Making peace with anxiety

I was always a worrier from as far back as I can remember. My first fear was the wind. I blame The Wizard of Oz.

As a pre-schooler I would wake up and run to the living room to look out the window at my ‘fear tree’, as I called it. It was a big tree across the road from my house and its sole purpose was to alert me of how afraid I was to be that day. Some days it was still as could be – those were the good days. Other days it only confirmed what I could already hear without even looking out the window: it was going to be a very bad day.

My fear didn’t just stop at wind. I was afraid of death, ghosts, spiders, chicken pox, bushfires and men with chin dimples. When I was eight I choked on a piece of meat and that set off almost 20 years of throat clearing and an obsession with my breathing.

As I grew older and more complex, so did my fears, so when I had my first panic attack five years ago at the age of 22, I wasn’t surprised, it was more a case of: “What took you so long?”

Of all places in the world, it came while I was at Disneyworld. I suddenly developed a terrifying and insatiable thirst, partnered with a racing heart and tingly feet, hands and mouth. At the time I thought nothing of it. My second came the next day while waiting for a ride. I buckled at the knees and had to be fed water by a stranger. The third lasted hours and arrived as I was waiting for a connecting flight home from LA airport, and the fourth came at a family barbecue. I ordered that I be rushed to hospital where I waited for hours to be seen before leaving and visiting a nearby medical centre. Here I was diagnosed with ‘panic disorder’ and prescribed Valium.

That was the day my whole life changed. I might have been riddled with a lifetime of various fears, but I had always been a happy, vibrant person who could see the good in most people and situations. This stripped me of those qualities.

I woke each morning with invisible hands around my throat. I would need someone to be with me at all times. I was terrified to even shower for fear of being alone with my thoughts, or that the heat of the water might increase my heart rate causing an attack. I couldn’t exercise, I couldn’t swallow, I couldn’t sleep, and for the first time in my life, I couldn’t find anything to be happy about.

I took a while off work but I was so scared of being alone that I returned. Traffic terrified me so I would leave early or come in late. After a few months my boss brought me into her office with a question: “How long do you think until you’ll be better?”

I had been asking myself the same thing.

I organised to see a counsellor. He gave me an interesting analogy.

“Pretend your life is a metaphorical party. You’ve invited everyone on your street and you’re having a great time but suddenly Bob turns up. Nobody likes him and you didn’t want him to come. Because you spend all night worrying about Bob being there, you miss all the fun. That Bob is your anxiety and you can’t let him ruin your fun at the party now, can you?”

I didn’t go back to see him after that. What he didn’t realise was that, at my party, Bob was the only one who showed up and he ate all the food, drank a bottle of tequila, pissed in my wardrobe and passed out on my couch. What a shit party.

As I write this now, I look back on these times and think about how important they are in my story. Not just this story I am writing right now, but also the story of who and where I am today. I wouldn’t change it even if I could.

Because of my anxiety I stopped taking drugs, I gave up cigarettes and caffeine and I stopped putting others before myself. Because of my anxiety I learned to recognise and rationalise my fears and I started investing my time and money into my health.

I look back on the past five years and I can actually see that every single thing in my life today has come to me because of this situation. Where I live, who I am with, where I work, what I eat, what I think and how I treat others have all been directly influenced by my journey to overcome what I once thought was a terrifying misfortune, but I now consider the best thing that ever happened to me.

Many people don’t hear their thoughts and their bodies telling them they need to change and then they end up with cancer or any other number of diseases that give them the ultimatum: change or die.

I am lucky. Like my own, my body’s voice is a loud one and it just so happens that if I don’t give it the positive thoughts or the right food or sleep that it needs, it floors me until it’s satisfied I’ve heard what it has to say and actioned its request.

I don’t try to overcome my anxiety anymore, as much as it can frustrate me at times. Now I love and embrace it. I was once told never to label it as ‘my anxiety’ because that gives it power, but I am happy to give it power. It’s only ever brought me amazing things.

I once read somewhere that the key to staying calm in each situation is to think to yourself: “In five years, will this matter?” If the answer is no, forget about it. What’s funny is, I always knew that this would matter; I just never thought it’d be for the better. 

Top 20 annoying things about movies and TV

I am lazy at the best of times and winter only adds to this sluggishness. Why would I want to go anywhere when it’s warm right here on my couch? Thus, I have put in long (not-so) hard hours to put this list together. 

