Living With Anxiety

As most of you know I have been suffering from anxiety since college. It is unclear as to why I began feeling anxious but it is based around the lack of control I have in certain situations. Fifteen years later, my anxiety has been progressively getting worse due to adult life and parenting and other variables that arise that I cannot control.

The best way I can describe anxiety is this: it is waiting for the other shoe to drop.

What does that mean? It means that even though life could be seemingly perfect or there is a lot of fun and exciting things coming up, instead of being happy about it or looking forward to it, my mind makes “to-do” lists and “what could go wrong lists”. The “to-do” list is the list of things I have to do to eliminate any surprises and what I can do to get the best outcome of each situation. The “what could go wrong list” is the list that constantly grows in my head and keeps me up at night with all of the things that could sabotage those things I look forward to or the things I want to be excited about.

If you could fathom what anxiety like that feels like, then you can imagine how I was at the beginning of the year when I was faced with the following:

-New full-time job

-Husband’s new full-time job

-Leo going to school full days Monday, Wednesday and Friday

-Noah going to “school” Monday, Wednesday and Friday

-Dad and Grandma selling their home in another state

-Dad and Grandma buying their new home in my state

-Mom selling her house in another state

-Changing to organic, low card, low sugar diet

Of course all of these things are great things! I am grateful for all of these things. I am also excited. But because of my anxiety, this excitement is more cautious. I’m cautiously excited. I have “to do” lists for each thing happening and an even longer list of “what could go wrong” and that’s what I hate about anxiety. It takes me out of the happy moments.

I know that anxiety seems like an easy fix with some pills but I’ve never been good at taking anything on a regular basis and I would rather find an alternative way to fix this problem. One of the many things I have been told to do and that I have thought about doing for years is recording my days. Something about “venting” or seeing the bigger picture is suppose to rework your mind. Plus with how busy our family is getting, sitting down to type anything out or write anything is becoming more difficult. Hence, my lack of blogging.

Speaking of recording certain things is that my husband actually wanted to do that. He is starting a new position in a completely new field and he thought it would be fun to vlog about it. For him to say that means a lot because he is a private person. So one of these days I have to decide about it but like everything else, I think more of the negative outcomes that could happen rather than the bad.

So now that you are up-to-date on what’s what in my oh-so-exciting life, I think today we will record some stuff and see if we like it because I would love to see the positive in every day rather than be bombarded by all the negative and problematic issues. My kids are only young once and I really have a strong urge to remember it all and be in the moment.