2014 is going to be the year I finally become "zen," you guys.
For realsies, this time. I hope.
In September I entered my fifth year of Generalised Anxiety Disorder (GAD) which, for those of you "normal" folk out there, is a mental illness that affects the brains ability to distinguish imagined threat from real threat. For example, a normal person will watch an advert for Macmillan Cancer Research and think "Oh, isn't it sad that people go through that?" swiftly followed by "What time is Corrie on again?" I say normal. Anyone in their right mind wouldn't watch that steaming heap of dung if they were paid to do so... but I digress. An anxious person will watch the very same advert and think "OH LORD HELP ME, JESUS/BUDDHA/BATMAN, IT'S A SIGN FROM GOD THAT I'M DYING FROM THAT BACKACHE I HAVE EVEN THOUGH I LIFTED HEAVY BOXES YESTERDAY."
Another example is simply going for a walk of an evening. A normal person will see other people in the street and think nothing of it. An anxious person will mentally play out, in great detail, how that person will mug and/or murder them and that nobody will be around to help them and they will just lay there forever until they become a bloated corpse and vultures will travel from afar to peck their eyes out and nobody will turn up to their funeral because everyone secretly hates them.
It's after these thoughts that their brain decides to put their body into unnecessary fight or flight mode, leaving them feeling shaky, sick, dizzy, exhausted, short of breath and with a heart beat that feels like it's doing the dance moves from Whigfield's 'Saturday Night.' A normal person only goes into fight or flight mode when it's entirely necessary, e.g. when their car has a near miss with an 18-wheeler or when a lion has escaped from the zoo and broken into their house for a bite to eat. An anxious person feels like this 150% OF THE TIME. After a while the body starts to shut itself down and leaves us feeling like an empty, diseased husk, which only serves to make our fears worse, leaving us convinced that we're dying of a myriad of weird and wonderful illnesses, some of which haven't even been discovered yet.
I don't plan to finish my fifth year of this in the same state I'm in now. I have an attack plan of sorts that I'm hoping will kick GAD right in the gonads with impressive force.
Firstly, I will be having a man from the internet hypnotise me on a nightly basis. Now, when I say "hypnotise," I don't mean I'm going to sit up all night watching videos on YouTube of swirling vortexes or a man swinging a pocket watch back and forth. I have acquired an app by a guy named Max Kirsten (his last name is a girls name. I know. Grow up.) and plan on him being my new bed buddy. Basically I listen to him talk at me with whooshing background noises for 40 minutes a night in the hope that he'll rewire my scrambled egg of a brain box, and so far, I'm enjoying it. I wake up from my odd little trance feeling remarkably awesome, although last night he scared the ever loving life out of me. I relayed my experience to my dad this afternoon, and it went something like this:
"So I had a man from the internet hypnotise me last night."
"...I see!"
"Yeah basically I just listen to him talk for 40 minutes while I have a bit of a nap."
"And how was it?"
"Well, the best part about it was that part way through he started talking at me with two voices at once, and it came out of nowhere and I damn near shit myself, which made me jolt, cracked something in my lower back and now my leg doesn't hurt anymore... so that's something. Maybe I should write him a review saying 'I still feel anxious, but thanks for healing my sciatica."
Having only been listening to it for three days, I'm not overly concerned by the lack of progress, but that 40 minutes of peace where I don't consider all the things that could kill me is blissful.
The second part of my attack is to get my gutty works under control. I suffer with IBS which, while it's super fun (it isn't) it's also somewhat of a hindrance to pretty much every aspect of my life as it stands. Eating has become a chore, which I never thought I'd say, and a chore that makes me anxious no less. So, come January 1st I will be eliminating wheat, gluten and lactose. Shortly after this I'll probably kill myself due to abject misery from all of the bland, tasteless food I'll be eating. The only bright side to this is that all of the carrots I'll be ingesting will give me super awesome seeing-in-the-dark capabilities and I can start calling myself Nighteyes. I've already started designing my cape. Thankfully this plan is not a permanent thing. The point is to eliminate certain things for a while, and then reintroduce them one by one and see how quickly it takes for me to poop myself. So, that'll be fun.
The third and final part is to DRINK. WATER. I have a terrible habit of limiting my fluid intake to decaf tea and Coca Cola, and while that was fine at the spritely age of 15 and gave me no real problems, nowadays a morning without water leaves me feeling like the dried up, mummified uterus of a 600 year old nun.
So that is my plan. I'm sure I'll write a blog in a few weeks about how it's going, by which point I'll be doing it posthumously because of the whole tasteless misery-suicide thing.
We'll see.
Nighteyes, out.
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