Anxiety strikes out of nowhere. You can be perfectly fine one minute and then the next minute be huddled up in a ball on your couch wishing this didn’t happen to you.

My friend once said that having anxiety about anxiety is the worst part and at first I thought, no fucking way you crazy lady! I thought back to my most recent anxiety attack which I didn’t have to think back too far since it is currently happening as I write this. I thought about the fear and panic. I thought about how crippling and debilitating they are. These feelings are the worst part, right? Or so I thought.

Since I have time to think because I want to get my mind off of my stupidly high heart rate right now, let’s dig deeper into this thought. When you are in the throws of an anxiety attack and you don’t think it can get worse, it does. The constant worry about having an attack could actually, in fact, be worse. When your daily thoughts from the moment you wake up are, “you will be fine today and you will take the day as slow or as fast as you need to” is the worst. To keep having to remind yourself that you are okay is frustrating and annoying. The questions of, where will you be when your anxiety attack happens, who will you be able to call to talk to, where will your kids be, how long will it last; those are the worst. It is the constant fear and panic from the moment you wake up to the moment you go to bed. Or it is that lovely point in time where you were sleeping and boom, not anymore because your friend anxiety wants to keep you up for the next four hours to play the giant mind fuck of emotions game. Cool. Game on.

To be quite honest, I am never really calm or never really enjoying any moment even when I am with my two favorite people in the world. Some anxious thought will distract me as H is reading a book and then I am forced to pretend to listen while trying to calm down and trying to hide it from her. When I am at events with people I care about and love deeply; my body is there with everyone but my mind isn’t. I’m checking my pulse to see if it is racing or slow because I honestly can’t tell anymore. I am waiting for another anxiety symptom to creep in even though I do all that I can to try and avoid it. I try and sit and do deep breaths to just regulate everything while I watch everyone else around me enjoying themselves. Then I get angry or sad because I just want to be like that, happy for a few minutes without this anxiety.

So now that I have been sitting here going through all of my symptoms while trying to write this blog, as fucking shitty as this is right now: the pounding heart rate, the shaking, the obsessive pulse checking, I agree with my friend. Living your life waiting for the next panic attack is the absolute worst.

If there is a silver lining to an anxiety attack, which in my case there is only one, it makes me so tired afterwards. I may not get a lot of sleep but after my body has been working overtime for however many hours they last (in today’s case it was three), I am so wiped. Heading to bed to get a little bit of sleep because most likely I will be up shortly because this is how my nights tend to go. Work tomorrow should go swimmingly.