Dancing Through Anxiety

For about the past year or so my life has been consumed by my anxiety. I'm not just talking about how I often felt anxious and experienced panic attacks, but even when I was calm I still had anxiety on the brain. My thoughts often included things like: Will this situation make me anxious? How can I prepare for possible anxiety? What's triggering this anxious reaction? What can I do during a panic attack to minimize it? What can I do daily to help keep my anxiety low? What's my exit plan? Can I handle this certain situation right now? Do I have my Xanax in case all my preparations fail? I could go on and on with the types of thoughts I often had and still have but we would be here forever. The main takeaway is that all I was thinking about was my anxiety. I think these thoughts were extremely important for me to have at the time, and to still have from time to time, because they have helped me to better understand myself, my anxiety, and how to live with it. With that b...

On Monday my parents and I adventured out to La Jolla, California to attend Jenny Lawson's (author of Furiously Happy and Let's Pretend This Never Happened) book signing for her new book, You Are Here, at Warwick's book store. This was not an easy task but it was so incredibly worth it and I wanted to share with you how it went. This past week has been a very positive week for me and therefore I've found myself wanting to push myself a little extra. I have been focusing on my anxiety related to being in a car and have thankfully been having some success at it. For about the last year I haven't been able to be in a car for longer than about thirty minutes before I would start panicking, but I have really been noticing how limiting that is and was determined to change it. After talking to my therapist about where my car anxiety seems to be stemming from I was able to attack the problem more head on. My parents and I have spent the last week going on driving...

During my most recent episode of depression I felt very lost in my purpose. I didn't feel important or that I really had a purpose in my everyday life. I wasn't going to school or working so why did I need to get out of bed? Why did I even need to get dressed? It wasn't until after I got out of this depression that I realized that I was working on me and that was important. It is important. Then I got sad when talking about this to my therapist because I didn't even feel that I was worthy enough to get up for. I mean how bad of a place do you have to be in to not think taking care of yourself is important? It was hard for me to face the truth that I didn't think I was worth getting out of bed for. In my mind if I wasn't doing something for someone else then my life didn't have purpose. Don't get me wrong I love helping people but one of the best ways to connect with someone else in my opinion is to truly understand yourself first. I had the answers on h...

Just a few thoughts from the mom side. You know those people who say, “if I had my life to live over again I wouldn’t change a thing”?   I just can’t begin to comprehend that.     Oh sure, I would never change the amazing man I married, my job working with kids, and the wonderful family and friends I’m surrounded by.   It’s the little things I’m always reviewing and reassessing in my head.   “Why did I say THAT?”   “Why didn’t I do it that other way?” I’m always feeling guilt (anxiety?) over past decisions and actions, ESPECIALLY when it comes to my children.   Every insecurity they suffer or illness they’ve faced must somehow be traced back to something I did or failed to do when they were younger, right? And when they’re suffering with things that are hard to pin down and fix right away?   Well, I should have caught it sooner.   I should have seen those little clues like I can always find in the movies before it progressed to this...

I just finished reading the book Furiously Happy: A Funny Book About Horrible Things by Jenny Lawson and I absolutely LOVED it! In this book Jenny Lawson writes about some of her daily experiences with her mental illness. I would highly recommend it for anyone going through anxiety and/or depression, and also anyone who wants to better understand what it's like living with anxiety and/or depression. Actually I just recommend this book to anyone because it's great! Not everyone's journey with mental illness is the same but I found myself relating to the author on so many levels. There were so many points in this book where I laughed out loud and there were just as many that made me feel less alone because I'm not the only person that can take the smallest things and have their brains take it off into the most crazy tangent. I don't want to go into too much detail because I don't want to spoil too much for those that are going to read it but I do have...

Looking back on my life knowing what I now know about anxiety, I can confidently say this is something that I have been struggling with my whole life. A lot of my anxiety prior to recently comes from a fear of judgment, a very low level of self-esteem, and a fear of very irrational situations I loved to make up in my mind. However it was always something I could kind of handle and get through on my own or with help from my parents until about two years ago.  In February of 2015 my grandpa passed away and to say I was devastated would be an understatement. He was my last living grandparent and I just couldn't grasp what life was going to be like without him. This wasn't my first time dealing with death, even death of a grandparent, as I've been to almost as many funerals as years I am old but, this was the first time that the grief became unbearable (something I wasn't aware of at the time). After his passing I cried, went through the funeral, and honestly thought...