Terrorized.....

I am doing something I don't usually do. I am writing this at 11 at night. I usually write around noonish on Tuesdays but today was hard for me. I actually purposely avoided it. I knew that this would be hard for me to write and even harder for me to think about. I knew that when I write I feel what I type and I had tried to avoid what I have been feeling all day.

A deep rush of dread has been in the background. It isn't the most powerful of my emotions but it is underlying. Like layers of paper, it is under my other feelings. It resides under my daily activities. Under my phone conversations and chores. Under my laundry lists and planning for Thanksgiving. I can smile, I can laugh, I can have a peaceful cup of tea but underneath is that niggling feeling of dread. Much like the feeling of waiting for a bad report card to show up in the mail or an abusive parent to come home. That feeling of dread of what is to come. I know it will come just not when or what will set it off. Not necessarily the face I present to my children or my husband but it is there waiting for me be still. So it can creep up and rush over me in waves of horrible dreadful fear. It is so palpable I can taste it. It is it's own being. A monster lurking in the shadows. I can hear it breathing.

It's hard to describe what having an "episode" like this is like. I try to find words or euphemisms that make sense to my understanding husband. All I can come up with is pure unadulterated terror. I am being terrorized by my mind and I am unable to describe it. I am left mute by it. I try to avoid it. Mostly, I try to not be still.

You see, having OCD means that I can not just let go of things. I can not simply be fine with certain issues. I worry. I fret. The harder I try to deny what is going on the stronger the feeling of dread is. It waits patiently for me to go to bed. When my hands are not busy washing or cleaning, when my mind is not occupied by lists and plans, when my body is simply too exhausted to have the will to fight it off. It doesn't need to be loud or intrusive. It simply waits. It always gets what it wants in the end. Eventually, I will feel the fear in full force, so it just lingers around to let me know that it is there. Always stalking. Always waiting.

I went to the doctor's yesterday. I have been worried I may have another stone in my bile duct. I have been doing good so far, but I feel I can't really trust that. I have had stones for eight years and this year I had four surgeries in a four month period to remove them. I became extremely ill and turned yellow before the last surgery. As someone with severe OCD I am paranoid of health issues anyway. This did not help things.

I was told that I am now diabetic. Borderline mostly and I need to lose weight to see if I can get rid of the diabetes. It was a shock to say the least. Diabetes runs in my family. I am not an extremely large person but I need to lose around sixty pounds to be where the doctor thinks I should be. I have put on weight after having my children and the medications I used to take for my OCD. I still was not prepared to hear my diagnoses. I had no symptoms or any idea that I had become diabetic. I knew I should lose weight but I had no idea what was really going on inside my body. The problem for me is not that I am diabetic per say. It is the unknown. I am not good with the unknown. My doctor put me on a medication. She rushed me through and didn't answer any of my questions. I have had surgery not to long ago and although rare, this medicine can cause death if certain criteria are met. Recent surgery adds to this criteria. My doctor didn't tell me this but the little sheet of paper on the pharmacy package did. My doctor did not order me a script for a blood glucose monitor. She did not tell me to check my sugars. She in essence told me nothing. I felt angry and scared and mostly in shock.

Here is where the fear comes in. I do not see the dietitian until the fourth. Because I have OCD I am terrified to eat. Terrified to not eat and too exhausted to figure out which way is the best way to handle this. Because my doctor is not answering the questions that I think are pertinent, I had to call my GI surgeon to ask if it is okay on his front to take this medication. Is my liver healthy? Do I have any renal problems they are unaware of? I have to ask these questions because for six months after my last surgery I was on a liver medication. My doctor didn't seem to be interested in that fact. This scares me. I am still waiting on my GI surgeon to get back to me. So I am waiting and as anyone with OCD knows the longer I wait the worse my fears become.

