Not A Good Day...So Far

I am having one of those days that I feel few people can understand except others with anxiety. I have just been having a rough time recently dealing with myself.

Sometimes I see my situation in life very clearly and I am just overwhelmed. The reality of not being able to hold down a job. The jobs that I can get are below me and I don't mean that in a mean way. I just mean I was not able to finish college. I think I have about a year of college maybe less. I have gone 3 times.

I know there is online schools but I don't know if I have the discipline to do that on my own. I also have a feeling that employers still look down some what at an online degree than someone who actually went to college. Anyway the thing is what I really wanted to be was a medical doctor. It is not like you can take that online. The blood phobia put a stop to that idea very quickly not to mention the anxiety in general.

My second choice was genetic engineer or virologist..I am pretty sure all would have to deal with blood. Anyway so I spend my days like I am actually in school. My boyfriend goes to work and I go right to youtube and to books. You would be surprised how many lectures are on youtube under any subject. My favorite being health if you have not figured that out about me yet. But I do like a well rounded education so I watch videos about all different things and read books on many topics. I might actually have more education than some people coming out of college. Minus my spelling and grammar.

Anyway today has been not so great because I was reminded by my brain that I will someday die. I think about how big the universe is and how small I actually am. I do realize that we will all die someday however that is not a comfort to me either. Sometimes I worry their is no point. I could be super rich and/or enjoy myself or poor or miserable. In the end does it matter? A 1000 years from now will anyone remember me anyway?

Many times people say "You are only here once make the best of it". And I try too..I am not walking around with my head down. I laugh. I am not stuck in the corner of a room hiding. In fact if you saw me on the street you would not even know how much I am suffering inside. I am sure that is true for many of you. The part about "your only here once.." I say thank God. If there is such a thing as reincarnation and I have a choice about returning to Earth..the choice will be not too. That being said I still don't want to die and will do everything in my power to stay here on Earth even if I am many times miserable inside.

Sometimes people try to comfort me with talking about an afterlife. To me it is a nice idea. It might be there. It might not be. Who can say for sure? I am hoping their is one though unless it is worse than here then I hope their isn't. Did you ever notice the afterlife is painted as a nice place? What if when we all died we had to do hard labor for all eternity and Earth was the easy place!! hehe

This is a very lonely illness. A lot of silent suffering. By far not the worst but not the easiest either. Sometimes in the middle of my worst panic attack I wish I could touch my doctor or therapist and transfer it to them just that one time. If they could just feel it and feel how I feel inside day in and day out all at once I think it would bring them to their knees. I imagine it would be very overwhelming for them as it was for all of us the first time. I wouldn't wish this on anyone not even someone I hate but I do which they could feel it sometimes. It might help them understand more. It might also make them see how strong we are. I might seem weak, I might cry or faint from blood but anyone who lives with this day in and out is strong.

You lose a lot with this illness. Friends, family and relationships. Not everyone leaves but even the ones who stay don't really understand. I would imagine from the outside we must seem selfish, manipulative, lazy, stubborn and a list of other negative traits.

Sometimes you get people in your life that may not even be someone you would want in your life if you were "well" but they hang around and you don't scare them off with your issues so you keep them anyway.

I am sure I have said this before but I can be in a room full of people and be completely alone. I am searching for something all the time in my head. I am not even completely sure what it is. Peace maybe. It could be why I educate myself so much. I am looking for an answer or some comfort.

I doubt my ability to get proper medical treatment. If I had cancer I don't know if I could go threw the treatments unless I was drugged out of my mind the whole time. I also doubt my ability to actually help someone who is injured. I have had a therapist in the past tell me that I would. However when I was living in FL. I was walking with my boyfriend to a gas station and this old man taking out the trash tripped and fell on the concrete. I saw him fall and kept walking because I was embarrassed for him and I was scared there would be blood an did not want to look. My boyfriend however went over and helped him up. Again to an outside viewer what an asshole I must have looked like. So I am not so sure if there was a bad car wreck how much help I would be. That example is why I still have doubts about me addressing any future medical problem.

