Life is no fun when your own body turns on you. When your brain just won't cooperate. I think the last anxiety attack I had was when I was in London two years ago. The last one before last night's, that is. I actually started believing I was in the clear. Maybe I don't really have an anxiety disorder anymore, after all, I thought. Yeah. Let's mark a giant red "X" for wrong on that one.

I have often wondered whether I should bother sharing stuff about anxiety. Won't that just mean that I'm identifying as an anxiety sufferer? Won't that just mean I'm attaching myself to it, instead of distancing myself? Shouldn't I just let it all go, attempt to be "normal," and hope to therefore eventually become "normal"?

More and more, I don't think that's the case. More and more, I think that if I just talk about it, instead of hiding from it, maybe I can allow it to just be real. And by doing so, maybe I can feel like I'm not a big freak, I'm not "crazy," I just have this disorder that makes me feel weird sometimes, and it's something I'm usually pretty good at managing.

Today, I feel extra sensitive, and extra scared, like I'm teetering on a very thin balance beam, unsure of where my next step will be. What will set off my adrenaline glands again? Where will I be? When will it be? I want to hide, but as I learned in my Abnormal Psych class this quarter, doing so would only foster a new condition of agoraphobia. I'm not going to tuck myself in my home for safety and avoid the world. Because if I let myself give into that, I can see how it would be a very hard thing to break away from.

So I'm here at school, in a weird sort of daze, hoping and mostly trusting that I'll be all right today.

Yesterday was another story. Yesterday, I got pissed off and gave a retort to an obnoxious comment. Then I obsessed over it, and replayed it in my mind five hundred million times. Because the disorder I have is Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, and the part that I struggle with most these days is the obsessive part. The compulsive part has its place, but it's far more manageable.

I had come to terms with it, before I shared the situation with a friend, who brought up another point I hadn't though of, and my brain rewinded the tape of the incident and hit "repeat mode" and "play" at the same time, and *I* did not have the remote.

And when I realized that meditating wasn't working, that I couldn't stop my thoughts, or the song that was annoyingly stuck in my head, I started panicking, and the adrenaline set in, and that's all it took. My brain wasn't listening to me, my body wasn't listening to me, and all I could do was wait. I laid down in bed, pulled the covers over my head, and felt jittery and restless, like I really wanted to go run a mile, but at the same time, I was afraid to move. And since deep breathing wasn't helping, the only thing that gave me any kind of release were the tears I let flow from me.

I felt like I was stuck in my body, this thing that had its own agenda, and I was forced to bear witness to it, with no control whatsoever. And I honestly can't really imagine a scarier feeling. Except possibly a panic attack, which leaves me wondering if this experience qualifies. I'm going through my textbook definitions in my head of what I've learned this quarter, thinking, well my heart was going fast, but was it racing? I was upset, but I wasn't sweating and I didn't feel like I was having a heart attack. So, anxiety attack or panic attack? I think it's the former, but all that really matters to me now is that it sucked.

The only thing that makes me feel better about it all is trying to understand why it happened so that I can prevent it in the future. And I think I know why. In London, and in the past weeks, I've been eating sugar. Mostly chocolate, which contains caffeine. And I'd given those up for a long time. I need to do so again. Also, I haven't been exercising or meditating lately, two things I was doing regularly for a while there. I need to start that up again, as well. I forget that they're so crucial to my mental health, because when I do them, I feel so okay that the notions of, "Well, I don't really have a problem with anxiety," come in. And I'm here to tell myself that I do, and that that's okay, because I can manage it. And if you have anxiety, you can, too. Our ways of dealing might be different, but there are ways of dealing for everyone. I'm just figuring out what works best for me.

In class, my professor said mental illness affects us all, that it's a human problem, not an abstract one. That we shouldn't ignore it or stigmatize it, making people out to be "weirdos" or "crazy" because of it. That it's a problem with the brain, much like people have a problem with their liver or their lungs.

All of those things made me feel a lot better. Because he's talking about me. And maybe by revealing this, I can help humanize the face of this disorder, make it real for others, help in the effort of creating awareness that people deal with these things regularly, and that it's okay, and that it helps to just be understanding about it, if your friend or family or whoever deals with it, too. Because understanding and support is all anyone really wants, anyway.

Of course, make no mistake, writing this entry is by no means an entirely selfless act. I'm also writing to convince myself that it's nothing to be embarrassed about or ashamed of, that it's okay to accept and process and deal with. Because... I have to. And I think I'll just go ahead and accept that instead of trying to pretend or ignore it all away.

I'll take it one day at a time. That's all any of us can do, right?