April 10/12

Evening to All,
   Wow! Look at me go! Almost two nights in a row here that I am blogging. Strange things are afoot at the Circle K! I trust that you are all doing well this evening and enjoying your families. Or at the very least, if you are in our household, you are enjoying that your kids are going to bed shortly! lol. Anyways, to begin with, we got our mortgage yesterday. What a totally stressful time that was. You have excellent credit, have never been delinquint on a bill, you have money put away in your savings account BUT, that does not matter. Your future is in the hands of some office guy/girl who will decide whether or not you can actually afford it. Thankfully though, we got it and now we just need our inspection to go through on Thursday and all will be good. Well, more gooder as my son says...
   So all of that being said, I was lucky enough to have another panic/anxiety attack yesterday morning. Part of it was my own fault though. I had to be out at a rig for 8am for a rig tear out. After I got there, I just wanted to get it all done. I wasn't in a hurry because there something else for me to do or somewhere else that I needed to be; I just wanted to finish it quickly. So I started to go hard on getting it tore out. About 45 minutes into the tear out, I realized that my heart rate had sped up quite a bit. Bad, bad idea. Well, at least realizing that it had sped up anyways. And of course, to be totally expected as I was going pretty hard plus I am incredibly out of shape.
   That of course lead to me starting to feel panic-ky. My anxiety levels started to climb up there on me and I suddenly was not having any fun. Here I am about an hour away from my comfort space, it is fairly warm outside, I have started to sweat like a pig and I am way over dressed not to mention it. I decided to take a 5 minute break in my truck and try to calm myself down. It started to work a little bit, but not fully to the extent that I would have liked it to. I also started to do some deep breathing to calm my mind that way but that did not work like I wanted it to either. So, I resorted to old faithful. I grabbed one of my elastics and snapped the crap out of my wrist until it was a deep pinky-red and my hand was vibrating from the pain.
   Man, that flipping hurts when I do that. But damn, does it ever work. My thinking totally got re-focused and my anxiety started to slip away. I went and finished tearing out the centrifuge and headed home. I think that I have mentioned it on here before, but I always try to find some small victory in my anxiety attacks. Yesterday's small victory was that I did not have to take an Ativan to calm myself down. Everyday that I do not have to take one to relax myself is a victory for me. Not because I am worried or concerned about getting addicted to them or anything like that, but it proves to me that I can use my toolbox to overcome my anxiety on a daily basis. I do not have to use medicines to overcome, I can use my mind to overcome my mind. Makes sense?
   The problem with having anxiety disorders or any other disorder is that your wiring in your brain is wired for full on flight or fight all of the time. It is very difficult to re-wire your thinking. The medications that one takes are to bridge that gap between the "synapses" in your brain. (Look at me using big words, eh?) They are mis-firing and need to be brought back together. Of course, medicine alone is not the cure all, end all. You need to use tools to make this work as well. Getting the proper amount of sleep or rest, exercising, eating right, attending meetings, writing a blog...whatever it may be. These need to be done on a daily basis. I am hoping that now that we have our mortgage that things will begin to settle down for me. I am still carrying around some anxiety, but as I have told Krystle, I feel that it is good anxiety. It is the anxiety of moving to a new home, taking on a new challenge, the excitement of moving to said home, having a way bigger bedroom and an ensuite.
   I am not feeling anxious in any sort of bad way, but it is still anxiety. It does leave the door open for me and allows my mind to feel weak. It allows me to feel weak. But as I have said before, I am not a quitter. I will not allow this anxiety to beat me. It will win a few rounds as will I. But in the end, I will come out on top. It is just a battle to get to the top, that is all.