Monday, October 8, 2012

The beginning of a beautiful death.

So, it has been over a year since I last posted. It has been quite the year. Let's get to it.

It is fall time now, one of my favorite seasons. I look out the window and see a skyline filled with trix cereal colored trees. I think to myself how beautiful it looks and the thought hits me, those leaves are dying. Even though they look breathtakingly beautiful, they are facing death. But it's a beautiful death. And then I thought of myself. My journey these last five years. And the only thought that kept running through my mind was it has been a beautiful death. A year ago, I would have never been able to say that. And even now, it's difficult at times to put the word beautiful on it but I'm starting to see the beauty...starting to.

One night, I was in the bedroom that I was staying in at my friend's home in Michigan when all of a sudden I began to have difficulty breathing. I started crying and feeling like I was about to die but couldn't understand why. I started to feel anxious and couldn't control this feeling that I was having. I literally was kneeling on the floor and couldn't move. I didn't know what to do. I couldn't put my finger on anything physically wrong but my heart was racing and it felt like something was very wrong. It was late at night, near midnight, so I didn't want to wake my friends but I felt like I was going to die! So, when all else fails, call your mother. And that is what I did. As soon as I told her what was wrong, she said, you're having an anxiety attack. She talked me through it and I was able to calm down. Little did I know that that would be the start of my hell on earth.

I believe I was having mini anxiety attacks before that but didn't recognize them as that. What would happen is something would pop into my mind-a cartoon character or something of that nature and I would be filled with anxiety for about 10 seconds and then it would pass and I would be fine. So, because they were so short, I didn't think much of them. Now they made more sense to me. After I experienced my first major anxiety attack, I had a few more major attacks. If you know anything about anxiety attacks, you know that they cripple you. I immediately start to feel like I'm going to faint. My heart starts racing, I start sweating and I can't function. I even threw up a couple times. Haha, I'll never forget the time I had one on my to school in Michigan on a sunny spring morning and I all of a sudden felt like I had to puke so I turned onto a quieter street, opened my door, puked on the ground, shut the door and drove to school and thought, this is not going to keep me from accomplishing my dream! I was proud of myself that morning. After about the third one, I said to myself - this is enough, I'm not going to allow this to take over my life. And what a long journey it has been to be able to sit here today and type this out. After I made this decision, I began to pay attention to what would bring on my anxiety - and I found that almost anything would bring it on....great. So, once I realized that, I started to dig deep inside and clean out the dark places of hurt and pain. Not exactly how I wanted to spend the last two and a half years of my life but something just kept ringing through my mind...there must be a reason for this - that was my hope that kept me hanging on. Because believe me, there were many a times where giving up sounded way too tempting. I just kept thinking, giving up would be easy but finding out what the roots of this anxiety is will make you stronger. So I took the shovel out and started digging...man, there were some deep roots in there that needed to be uprooted and burned. And the only one who could uproot & burn them was me because no one else understood.
Well, hello lonely road... .so nice to see you.

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