In Which I Fret About The Chance That Things Might Change In The Nebulous Future, Because, Hi, I’m Me.

Tags

anxiety, change, generalized anxiety disorder, homes, life, living far away, moving house

PH likes change.

It is one of his most baffling but also more endearing qualities. He likes to visit new places, try new things, and basically expose himself to all kinds of potential for disappointment, regret, and other things that I avoid as if they were herpes.

Change me no likee.

Well, that’s not quite true. I like GOOD change. Really obvious, risk-free, guaranteed-to-be-positive change!

Most change doesn’t fit that criteria.

It was his love of change that sent PH out to Vancouver in the first place. He sold all his possessions, up and moved.

Making the decision to move out there with him several years later was probably one of the riskiest things I have ever done. I was leaving friends and family behind and quitting a job I liked. But on the other hand, I was heading to a place with much better job opportunities, I was young, and I had my fiancé with me.

It was fun, and exciting, and difficult. I had trouble finding a job, I had trouble making friends, and I had a lot of trouble putting down roots. I suffered depression. I lost two jobs.

But I’m finally getting settled in.

And now, Perfect Husband is starting to get bored of Vancouver.

I think he is also getting tired of sharing me with three different jobs – my vet clinic job, my dog training business, and my occasional Elance work.

Even though he knows we need the money, and he is supportive of my dog training business in general, he doesn’t like me disappearing for half the weekend on my dog training appointments. And if my clinic job asks me to work a Saturday? There is definite grumbling to be heard.

But at the same time, we want a second child and have no idea how we will be able to afford it. The math just doesn’t work.

If we didn’t have a $220,000 mortgage plus monthly condo fees, we wouldn’t be feeling the pinch so much. It doesn’t help that we know that if we outgrow our current place, we’d need an even larger mortgage. Our current one is tiny by Vancouver standards, because our complex has so many repair issues.

For a larger place, we’d be looking at $600,000 or more, very probably. And that just ain’t gonna happen unless I suddenly become VERY famous and rich.

So whenever a job pops up at PH’s company in a place with lower housing prices, even if it’s a job that he is totally unsuited for, he applies for it and starts browsing houses. I’ll get a text saying ‘Hey, want to live in Memramcook?” or “Who wants to move to Burns Lake?”

Of course, since he’s largely unqualified for most of these jobs, and because he lists moving costs as a condition of getting the job, the chances are remote… but there have been some close calls.

And every time he does this, I have to think about how I feel about moving.

The problem all comes down to change.

I’m actually HAPPY right now, which, to quote Marlin from Finding Nemo, is a big deal, for me.

I like the vet clinic where I work. I like my boss, and my coworkers.

My dog training business is picking up. We actually have a minor TV celebrity on our training roster right now. If we get permission to use her name on our website, that will look AWESOME.

I have friends who have little boys of about Owl’s age. Our neighbour dropped his two sons off to play with Owl for a couple hours yesterday and the house got so much more peaceful with to toddlers to occupy Owl’s attention. We have another friend’s tot coming over for a babysitting session tonight, so Owl will be happier than a pig in muck.

For all of the issues we occasionally have with Owl’s daycare, he loves it there. He talks constantly about the other kids, he hates to leave, and they love him. They tell him “I love you, baby” constantly.

Daycare Lady’s daughter even painted a large (and slightly Uncanny Valley creepy) portrait of him which now dominates the playroom. It is the Temple of Owl over there.

So why on Earth would I leave?

Oh, right – the fact that we are a $4,000 flight away from our families at Christmas time.

Oh, right – the fact that our parents aren’t getting any younger and are missing Owl’s toddlerhood.

Oh, right – the fact that we have no idea how we will be able to support a second child.

Oh, right – the fact that we definitely have no idea how we would ever afford a larger house than we have now.

If you had asked me three years ago if I wanted to leave Vancouver, would probably would have said yes. I was unhappy with my job, my friendships still felt uncertain, and I was lonely and feeling damaged by years of workplace bullying.

But now I don’t know.

I want to be closer to my family, but I don’t really want to start over in a new city – make friends, put down roots, go through all of that again.

I REALLY don’t want to have to hunt for a new job. My job experiences have been so fraught with stress that I just can’t face it again.

If we moved anywhere, I would want it to be either such a massive promotion that PH could mostly support us on his own, and I could just write or train dogs for extra money on the side, or it would have to be a place with such cheap houses that it amounted to the same thing.

And when it comes to moving back to the Maritimes, well, I have a lot of conflicting feelings.

On the one hand, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick are home to me, and probably always will be.

The clapboard houses, the drifts of snow, and the shabby corner convenience stores are real to me in a way that Vancouver has never been. I see Vancouver as shiny and soul-less by comparison.