Eating terrifies me. Not eating terrifies me. The medication terrifies me. The not taking the medication terrifies me. I am completely terrified. To hold all of this back instead of being strong and facing what I know is going on with my OCD, I decided to clean. I scrubbed the floors, made the beds, got my house ready for Thanksgiving. I put up the boy's Christmas tree, that they are going to decorate on their own.( more about that on my next post). I hung Christmas stockings and planned meals. I vacuumed, swept, mopped, washed, scrubbed, till my knuckles were raw. I avoided each fear, each feeling that threatened to rush over me with taking out the trash, doing laundry, and straightening picture frames. Even going so far as to clean my yard and porch in twenty degree weather while it snowed down on me while my fingers became numb with the cold. Knowing that if I stopped for one second, if I let myself even look at the feeling of dread, the fear would rise up like a wild fire in the pit of my stomach and spread throughout my body with the hot scorching flames licking at my limbs, torso, and face until I was so engulfed in it that I would become immobile. I would become so absolutely terrified that I would break into two halves and fall to the floor. I would lose all composure and be lost.. I was, no am desperate to not feel this misery I know is going to attack me when I lay my head down to sleep tonight. Except I wont sleep, because I will be worrying. I will lay my head on a pillow of dread and wrap myself with the blanket of fear. I will cry myself to exhaustion and then maybe I will get a few moments of complete emptiness enough to nod off. Stuffy nose and tear streaked face to accompany my dreams.

You see, I have health fears so to me, I am afraid my body has turned against me and I just don't know it. It's hard to describe except that I often fear my body will betray me. It will make me sick or hurt. I constantly fear my organs aren't working properly. Sounds weird but it is how I feel. This is health fear OCD folks, and it is a doozy. I am usually able to ignore it but not today.

I also have contamination fears. After I had to get off my medication for OCD because it was known to cause a severe heart arrhythmia and was killing people, I began to look at medicine as poison. Not intentionally but because my OCD picked up on it. Medication or at least the thought of it terrified me to my very core. When I had to take the liver medication, I prayed every night, sometimes twice, that it would cause no damage and would just do what it was supposed to. Make me better... Please just make me better and please don't hurt my liver, or make me sick, or make me...die. Please don't take me away from my children. Please don't make me miss them growing up. Please don't let me hurt them by leaving them without a mother. They need me. Please. Please. Please God. Please..... crying silently into my pillow until my body became wracked with exhaustion that I would fall asleep. I did this every night for six months. I never told anybody. It was ridiculous sounding. It seemed silly to cry myself to sleep as an adult over something I didn't even know was going to happen or not. More than that, it is extremely painful to spill out my deepest fears, my weaknesses, my shame. To say them aloud is to own them and it is beyond  agonizing to admit them to my loved ones, my friends, let alone anyone else. To admit that I am sometimes so very strong and sometimes so equally devastatingly weak. Sometimes I am broken. Sometimes I am simply, overwhelmingly, terrifyingly broken..

When I got off the medication I was a little scared the stones would come back. I was afraid of more surgeries and hospital stays. More terrible food and anxiety attacks because I was far away from the safety of my home and I had to deal with strangers on a daily basis. They were nice but they weren't my family. I was also grateful that my secret nights of crying would be over and now I would get to be me again. No pills that could harm me. No one would have to know about my weak nights. My silent crying until my pillow was soggy nights. My begging until I fell asleep nights. I was free, finally.

Now, I know with my brain that medications are important. I know this. I know that this diabetes medication is taken by thousands of people and they do marvelous on it. I would most likely be no different. And after I lost the weight I wouldn't have to take it anymore. But the fear is there. It is back almost as if it never really left. The unfounded yet extreme fear that this medication is actually more poison than help. That this medication could harm me more than heal me. It may not be founded as the complication is rare, but that is how OCD works. I have a fear of catching the plague in Wal-mart. It isn't factual but there it is. No one has reported a mass outbreak of the plague at Wally World recently but it still goes through my mind. That is why I love hand sanitizer. There is no hand sanitizer for poison that comes in pill form.

