It's been a while since I last wrote in here. That's because I was doing fine. I started off the semester with hardly a hitch. I did ask Brian to drive me in a couple of mornings early on, but soon I was walking to and from school on my own regularly. I was making it to every recitation and lab I had to teach, each class I was taking, and all of my various meetings. I was eating during that two hour gap I had between recitation and lab. I had fries during the hour break during comps and made it through the second part of the exam just fine. I was snacking at gatherings with friends and colleagues. It was all going so well. My therapist seems pleased with my progress. It's starting to look like we might not have to meet for a while, although I schedule another appointment just in case.
Then today happened. I don't know what triggered it exactly. Maybe it's just that my fascination with Pokemon has dwindled, so I wasn't able to distract myself like I have in the past. I was feeling just a tiny bit off, a little gassy, but otherwise fine. I was supposed to help proctor an exam. I made it into campus before my anxiety started causing trouble. Maybe I was a little worse off than I realized. Okay, well there's a bathroom on the first floor of Neville. I went in and sat in a stall and calmed down. I was going to be fine.
The time was starting to tick down. I left and started walking toward Bennett. There was a women's restroom on the second floor. I would just go grab the grading rubric from my mailbox and then go to the bathroom. No, I was going to go to the bathroom first. I'd worry about the rubric later.
I get up there, I get into one of the stalls, and I'm not doing so well at all. I'm hot and sweaty and my GI tract is not happy. I start shaking. I feel like I'm about to cry. I'm sure that if I walk down to that classroom, I'm going to lose it completely. So I text the professor I'm TAing for and ask him if he can find someone to cover for me. There are three minutes before I'm supposed to be there. I feel like a garbage human being.
The professor texts me back to let me know that they've got it covered. I go home. I sit down at my desk. I have a ton of responsibilities, like the meeting I'm supposed to be at at 1 to discuss next week's recitations. I decide I'm not going. I'm still in rough shape and I really need to pull things together before 4 so that I can run lab. I've got a paper to write, papers to grade (which I can't grade now because I never picked up the rubric). But the only thing I can do right now is write in here. I have to get it out. Maybe by putting it down on paper, I can keep it from consuming me.
I hate anxiety so much. What should have been an easy task, something well within my control, became and impossibility and I flaked out last minute. Maybe I should have tried anyway. I told myself, walking between Neville and Bennett, that the worst thing that could happen was I'd have an anxiety attack in the classroom. I thought it like it was no big deal. But when I was in that bathroom stall, it seemed like the worst thing in the world. I wanted nothing more than to be back at home, where I'd be safe. I had made so much progress, but now I was back to square one. Now I have to wonder, can I make it through lab? Am I going to have to revert back to Brian driving me everywhere, to eating nothing between obligations, reduced once again to the shadow of the person I should be?
I know that this will pass. I know that, in time, I'll get back to the way I was yesterday, but I also know that I'll relapse again and again and again. It's always there, waiting, looking for a way in. Today it found one. I just hope that I can get through lab, because I don't know what I'll do if I can't. (Note: I wanted to end with, "I hope that I'll survive," as an allusion to System of a Down's Lonely Day, but I didn't want to give folks the wrong idea.)
