, not working, and sleeping all day. After seeing my therapist for about a month, she started me on an ADD medication that was also found to be useful in treating anxiety, it made me feel worse. She switched me to Celexa. I know some people have had problems with it, and like all meds it makes some people have that medicated feeling. I feel like it changed my life, I felt like I could function for the first time ever, I enrolled back in school and had two semester making the kind of grades that got me that scholarship six years ago.

I moved to New Orleans in June of this year to live with some friends and then moved into my own place in the city. I turned 24 and was taken off my parents insurance. I am no longer on my medication due to financial constraints. At first I was okay, now the panic attacks, the crying, the obsession with symmetry, the preference of staying in my apartment instead of going places with friends, the overeating. it's all coming back. I took a semester off, but am enrolling in school nexy semester. I feel alone in this now, no doctor, a family and friends who cannot relate, and I'm worried that the cycle is going to begin again.

It's something I know I am going to have to fight forever, I only hope I can continue to do so.