Chris In Canada

Chris I don't know if you read my blog still. We wrote to each other every day online for months and I felt that we had become good friends. Then one day you just delete your profile and was gone. Not even an email telling me why.

I knew your dog was ill and I thought maybe he died so you stopped writing because you were upset so I waited for you to come back but its been almost two months now. You also told me once that if you ever just disappeared from online you were dead. However your profile was deleted so I assume you aren't dead unless you killed yourself.

I have had some hard times since you disappeared on me and going though a very rough time right now. I miss you and wish you would come back.

Moods

My moods change so fast sometimes. I find it exhausting. It is not even week to week or even day to day. Sometimes my moods change several times during the day. My moods (thoughts) tend to be very black or white thinking which I try to avoid but so far is it is how I seem to think.

My thoughts range from "everything will be ok." to "It's all falling apart" This can be in a span of hours.

I have a very hard time dealing with several issues in my life outside of all the anxiety and phobias. I am having a very hard time with aging. Some of that fear comes from vanity but a large part of it comes from my fear of dying (and dying young).

Being dead is not what scares me because after I am dead its done I will already be dead. If there is an afterlife I will know at that point and if there isn't...well then I won't know I ever existed. Everything I have ever said and did, the people I met that both loved me, hated me, were kind to me or said hurtful things will all be erased by the sands of time. I can't worry if there is no afterlife because I will just be dead.

If there is an afterlife I would hope I would then see the big picture, something that no other human could explain to me or tell me..all the love in the world directed at me in this life and all the hurt people have caused me would hopefully be explained by seeing that big picture. Either way I diverted. It is not being dead that scares me...dying does.

I don't want to die and since a very small child I have thought of death often. More than most I would assume. My childhood prayers went something like this.."Dear God, Please look after my parents and friends and everyone I love. Let Big Toad and Baby Toad live for a very long time (I use to have pet toads and that was their names) and please make sure I live to be at least 107 years old before I die." Even back then the fear of dying young was set in place.

The fear of dying young is right up there with having something happen to me which I can't fix. Lets say I lose an arm or a leg. Can I live my life without it? Yes of course I can. Well then why do I care so much? Well because I know how the world is. Some people would be out right rude about it. Sure those people would be rare because most of us would never say anything rude. I am more concerned with the deeper thoughts people have.

Lets say I am a decent looking guy, I make you laugh, I am intelligent, I sent you flowers to your job and over all care deeply about your well being...sound like a nice guy right? Many of you would date that man or woman. Now I want you to imagine a man or woman with no legs comes up to you and asks you out on a date. They are all of those things listed above. A large percentage of you will never find out how wonderful they are because you can't get past the no legs. Now imagine sex with that legless person. Mental blocks come up in most peoples minds.

So why do I care what others think of me if that happened to me? Mostly I don't care. What I do care is that I become defined before I speak. I care about the mental pain of knowing how people think. Because I know right now this world is very very materialistic. I care because I can't fix the problem. I can't grow new legs. I can't really put this into the right words so I will stop. Side note: many of our soldiers are coming home missing limbs. I don't agree with this war but I do think about the soldiers that are hurt or killed by it. I see their strength on TV and getting on with their life after being injured. Don't think for a second they are not having dark moments in their mind. Moments like despair, depression, fear. That is what concerns me more.

It does matter that while you are watching a movie that someone else is in a hospital dying alone. I matters that while you are eating dinner at a restaurant and the service isn't fast enough or food not warm enough that someone else is having their first day of chemo or a dead child is being held in his mothers arms because there was not enough food. It matters and sometimes I think I feel it all way too much.

You know when I was in the hospital back in 2000 after my lung surgery I could see out the window. I looked at all the people walking by on the sidewalk down below. They did not know I was in there looking out at them nor the fact that there was an old man next to me who would scream at night when they had to come in and drain his lungs because of fluid build up. The people down below didn't even know I existed. I think that was my first glimpse of reality.

