zk/diary/2013-09-22-anxiety-followup.md

---
type: post
title: Anxiety - Follow-up
slug: anxiety-follow-up
date: 2013-09-22
---

The last few days have, honestly, been a bit of a rush, in terms of just how
real I feel, compared to the last few weeks, minus this afternoon.  I never do
well with shopping on the weekends.  I love shopping, really, and I also love
weekends, but these clots of people studiously ignoring each other exert a
pressure on me that is not within my power to ignore.

This continued on throughout the day, but given not only the medication I've
been on of late, but also the amount of attention I have been paying to myself
in this realm, I've been able to, if not totally control, though there was some
of that, at least play a spectator to the mechanisms and action of my anxiety as
it unfolds.

Everything moves in waves, and I like to think that this is because my body is
responding to a concentration by releasing a response.  The response comes on in
a wave, lasting perhaps five to ten minutes, before the effect starts to fade,
but the anxiety remains, and so another wave is released.  This has been a
consistent experience over the last few months, but I've noticed that, during an
actual panic attack, the sensation disappears, to be replaced by unrelenting
levels of whatever-it-is involved in the process.

I think that the waves have been interesting and notable of late because that's
when I, at the beginning, felt as though I were coming to some grand realization
that there was some sinister plan driving the people and things around me.  Of
late, however, this has been a slow ramp up when I am able to brace myself for a
sense of "Now I am starting to believe the things I worry about," and that is
far less terrifying than "Oh my God these things are really true!"

The same has been the case for the auditory aberrations for the last few weeks.
So absurd is it to hear someone say, as though they were simply notifying you of
which platform the train would be arriving at, that it is now time for you to
hang yourself.  As I mentioned, the aberrations also included various mocking
narrations as to what I was doing or thinking at the time, the most memorable
being, "Makyo the irrelevant fox," which...I don't know.  Way to go on
incorporating aspects of my life within furry, I guess?  And so I turned one of
these mocking mantras into a response, and those who follow me on Twitter or
know me in person know my fondness for the phrase 'get fucked' of late.

Even so, this is the type of thing that I feel rolling up against me, past me,
and then through me and on to wherever it is that anxiety goes.  Today, after
that ridiculous shopping trip, I felt anxiety dogging at my heels until dinner
time, and it was then that I had a moment to pause, let go, and study the
feeling of the slight delusion involved in the rush, as well as the welling up
of other people's voices.

It was intriguing, but, perhaps due to the meds, something I could watch from a
distance, so long as I put in the effort.  I can feel just why the last few
weeks were as scary as they were, but I was able to take a step back, and also
able to search back through the events of the day and feel just why it started,
and what it felt like when it did: a shrinking and bracing, a preparing, a sense
of "I had better watch out."  Before that, at some point, I expect that I will
find similar roots to a raise in levels of anxiety that I'd felt before.  Not
similar enough to catch in the filters that I had set up, but close.

I am not happy about being prescribed benzos again, but I think the last few
days have shown their utility, and I will use them with as much caution as I
can, until I can figure out how the fluoxetine figures in.  Either way, I'll
take it, and I'll be sure to keep on myself for finding a way to buttress myself
against this (ridiculous, stupid, nonsensical) onslaught.