Then there is the fear that by not taking the medication my sugar level maybe too high. I don't have a monitor to check it and even if I did, I would still be terrified. The only way not to worry me would be to have one surgically implanted so it could read it every second of every day and they don't have anything like that. I am terrified when I eat things. I wonder if my sugar has gone through the roof. I have to force myself to swallow and not think about it turning into pure sugar as it goes into my bloodstream. I don't know what else to do until I see the dietitian, so I try to avoid breads and things with a lot of carbs. Then the OCD sets in and I am scared that I am not eating enough. Maybe my levels will go too low and that could cause diabetic coma. I am sometimes alone. This could be really bad. And how the hell will I know either way if I don't know when to check it or have a monitor to check it with?  I now eye every fruit, every vegetable, every single piece of food as suspect. I now am terrified of what I drink. I have no idea what is going to spike my levels nor if they are spiked without me knowing. I feel like I am being tortured every time I walk into the kitchen. I am being terrorized in my own home and it is by me. I am terrorizing myself.

So, today I did what OCD sufferers do best. I avoided. I avoided writing and thinking and anything that remotely resembled obsessing about it out loud. Until now, because I feel that I have to and need to, be honest about my OCD. Because you can't write a blog about mental illness and pretend that everything is okay all of the time. Everything is not okay. Sometimes I do not have great days. Sometimes I do not have great weeks. Sometimes not even great months. I need to purge my fears even though they are extremely painful and scary. Even though I know to normal people they seem completely ridiculous. Event though I am afraid of being judged by them. Even though a million reasons of why I should just shut up and deal with it like an adult goes through my mind, over and over and over again. I need to tell my readers because there may be a million reasons not to tell but, there is one extremely important reason to tell, because there are others out there like me that are too scared to talk about it. And they need to know they are not alone. I want them to know that there are people that go through the very same feelings of believing that they are weak, that they are broken, the very same feelings of fear and dread, and yes, the very same feeling of shame because they feel that no one understands. I have to be honest because I don't want one more single person to have to cry silently in their pillows at night. And worse yet, keeping it a secret because they feel ashamed by it. My shame ceases to be shame if it helps one person feel less alone.

I am going to be okay. I know that whatever my surgeon says I will be fine. I am going to do what I need to do to be healthy and if it is this medication than I will have to just learn to deal with it. I may cry myself to sleep at night and beg til my voice is but a whisper but I will get through it. I may be scared but I will forge on. I will find out what I can eat and can't. I will go to the gym and exercise. I will get healthier so that this does not define my every waking moment. So that my OCD  takes a back seat and is no longer trying to drive the car. I will win this battle, not just because I want to but because I really have no other choice. It's fight or drown and I have no desire to breathe in water today.

I heard once that the strongest of steel is forged in the hottest of fires....If that is true than we surely will be stuff cities and civilizations are built on. We will be the strongest of beams, the toughest of walls, the tallest of bridges, and the sharpest of swords. We will be unbreakable....

Neurotic Nelly

What Matters Most....

I ran across a profound quote/ title of a book the other day that I would like to share with you guys. It stirred something inside me as poetry often does. It made me ponder. It made me think. Which could go either way on if that's a good thing or not.

What matters most is how well you walk through the fire....

This speaks to me. It is a low pitch hum that rolls under my feet. It ignites electrical sparks in my brain. It breathes new life into me and yet steals away bits of my soul. It makes my mouth dry and my voice weak. It is truth and lies and everything in between. It says to me all of the fears I have are pointless. It reminds me that it does me no good to fret if I refuse to walk over the coals in the first place. It makes me feel strong and weak at the same time. It makes me rethink my past and comb it over like Donald Trump's bad hair.  Excavating each piece and examining it. Am I doing all I can? Am I giving myself a chance? Do I give myself enough credit for the things I have managed to accomplish or maybe too much credit? Am I over analyzing again? Of course I am, I have OCD. I over analyze everything, myself, my day, the lines in the grass....

And what does this simple phrase mean to me or rather about me?