The top 20 annoying things about movies and TV: 

1. When they sleep next to someone (especially when it’s a new lover) and wake up in the morning in the exact same spot under their arm. That doesn’t happen.
2. Two words: Morning breath. Doesn’t seem to exist in Hollywood.
3. Why does no one drive manual cars unless the movie is about cars?
4. When they brush their teeth it never gets foamy and they don't rinse.
5. The way when they have sex they just seem to finish at the same time. Then then the angle at which the guy rolls off seems like it would cause some sort of penis breakage.
6. Oh, and they keep their bra on while doing it. If they don’t want to show the world their boobs, fine, but just angle the camera differently or something because the bras come off. Has no one in LA land had sex before? Do they just have Barbie and Ken bits down there?
7. No one steers the steering wheel like that, you psychopath. 
8. The way they just let people run away after an argument. Like…they’re not gone. THEY’RE RIGHT THERE! You CAN catch them. (My poor flatmates have to deal with me practically screaming at the television all the time.)
9. At the end of a phone conversation they all seem to just hang up without saying goodbye. Or if they’ve made plans, they don’t say where they’ll meet or what time or anything like that. What the hell? 
10. Farts are only ever a part of the plot or helping to define a character. Sometimes farts just happen. I think movies need to explore that in a really relaxed way.
11. What’s with the way they shower? Is it just me or do people not shower like that? And thanks to scary movies, I am an adult who is too afraid to close my eyes in the shower now.
12. Turn the lights on when you get home, idiot. No one walks through the house when it’s dark like that. What are you, a cat? If only you could hear the tension building background music.
13. Spontaneous song and dance. I’ll believe a War of the Worlds-esque situation before I’ll ever believe that people will just start randomly singing a song and completing a choreographed dance at the same time. Musicals annoy me now that I’m older. I just can’t see past it.
14. Empty coffee cups. Nothing, I repeat, nothing annoys me more than when people are supposed to be drinking or carrying hot tea or coffee, yet the cups are quite clearly, even visibly, empty. Come on guys. Seriously. No…seriously. To quote Friday: “Use water. It won’t hurt.”
15. When the camera is shooting someone from the front, and then it cuts to their back - and so on, and so forth – and their hair is different from both angles. 
16. When you see the microphone at the top of the screen.
17. When people in high school look like they are around 30.
18. How big kids’ rooms are. No kid has ever had a room that big, ever. What’s with this little jerks and big rooms?
19. No-tongue kisses.
20. Sarah Jessica Parker's hands.

I'm back in the Bloggersphere!

In case you hadn’t had enough of my incessant status updates, sarcastic comments and annoying commentary, I’ve decided to become a more frequent blogger. Lucky you! There are lots of reasons for this and I’ll share them with you now:

1. I just really want to be that person who says: “This is SO going in my blog!”

2. Well, I’m a writer, so why not have something to show for it?

3. I’ve been told (countless times) that I talk too much at work (sorry people I work with), so now I'll redirect some of my meaningless chatter into typed word and immortalise my nonsense… forever.

4. I always lose pens meaning keeping a physical journal is not an option for me right now.

5. I do everything in the hope that I’ll someday be ‘discovered’. Surely someone with lots of money will stumble upon my blog and hail me the voice of my generation, catapulting me into stardom, or at least, like, want me to help them ghost write their autobiography.

So there you go. There are now even more places where you can laugh at my expense and if I win this freelance erotic short story writer deal on freelancer.com, I’ll be sure to post the link to that as well.

But seriously now. Not that I couldn’t/wouldn’t/shouldn’t/won’t/don’t write that sort of stuff, but how do people do it, publish it and then attempt to carry on professional/familial relationships of any kind?

Unlike most people in the world, I have not yet read Fifty Shades of Grey (I just feel that I can gain the same experience from five minutes on Redtube as I would for the hours that reading this book – not to mention its two sequels – requires).

Having said that, I have read excerpts and I can’t help but wonder (excuse my Carrie Bradshaw-esque rhetoric) - how the hell does this woman present this book to her parents? How does she show up at the office or meet up with friends without every single one of them wondering if she has copped it like her character? And her poor husband. He has just released his very own book and is currently on a worldwide media dash, yet surely each and every person who speaks to him will be wondering, if not flat out asking, if this sadomasochistic Christian Grey fella is inspired by his sickening bedroom misbehaviours. If not, what is his wife getting/not getting that is inspiring this sort of erotic offering to the world? (The more I type, the more I realise that I absolutely need to read this book.)

Not that there is anything wrong with writing erotic tails, I mean, 'sex sells' as the old adage goes, and of course the research would be enjoyable, but I’d really like to meet this person who made her fortune by trying and succeeding in avoiding using the word penis or cock too many times in a sentence, and who singlehandedly increased US infidelity rates by 50 per cent – according to statisticsoninfidelity.com, if you can even believe that such a website exists. Apparently this is the go-to book for women wanting to turn their vanilla sex lives into triple-choc-chip-with-a-tobasco-swirl-and-a-shot-of-tequila-on-the-side sex lives. Well I don’t know about you, but I always do my tequila shots near the bathroom in case they make me sick. You can take whatever you want from that.