The thing with suffering from major anxiety and panic attacks like I have been for the past several days it’s hard to explain to people who don’t get it. I’ve been emailing with someone who does, and it’s so much easier talking to them than it is talking to someone who just doesn’t get it. Trying to explain you hardly understand yourself is really hard.
There are times where I just sit and sob for no reason. I’ll be in the car and I’ll just start crying. I can’t help it and I wish I could. People don’t get that. People don’t understand that I can’t control my anxious emotions and what comes with them, because trust me, no one wishes that I could more than me. I wish I could do certain things without panicking but I can’t. There are many times that I just collapse in fear of literally nothing but my own thoughts and that’s the hardest thing to explain.
It’s a struggle to leave the house or get up some mornings, yesterday for example. I’ve been finding peace in crafts, especially painting pottery. Yet, hanging out with other people is just not something I want to do, I don’t want to try and explain my sudden desire to leave. It’s hard to be with people and talk to people and be out and about when your mind is constantly looking for an exit plan. Whenever I leave my house I’m developing an exit plan as soon as I’m out the door. If I’m in a situation that involves sitting for any amount of time, I sit on the end, unless someone can approach me from the end, then I sit only one seat in. If I’m going out to eat, I have some sort of plan in case I have to leave quickly, and if it’s a rough day, I’m not going to order any food incase I have to leave and I don’t even have enough time to pay. How do you explain this to someone?
How do you explain that you don’t want to leave the house? How do you explain that before you go somewhere new you have to look it up so you know what to expect? How do you explain to a friend that you need to go home because you think you can’t breathe? These are the questions I ask myself as it gets worse and worse. It’s even harder when it comes to family sometimes because you see how it affects them. You see how they struggle trying to understand when you can’t even explain yourself. You can’t tell them what’s going on in your own mind and it’s frustrating. In my case I yell because I’m frustrated with myself, but yelling doesn’t help anyone. I yell because I don’t know what my mind is doing and it drives me crazy. I hate having no control over myself and that’s how I feel about 99% of the time. When you can’t explain how your mind works to the people you love the most it’s really frustrating for everyone.
There are times where it’s hard to do anything and I don’t know how to handle myself some days. On Friday it got so bad I just turned everything off. My phone went off, my laptop went off and that’s why I wasn’t around. Yesterday I didn’t want to write that’s why it was shit. It’s painful to get online when things make you anxious on social media. I don’t need to see tweets about stupid things (even though I tweet stupid things half the time) that’s not stuff I need to concern myself with when I spend half of my day crying.
I’m not sure why I felt the need to write all of this out. I just felt like I think people need to know that it’s hard to explain yourself when you don’t even understand what’s going on. My head is a mess of thoughts and I can’t distinguish things I should and shouldn’t be afraid of. It sucks but that’s who I am. I’m trying to cope and lately it’s not working. I’m just sharing it here so people understand why it’s hard for people like me to do a lot of things. I know that sounds dumb but I literally have no idea what’s going on in my head the majority of the time.
XOXO,
Mary.
Mary Rose Jaskiewicz 
Tell me what you want, what you really really want!