Everyone walks through their own personal hell. Their own fire that singes and burns. Everyone has issues and problems. Some people choose not to face them. Some people pretend nothing is wrong. Some people don't know what to do and panic and some people just look the other way. At some point all the king's and horses and all the king's men can not stop all of the castles from falling. There is always a stopping point, a place of no return when you either jump or fly, sink or swim, crawl or walk.  Everyone will have to walk across the fire.

I have accepted that I am walking. I have accepted the pain, the burns, the soot covered feet, those awful smudged black footprints stamped all over my life. They are a real pain to try get out of  the carpet.  I have accepted that life is a learning experience and been reminded over and over again that learning can be agonizing. I have accepted that my struggles are long and my issues are many. I make no excuses for that. I see them clearly. And so what? My whole life is a fiery ravine to be crossed. It has been fraught with issues and obstacles. I can't let that stop me. I can't just sit on the side lines and be stationary. I don't have the luxury to simply look the other way. I never did. I am forced to walk through the fire and you know what? I am determined to do as good as I can. I am determined to be a walking, talking wave of positivity. Not because I am a naturally bubbly person but because I believe that I deserve to be happy. We all deserve to be happy. So yes, the fire burns and it is extremely hot but that doesn't mean I have to be angry or sad about it. Everyone has issues. Everyone has pain. Everyone else's fire is just as sweltering and painful. I am no different just because my fire is because of OCD or mental illness. Fire is fire and pain is pain.

So you see, it doesn't matter why I have to walk through the fire or what caused the fire in the first place. What is most important is what I do with it. How I choose to walk through it. How I hold myself. How I treat others. How I present myself to the world. That is what matters the most.

So I have decided that since this is my fire I am going to walk through it with a smile and an open hand. An open heart filled with compassion. Only nice remarks on my lips for those that need a kind word. Ears ready to listen and not just hear. A mind ready to learn. Making sure I never cease to tell people that they are worthy no matter what size they are,  they are beautiful no matter how broken they feel, they are valid no matter how often they have been told otherwise.  I will not just walk across the fire I will dance through it because life is hard and painful and yet so very very beautiful at the same time. I will walk through the fire singing opera and folk music and rock and country, and oldies, and Christmas carols, and even rap ( although I have terrible rhythm and you might want to wear ear plugs for that one). Simply because music binds us all together and it is magnificent, all of it, in it's own way. I will walk through the fire offering friendship and acceptance and empathy. I will walk across the fire wearing broken in cowboy boots, my grandma's gaudy jewelry, my favorite jeans and sweater, a doctor who scarf and a top hat. Because I love top hats and Doctor Who and being comfortable and my grandmother and this is my life. I will walk through that fire being totally, completely me and make no apologies for it.  Yes, what makes you have a fire to cross is important. Yes the issues you deal with mean something but what is most valid, what is most important is how you choose to deal with those issues. How you choose to behave and hold yourself. How you choose to either help along the way or ignore as you walk by. What is the most important is how you use your knowledge, how you love, how you guide, and if you can learn to love and accept yourself  each step at a time. To always be as kind as possible, as confident as possible, and most importantly to remember to always be yourself. You are magnificent and you can rock walking through that fire like nobody else.

It doesn't matter where you have come from, what you have been, or where you are going. How sad and broken and scared you have been. How scarred and damaged you have felt. How lonely and anxiety prone you may be. How dorky or cool, or strong you think you are.


What matters most is how well you walk through through the fire.....

I'm not going to just walk through that fire well, I am going to walk through it exceptionally.

Neurotic Nelly

Broken Ballerinas

As a child I used to take my candy money and go to a small junk store. This store sold antique gas signs, hubcaps, and various junk. The store was a dark disheveled mess that smelled slightly of motor oil and grease. The man ,whom I secretly believed was a magnificent collector of all things thrown away, would pull out a cardboard box for me. It's contents were my precious treasures. Broken ballerinas that had been separated from their jewelry boxes. Beautiful ballerinas that were no longer destined to dance and stand. They could be played with and collected. They could be bunched together as to never live a lonely existence again. I loved them with their different paint colors and hair styles. My little plastic delights. I spent everyday there until I had finally purchased every last one he had saved for me. I kept them in my generic eighties music box with pink satin interior that played Rain Drops Are Falling On My Head. I would spend large amounts of my childhood playing with them and making them twirl to the sounds of my music box. It was a comfort. I kept them always and when I grew older instead of playing with them I would occasionally take them out and look at them. My little treasures. They were like me, broken but beautiful, strong but small, colorful and different. Some were newer and some were antiques but I loved them all equally.