We hide our sick and the truth is most people just don't care enough to do anything about it. As a people we ignore it. After all its not nice thoughts to have. It is more fun to rush to the store to get some item before it sells out or before the sale ends.

Those of us who are sick or have been sick and scared. Some better off than others know exactly what I mean. Compassion has been removed. There is a tiny amount left in this world. You only have to stop and think to really experience the horror of it all. Why do you think they changed the word "personnel" to "human resources"? Because that is what you have become...a resource.

You know everyone has a different version of you in their mind. You mother thinks one way of you, a friend another. Who has the real version of you? In my case I already know how my death would be dealt with. My parents would say "It was for the best he suffered with so much anxiety." (That is what my life would be reduced to) as for my friends in real life god only knows. I have never had the sort of friends I could talk to about my true self the way I type to you all on here. I don't even have real life friends anymore. I got rid of them because of that very reason. I hope I do find a friend soon I can be open with. There are things about me that I would never write on this blog. But only because it could hurt the people I know should they ever find this.

I don't want to be erased. I matter. Yet I am at the mercy of the universe. I am scared to death of making a wrong choice and becoming injured or dead. This is why I fear side effects of medication so much. People die all the time from pills or from vaccines.

When a therapist says to me "You could also die in a car crash just as easily as the pill causing your death or injury." This is true but in my mind I just upped the chance. Now I am taking this pill and I drive.

I am sure nothing I just wrote makes sense to very many people. I went all over the place in this blog. I am just going to proof read it and post. Maybe someone will see some of what I am saying because I have a very hard time expressing these feeling and finding the right words to convey them.

The 100 Day Confessional

I have been thinking about posting this for sometime but I have gone back and forth on if I wanted to only because it was so personal. However as time has gone on I have been writing more and more personal things about myself in this blog so I figured I might as well.

A little background on this. I had just got done watching a video called "The Secret" as some of you may have seen or heard about on Oprah. On Youtube there was a group of people doing something called "The 100 day challenge" where they were trying to see how they could change their life in 100 days using "The Secret".

It seemed fun and I never completed it. For me it turned more into a confessional. I did not even use my face on the videos just a picture of Earth and my voice.

Each video is about 9 mins long and there are 9 videos. You will hear me talking about what day of "The 100 day challenge" I am on at the beginning of each video.

Truth be told all 9 videos were recorded in a single night and I just broke them down into different days. I recorded it a little over a year ago and was drinking several Coors Light beers while I was recording it.

I tried to stop drinking at that time but that did not end up happening till Nov. 2007.

This may take some time to get through but maybe it will be useful or helpful to someone who listens.

Off To The Club We Go

If there was ever a point were I completely lost my mind it was in the fall of 2003. For some reason I started to completely not care about life and started to wonder about the social norms we live by. All this thinking was of course at the time mixed with heavy drinking.

My mornings would start by me waking up on a blow up bed in my mouse infested apartment and taking a walk down the street to the corner store to buy six 24 oz. cans of Coors Light. Usually while walking there my heart would be pounding so hard and a form of paranoia would be setting in from the heavy drinking I had done the day before. Alcohol would calm my anxiety but payback was a bitch. When the alcohol wore off the anxiety would be 10 times worse than it normally was had I not been drinking. While walking to the store I was sure if someone ran up to me that I knew and started talking to me I would jump out of my skin or throw up or both.

I would get in the store and I remember at times holding my breath. I wanted to get out of there before I had to breath again. The length of time in the store felt overwhelming. When I have high anxiety there is something about being in a store that drives me mad. The lights, colors, sound of the running fan by the register and people moving around me to get to the item they want. Thankfully it was a small store and the beer was near the front door and register. Since I bought beer there everyday the people that worked there knew me and seemed not to judge that I was buying beer at 830am in the morning. Though I am sure they knew I had an issue with drinking I was usually greeted with "How are you doing boss?" or one time "We were almost out of Coors boss but I knew you would be coming in so I put six in the back for you boss. I will get them for you."

