Tag: anxiety

About Me

Overcoming Anxiety: My Journey to Healing

Autumn

It’s difficult to start.

I was so stressed out that I was vomiting and I ended up losing 20lbs in two months. I also spent a month in crisis counseling.

I also learned how to reach out and open up, to tell the people around me about what was going on. I discovered that people are a lot more supportive than I expected … and that the truth of my situation was a lot more visible than I had been led to believe.

And now here I am, in a better place. Quite literally, too. I have a great view of the sunset from my new home, and I’m in walking distance of nature — I like to take my dog out and have small chats with strangers.

I also still have anxiety when my doorbell sensor goes off. The occasional bad dream. Triggers that lead to quiet meltdowns … in a nutshell, PTSD.

Not exactly the life I dreamed of. I keep going round and round in my head, asking, “Can one person really cause this much damage?” It seems so unbelievable, that a person can hurt someone this much without it being a crime. Yet it happened. I know it every time I step on the scale and see how much weight I have yet to gain back.

The far more important question now is, “Where do I go from here?”

I often wonder if my fantasy life — the way I imagine myself getting up and spending the days if everything was perfect — is achievable or not. I have a clean house now, with white walls. Day-to-day life is running more smoothly than it has in a long, long time, and my thoughts are feeling more alive than they have in years. So maybe, just maybe, I can achieve my dreams.

I’m definitely not getting bombarded with criticism and demands the way I was not too long ago.

Let’s work on baby steps.

I want to be a writer. I’ve always wanted to be a writer. So let’s write. Casual. Small. No pressure sort of writing. Free writes. Story snippets. Totally random stuff that has nothing to do with anything.

Then one day, I’ll pick my bigger projects back up and start self-publishing novels again.

You ready?

I’m not sure if I am.

But I can’t spend my life always waiting for the next crisis to hit. I want to take charge and make my dreams come true.

About Me

How I’m Transforming Fear into Confidence As A YouTube Creator

Autumn

I’m serious when I whip out my notebook and start taking notes.

So … “how to get big on youtube” is a genre, and there are about a million channels all telling you how to … get big on youtube. Naturally, that inspires me to feel massively insecure about the fact that probably everyone is following the same advice, and I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to measure up to all the people who don’t have my issues (of which I have so many). There are a gazillion youtube videos out there, after all.

Meanwhile, I’m still working on my camera anxiety.

This is probably going to be a big block for me, but I’m determined to get over it. The thing is, I realized that since I’ve lived most of my life trying to be invisible, I’ve attracted people who wanted me to be invisible … and I don’t actually like it at all. What I really want is to feel seen and heard, which also means that I have to get over feeling so uncomfortable with being seen and heard. I mean this for my personal relationships just as much for my current career venture.

To get a little bit personal here, I recently played Josh Groban’s song, “Hidden Away” while belting it out with my terrible vocal control, when in the middle of it I broke down sobbing too hard to keep singing.


If no one sees you then nobody knows
And all these words you were meant to say
Held in silence day after day
Words of kindness that our poor hearts crave
Please don’t keep them
Hidden away

Josh Groban – Hidden Away

I’m teary eyed right now just reading over it again.

I don’t think I was meant to be silent and invisible in my life. I love words too much, and I care too much about leaving a positive impact on the world. So, no matter how hard and scary it is for me to stand up and be seen, I want to do it. I want to overcome my fear. Because I want to help others and leave the world a better place, and I can’t do that in hiding. Do you want to know something that I’ve learned? Strong emotions, including fear, are easier to turn into forward momentum than having weak emotions. So it’s a good thing that I’ve got fear in droves — tons and tons of it, about practically everything.

Getting back to the original topic …

The deeper I dive into this youtube idea, the more it feels like I need to do this for the sake of my future. Because, as it’s been said, “If you do what you did, then you’ll get what you got,” and I really don’t want to repeat my past. If I can get over my camera anxiety, then I can start a new chapter in my life where I’ll be more confident in myself and make better choices. I also won’t attract people who expect me to sit in the shadows while they hog the spotlight.

So, the photo above is of some of the notes that I’ve been taking about managing a youtube channel — specifically the thumbnails. Not every popular channel follows those rules, but they’re a good place to start, especially considering that you only get about one second to capture someone’s attention. Then, after they clicked that thumbnail to see what the heck, the first ten seconds of the video are where you establish whether or not they’re going to stick around and watch it. Kind of insane, right? One second to catch someone’s eye, and ten seconds to make them stay — yet that’s how fast our brains work. In a way, it takes the pressure off the rest of the content, because as long as I don’t plummet downhill with the quality, I don’t have to maintain that level of engagement for the entire video.

I’m starting to feel excited about learning marketing. I wouldn’t go and claim that I feel excited for it every moment of every day — I still have plenty of periods of feeling soul-crushing defeat about how everything went so so wrong — but I can get behind the idea of spending 2025 learning me some new skills and re-making my life into something better. Provided I don’t end up homeless.

I even went through the trouble of digging out my fancy camera, that I bought all the way back in 2016 so that I could get high-quality photos and videos of the kids. Only then I became too anxious about accidentally breaking it or something, so I didn’t use it that much, and it ended up sitting in the case gathering dust. LOL. Now it can be repurposed for youtube, I guess.