 At sixteen I moved back down to Texas. We were living in a one room house beside my grandmother and grandfather till we could get back on our feet. All of our belongings were stored in a big shed next to our tiny home. Not long after moving we had a drought. The grass had turned to yellow tufts. The ground had such deep cracks in it that one would imagine they reached straight to the depths of Hell. There had been declared a state wide burn ban. No one was allowed to burn fields or garbage. Cigarettes were supposed to be snuffed out in ashtrays or in water. No fireworks were going to be allowed on the fourth of July if this continued. That day was hot and windy. My mother, grandmother, and I went to go get bbq. My grandfather, who had a heart condition stayed home. There were tall grey black clouds in the sky. Darker than I had ever seen and I felt uneasy every time I looked at them. Something was wrong but I had no idea what. On our way home we were stopped by a road block. The main street was closed and we had to take an alternate path back to the house.We saw fields with fire blowing across the street and many brave farmers and volunteer firefighters trying to put it out. It was still far enough from our home to not be a worry. The acrid smell of smoke was thick in the air and hung like a wet blanket. Not unusual for Texas in the dead of Summer. As we reached home we ate and watched the news. Some moron had decided the burn ban was not anything to listen to and had burned some garbage in a barrel. The wind had blew the barrel over and the fire had spread over two whole counties. Right then, there was pounding at our door. The fire had finally made it to our street and the volunteer firefighters were trying to get everyone out in time. We loaded up into our vehicles. My grandmother went first in her van. My mother and I got into our car and waited for my grandfather to get the insurance papers and get into his van. It took him a little longer than he expected and we were getting worried. Then as he got into the van, like any good slasher film the stupid thing refused to start. By this time the fire had climbed the trees snapping and crackling. It was a hungry beast that devoured everything in it's path.  The earth had turned into a sweltering sea of orange, red, and black. The fire had now become a forty foot wall of flames bearing down on us and grandpa's stupid van was not cooperating. I believed that we were going to be roasted to the spot. I believed that we were going to die. The van finally jumped to life and we drove like bats out of hell. At the safe point people were staring at us. I couldn't figure out at what until I went to go to the bathroom. The restaurant was full and everyone was gawking at me because I was covered head to toe in thick soot. Our street was closed for three days. Our crazy brave neighbor had managed to save our houses by watering them down with the water hose and leaving it running on the butane tank. If he had not done this, the tank would have exploded like everyone else's had on the other side of our property. Because of him we were the last house on the street to still be standing. He could not, however, save the shed. The next few weeks were filled with grieving the losses. Many had lost pets, belongings, and homes. Many were not near as lucky as we were and we were thankful. My grandfather mourned his golf clubs, my mother mourned her couch and other furniture. I mourned my childhood that had turned to ash. My first teddy bear, my clothes, my awards and yearbooks, letters from friends and family, and most of all my broken ballerinas. They were now an ugly kaleidoscope of blackened glass, melted plastic, and warped metal. There was no trace of what these items had been beforehand. The were all black chunks of char. I never collected them again. There was no point in trying to relive the past. The beautiful ballerinas were left like I felt, melted. I loved them because like me the were broken. Like me they were unique and different. Like me they were lonely until I found them. Now they were gone. I was lucky to have still had a home. I was blessed to have had a few extra years with my grandfather. This event taught me that things are not really as important as you might think. I miss the ballerinas, but I don't need to have them.  I do think of them often. I wonder if any little girls collect things like that anymore.  And still anytime I walk past a music box in the store I always take a second to carefully wind it and see if it plays Rain Drops Are Falling On My Head.

                                              Neurotic Nelly