Once I got back to my apartment I would start to drink. After the first 24 oz. I must admit I felt a lot better. I then would go online to gay.com and start to chat with people or look for a possible hookup to come over later.

You have to understand at the time the only things in this one bedroom apartment besides the mice were a blow up bed, a small 13 inch TV that set in the corner on the floor, an alarm clock, and my computer which set on a card table. The roof leaked, there was not always running water, no oven just my microwave and a half working refrigerator that I would not keep food in too long. At that time however I really did not need to keep food there because there was a Chinese restaurant two doors down and other such food places. I lived on beer, Chinese and pizza for the most part.

At the time my best friend who I would go out to the clubs with every night was sleeping with hustlers and starting to do crack. I remember at the super bowl party he had at his apartment that year I was drinking while the other people were doing crack, coke, opium and whip-its (nitrous oxide). That was the year Janet Jackson flashed her breast.

So anyway the two day mental break from reality came when one night I got so drunk I thought it was a good idea to get dressed as an alien and go to one of the local gay clubs. My friend at the time had the alien suit from a past Halloween. So I went over to his house to put it on and we went to the club together. Walking over with a giant "Alien Grey" head and the alien body that went with it certainly brought attention. It was impossible to see who I was. It was one of those all encompassing costumes. Cars would slow down as he and I walked to the club and I would just wave at them. It was sort of humorous to see peoples expressions especially when they would turn the corner not expecting to see an alien with a large head walking by.

When I got to the club some people clapped. Of course they were drunk too and this must have seemed fun to them. I do remember it was hard to drink while in that custom and I would have to slip the Twisted Tea bottle under my giant head and drink it with a straw. That is the only night I ever danced in a club. I refused to tell anyone who I was and no one could tell. The only person who knew was the friend I went with. I remember dancing with this hot lesbian and she said to me "Are you a boy or a girl?" I told her a boy but I think she was hoping for a different answer.

At 4am I wandered home drunk in my alien suit to my apartment. You have to understand I lived in a bad area at the time but I don't think anyone was going to mug the alien. I would assume even criminals would not want to mess with the mental case coming down the empty streets at 4am in a giant alien suit.

The next day I woke up still drunk. I felt like I was going to die and went to the bathroom to throw up. Then of course paranoid back to the corner store to get beer.

That night I went out again with the same friend to a different club. After we drank a bit he passed out in the corner of the club so I went to the bathroom. A girl was in there doing coke and had all this makeup laid out. I asked her if I could have a tube of her red lipstick. She gave it to me and said I could keep it. At first I just put it on my lips. However eventually I had colored in my whole face. Forehead to chin was colored with blood red lipstick. I would have painted more but the tube was now empty so I took the tube and looking in the mirror carved the word "FUCK" backwards in the lipstick across my forehead (you have to do it backwards in the mirror).

This is where it gets spotty but I opened the bathroom door and do remember some heavy set girls eyes get very big from shock of seeing a blood red face emerge with the word "fuck" written on it. Then later someone taking a picture because I remember this figure coming out and a flash bulb going off. At some point how long later I don't know I went outside to smoke a cigarette. Either I had met this guy in the club or outside while smoking but I knew we walked back to my apartment and had sex. He was wearing a white t-shirt and by the time he left he was covered in red lipstick. His white t-shirt looked like he had been shot and bleeding. I have no idea who that guy was but every time I went out after that night I looked to see if I saw a face that was semi familiar. I am sure if I ever saw his face it would trigger my memory and I would know that is who it was.

Of course it has been five years since that event took place so I am no longer trying to figure out who the guy was and the days that followed I seemed to go back to my normal, drunk, nervous self.

If someone ever asked me if there was ever a time I felt I had lost my mind it would be those two days. The strange thing is I am not embarrassed even now by it. I wouldn't change those events from happening. If anything I am more curious by my behavior at the time.