anxiety

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As if I didn’t have enough expensive audio devices already.
At least I decided not to buy Solaris because they seemed a bit too big for my comfort to buy without testing them out first. And Polaris seemed like a better fit for my emotional needs than Andromeda.
Fun fact is that out of the pretty big selection of earpieces they come with, I can only comfortably use the very tiniest ones. I don’t know how I feel about that. Did I always have such tiny ears or are they closing up on their own gradually because there’s too much bullshit to deal with in the world.
Great sound and noise cancelling. (Without relying on weird technologies for noise cancelling.) Feels like having a concert hall suddenly appear in your brain and take up a lot of space. Which is a really good thing.

I’m also writing about earphones because there are too many emotional things I wish I could write about but can’t really.

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I’m usually too afraid to waste it to use it often, but:

The ultimate medicinal combination for a Sunday when you were hurting and feeling like shit:

  • curtains that shut out all the light from outside
  • softest clothes you can find
  • iced sweet late
  • sweets
  • painkillers
  • aroma oil in a diffuser
  • and the extended editions of Lord of the Rings
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Control?

Death Stranding (to listen to the music and look at environments mostly)?

Or replay Bloodborne?

Choices, choices… I may not be in quarantine, but I do have a 3 day weekend and a lot of anxiety to run away from.

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After taking a nice quiet 40-minute walk home in icy wind without a scarf, also getting lost a couple of times, I feel I won’t even need corona to get myself a nice two-week vacation being sick at home.

When it comes to doctors and therapists… I can’t help to feel like I’m screaming into a void. I’m constantly trying to send an SOS. Tell people that something is wrong. That walking around with daily headaches, chronic exhaustion, thinking ‘I’m so fucking tired…’ from morning to evening every single day without exception, feeling like my consciousness is slipping away multiple times during any day, having to force myself to move because I keep freezing in space, getting lost in time, forgetting what day it is, and especially what day of the week it is really not right… And yet not a single medical professional I’ve met has taken it seriously enough to actually look for WHY, instead of trying out a collection of medications, and then shrugging me off when I tell them none of those work.

Then, I face a situation where, having a very stressful and anxiety-filled week, I can’t even rely on any tranquillisers because I’m too groggy and scatterbrained as I it is, and I’m too afraid to add any chemicals (or not so chemicals) in the mix that can make me feel even less ‘present’ in the reality.

Instead of tranquillisers, today I have to rely on food, therapeutic activity of copying books by hand, and first seasons of Great British Bake Off.

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had an anxiety attack because I painted my nails.

Not even an anxiety inducing colour.

I don’t even guess anymore

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While I love to pretend like I couldn’t be happier about escaping the chaos, the buzz, the heat, and the air pressure, and all the ‘too much’ things about the overcrowded megalopolis city I live and work in, the first thing I notice when I reach one of the small towns I like to go hide in, is that I have very little ability left to deal with little things about living and being outside without the anonymity the state of being one speck of sand in the overflowing sandbox that is Tokyo provides.

I’m making this about more than it is.

I just can’t really handle the difference in amount of human attention you draw just by existing in a small town, and the way that difference feels on my skin when I say, enter a cafe.

And the fact that there are no easy chain coffee shops where I can pop in, quickly buy a few giant cups to go and haul them back to my room to read and write in peace nowhere in the vicinity is throwing me more than it should.

I’m too used to have a selection of various coffee shops on every corner… And now I need to gather courage before I can enter a new kind of place.

In fact, I wonder if I even can discover a place where I can get a coffee to go at all around here at all…

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My first reaction to having a breakdown in public is to pretend that I’m not having a breakdown and buy a hamburger take-out. Though usually cheeseburger. With pickles if I can help it.

Though since I can’t really eat lately, this time the hamburger is spending the night in the fridge. Crisscut fries and all.

Thinking about how many meals it will take me to eat it and will it survive long enough to be still edible when I can get to it is better than thinking about the fact that I have no support system at all and my breakdowns are getting worse.

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A year ago, I looked at my 10-15 book TBR pile and thought it was a lot.

(a year ago my head was in a place where I couldn’t really read anything but fluffy fanfiction on 2-3 specific fandoms by thousands)

As of this moment my TBR pile has reached at least 84 (I run out of space on the top of my shelf where I was storing them 20 books ago) … with more expected in the mail.

I need to cancel my book boxes…because as of now, the book selections they send end up all the way on the bottom of the list of things I want to read at the moment, and there’s really no sense in ordering them if this is the case.

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I don’t need my therapist to tell me (I can tell it her myself) that I’ve been reading so many silly, and not so silly, fantasy romance-ish books, which I would previously consider kind of uncharacteristic, because I use them to fight my deepening depression and anxiety on the very chemical level.

It also would be why I get so uncontrollably angry and disappointed when a book that I desperately needed to pull me up, has so much angst (because apparently too many people believe angst is fashionable, cool, and deep) it actually managed to bring me down.

Which is not really fair to the books I read, because having angst doesn’t make books bad objectively, but right now in my eyes, it kind of does.

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It’s a nasty kind of irony… that the worse I feel, the higher the probability that I won’t be able to handle calling in sick… and I can’t even convey how ridiculous it is, because not a soul on the other end would say anything bad about it. Or act in any way that would show that they didn’t like me taking days off. But the phone is one of my triggers and no matter how many times I make myself do it next time never gets easier. If anything it only gets worse. Probably because I have to make myself do it, but I don’t know how do you even get around that.

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Being completely unable to decide anything is one of the more annoying depression symptoms.

Sometimes it makes me have a panic attack in a store, unable to choose between a blue jacket and a green one, sometimes it makes me turn down a chance for a better work position, and sometimes I spend all day unable to figure out if I’m going to go to a concert by one of my favorite bands I brought ticket for 3 months ago, or give up and go home this evening.

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Me: Buys a tone of books that have ‘romance’ as one of the genres every time there’s an anxiety attack (seeking ‘comfort books’ like cheeseburgers).

Also me: Gets genuinely surprised and disappointed when plot/romance balance exceeds(on the romance side) 70/30 and characters can’t stop thinking about sex… (like I thought I was buying something else).

I also complain about cheesy covers and titles. But then keep buying fantasy, sci-fi, and historical romance books anyway. And stuff them into my brain like gauze into bleeding wound.

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It took me ridiculously long time to realize that I always have unexplainable bruises not because I’m clumsy and bump into things, but because I’m scratching myself to bruises.

I only wish I could stop doing it in front of people and at work.

Though if I wasn’t going to work I probably wouldn’t be scratching.