So … let’s see where this goes.

What about you? What are some strong emotions that you’ve had, that you’ve used to change something for the better in your life? I’m really curious, because I think that we can help cheer each other on with positive words; we all probably need more than we’re getting. 😊

Stories, The Scion Suit

TSS – Nightmares

Autumn

Is there anything more exciting than a story passage presented completely out of context?

Hee hee, enjoy.

Carol began to gasp and moan in her sleep, whimpering the words, “Don’t … take me …” before Lambert managed to shake her awake. She was thoroughly drenched in a cold sweat, and still confused as she frantically asked, “Where’s Henry? I can’t find him!”

“He’s there, right next to you in his crib,” Lambert answered soothingly, and waited for her to pick up their four-month-old son before pulling her into an embrace. “Everything’s fine. You had another nightmare.”

She was quiet, and he suspected that she had dozed off again. He kept her pressed against his chest, however, feeling her clammy skin underneath his hands as his mouth formed a straight line. He had hoped that with time and emotional support, Carol’s struggle with postpartum anxiety would resolve on its own, but instead it was growing worse.

The baby woke and began to root, so Carol shifted to breastfeed. “Sorry about this,” she murmured, completely awake. “Could you get out another pajama shirt for me?”

He nodded, but remained still. “Carol …” he began, and she stiffened from his tone. “It might be time for you to go see a professional.”

“I don’t want to,” she answered slowly.

“You’ve been having nightmares every night for awhile now. It might be best to get you on medication to help you through this.”

“I have you.”

Lambert felt Carol move to curl up around their baby, and for a moment he debated whether or not he should drop the subject all together. He got up to rummage through the dresser in the darkness, found one of the over-sized shirts that she liked to sleep in, and handed it to her.

“Cognitive therapy isn’t making any difference,” he said quietly. She remained silent, so, he pressed on, “You’re a good mother, and it’s natural to have some feelings of anxiety with a new baby …” he began, and the therapist’s intonation that he had slipped into grated against his own ears.

“Would you mind holding Henry while I change?” Carol interrupted, her voice slightly higher pitched than usual. She had recently discovered that he couldn’t argue with her when she spoke that way, and utilized it whenever she wanted him to back down. It was enough to make him cave and give up on his line of reasoning.

Lambert didn’t know what to do. For the most part, Carol was still Carol. They went fishing together on the weekends, and he came home every evening to dinner and a clean house. As long as she had their baby pressed against her in the carrier or in her arms, it was as if nothing had changed. The car trips were almost endearing, with the way she frequently checked the mirrors to ensure that Henry was still breathing, and needed the occasional reassurance that he wasn’t going to be stung by a bee or bitten by a spider while he was in his car seat.

But the nights were different.

Lambert had purchased a special crib with one side that clamped onto their mattress to help her feel closer to Henry, but it couldn’t overcome the mental separation of sleep. There were times when she had startled awake with the baby in her arms, crying about how she couldn’t find him. Recently, she had begun to fight against the fear of being taken away herself, but once awake she always claimed that she could not remember what she had been dreaming.

They had talked. And talked. And talked. Lambert had accepted the military relegating him into a paper-pusher role after the war had ended, because it enabled him to be home every night, and he didn’t dare leave Carol to sleep alone. He had even quit drinking for the most part, so he could maintain his vigilance and be there for her the moment the nightmares began.

After four months, he had reached the end of what he could handle on his own. Carol needed something more than talk to help her, and as a defunct psychiatrist, he was no longer qualified to provide it.

About Me

Facebook

Autumn

[////]=I quit Facebook completely almost two years ago.

(^ Baby help. I didn’t notice it until several hours after posting.)

I created my account as a teenager because it was the cool thing to do (back when you needed to have a school e-mail address to sign up), then over the years that followed it  mutated into a sense of obligation. That whole, “I need to keep people up-to-date on my life,” thang.

Facebook was never a big source of dopamine addiction for me. I was never viewed as being trendy, so instead I mostly felt the anxiety of not being ‘like’-able enough for anyone. But, you know, I was obligated, even though I grew to hate it.

Then the summer of 2017 happened. As I contemplated posting about personal events, I thought about how stupid it was to feel enslaved to people who were never going to see or talk to me again. And why was I keeping up on their lives anyway? They never cared about me before Facebook came along. You know what? Screw them all.

I haven’t looked at Facebook since.

I also highly recommend quitting social media to everyone. Doing so had a surprisingly beneficial effect on my life, even though I never considered myself much of a user in the first place.

So…

This year I published a book on Kindle. I’m not terribly concerned about making money off of my writing, I just want to connect with readers (you know, the peeps who appreciate the way I think). Since I have four small children, I don’t want to do anything that intrudes on my life too much — motherhood comes first above all else for me, and kids are time-consuming. I confess that the thought of Facebook has crossed my mind as something easy.

But I swore never again, and I meant it.

Not to mention, I’m not going to find readers on Facebook, considering that I, as myself, did not enjoy any sort of popularity on the site. Not the right crowd.

I haven’t the foggiest if I have any chance of finding anyone with my self-imposed restrictions, but hey, I’ve never been known to be conventional. The important part is, I still have time for homeschooling and baking cornbread.

At the end of my own life story, I want to say that I kept myself.