My Enemy "Anxiety" and Her Partner "Panic"

Another fabulous guest blogger, Anita from Ovalina
shares a little something about herself, that, I too, can very much relate to!
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Here I am at my desk, getting ready to at least try some humor for my guest post at Jen’s site, when without notice, a wave of anxiety punches me in the gut, like unexpected hemorrhoids I discovered on take-off on a transatlantic flight to Germany. Not a good omen.

In full panic attack with fingers trembling, eyes darting from one spot on the wall to the other, moving my butt from a corner of the chair to the opposite, you’d think I was at a spinning class, I realize that there’s no way to go around my anxiety, so I have to make it a part of my writing today.

Thing is, I hate introducing myself as the anxious panic prone woman, but it does happen on occasions. Despite clues that would point to the culprits for my condition as a husband who’s been deployed five times to Iraq in the last four and a half years, my five lovely daughters very close in age, and moving around as often as we do, these things aren’t really the cause of the anxiety.

They’re stressors and can make it worse, but I actually had anxiety as a child. I remember being five years old, growing up in Rome, and worrying incessantly that the leaning Pisa tower would actually collapse. I lost sleep over this possibility many a nights. And Rome is pretty far from Pisa.

So you see, outside circumstances can exacerbate the situation but they’re not the masterminds behind these attacks. Despite many years of therapy, yoga, meditation and lots of other things I’ve tried, my enemies anxiety and her partner panic occasionally pay me a visit. I have tolerated them for the most part, except when their chattering is as loud as a trombone and I can’t hear my thoughts, than I want to smash my head into a wall.

But I think I’ve had a breakthrough. I found some new ways to handle my issues and what better place to start than Jen’s blog, Cheaper than Therapy? At this precise moment things are looking better, I’m sipping a glass of red wine and eating Honey Nuts Cheerios – that’s all I had in the house, no peanuts, chips, crackers or anything salty so I defaulted to sugar.

But the breakthrough isn’t the food. It’s the writing and the connections with other bloggers that have made my anxiety more manageable. Lately there’s been a lot of complaining about bloggers, specifically mommy bloggers, but I think that the good this community can do still outweighs the negative (which really you’d find anywhere).

Blogging has helped my anxiety. While writing this post, I twittered that I felt a panic attack coming on and received responses ranging from put ice on your wrists, to breath in a bag, to watch True Blood.

I don’t know that any of those things would work, but it was funny and it took me out of myself and into a community of women who cared. And I didn’t feel alone or scared. I felt that I could it make through.

That to me is what it’s all about and why I’m happy to have the chance to write at Jen’s site, which is always so fun and full of great writing.

Thank you for taking the time to read my post and I’ll ‘see’ you around.

Cheers,

Anita Tedaldi