Besides, if we moved back there I wouldn’t be facing the making friends issue – I still have friends there, although they don’t have boys Owl’s age the way my friends here do.

But they’re old friends who would pick up with me as if I never left.

On the other hand, I’m a massive snob.

I went through the public school system in Nova Scotia and I shudder at the thought of putting poor Owl through it. Even though I know there are good teachers and bad teachers everywhere, and it’s all just a crap shoot.

I also feel like being a professional dog trainer from Vancouver means something, whereas if I ever wrote a dog training book, the fact that it was written by a trainer in, say, rural New Brunswick wouldn’t do much for my reputation.

Everything in the Maritimes is small, and expectations are low. Businesses tend to have shoddy signs, and websites that use comic sans. People “from away” are looked at with suspicion.

I feel like moving East would be a huge step back for my career, even if it were a step forward for our finances and family life.

This is the stuff I torture myself over. 

I’m happy right now, but like it or not, change is coming – either we have a second child and things get really challenging, or PH actually gets an offer from one of these jobs he applies for, and my entire life will be uprooted, with good and bad consequences mixed right in.

I DON’T LIKE CHANGE.

No More Purple Pills

Tags

anxiety, busy, depression, generalized anxiety disorder, motherhood, stress, time management, welbutrin, work

I have been off of my Welbutrin for about three months now. I started to wean myself off in June, skipping the occasional day, until I actually forgot to take it at all for a week.

Then, when we went the the states, I left the pills behind, and I haven’t touched them since.

I’ve been doing fine.

I had a happy summer, loving my husband, liking my job, training dogs, writing on Elance.

I’ve been very tired. I feel very extroverted out.

I wish that I didn’t have to juggle work AND dog training AND Elance, but I’m not willing to give up any of these. I need them.

I need the work, the dog training is my insurance for the future when we have a second kid and full time work will no longer cover daycare costs, and Elance is extra money in my pocket while building my writing credits, which is REALLY part of my long term plan.

I spend my mornings trying to shepherd Owl into his clothes and into the car, I work for 9 hours with no break, and then I pick Owl up and entertain him while PH makes dinner. By the time we get Owl to sleep it’s 9 pm and I’m exhausted.

PH wants me to take more time to myself, to hand him the baby and say “YOU deal with it, I’m out of touch for an hour” but I rarely take him up on it. First of all, because I hand him Owl and then disappear training dogs a couple times a week as it is, and second of all because I want to spend time with my husband and son.

But PH thinks all this work is adding to my anxiety.

I haven’t really noticed it (maybe fish don’t notice water, much) but PH thinks it has been worse lately. I don’t know if fall coming on is beginning to activate my SAD, but that seems hard to believe, because it’s been warm and sunny an gorgeous outside lately.

So maybe it’s just all too much.

But I’m not quite sure what to do about it. We need money, and I need to make money while building a way to make money with fewer hours in the future. So I think this is just how it is right now, and I’m not unhappy or miserable.

Just a little stressed.

That’s within normal range, right?

The Cloud in the Silver Lining

Tags

anxiety, choice, employment, GAD, generalized anxiety disorder, jobs, life decisions, stress, worrying

I got the damn job.

To make it worse, the lady offering me the job is so NICE. She says that they are “excited to have me joining the team” and “looking forward to seeing me” and that she will arrange my schedule to be sure that I am out before my daycare closes.

Yes, that’s right, I’m COMPLAINING about how NICE she is.

“Carol always manages to find the cloud in the silver lining,” PH said over the phone to my mother today, which made her burst out laughing.

Let me walk you through my mind:

In order to determine how I feel about something NOW, I need to know how I will feel about it in the future. I’m afraid to be happy about something now if I think there may be a chance I might regret it later. So here are the future scenarios running through my mind:

Scenario A: Maybe I’ll love the people at this job, and won’t be offered the awesome charity job that would be perfect for me. I will be overworked from trying to work full time at my job PLUS the dog training business, and never see my family, but at least I will like my workplace.

Scenario B: Maybe I’ll love the people at this job, and will ALSO be offered the awesome charity job that would be perfect for me. Then I’ll have to choose between a full time job in a setting I don’t like but with awesome coworkers, and disappointing people who have been awesome to me and who I enjoy working with in order to pursue a more “ideal” job that may or may not pan out.

Scenario C: Maybe I’ll find myself in a similar situation to last time – feel incompetent, feel disliked, be generally unhappy. I won’t get the other job either, and I’ll just tough it out until the dog training business gets big enough that I can quit.

Scenario D: Maybe I will feel incompetant but then get the other job, and will leave feeling like a failure but at least I’d be going to a more “ideal” job.

Scenarios A and D are preferable, and I still dislike both of them.

I didn’t sleep much last night. I’m near tears most of the time. PH is alternately worried about me and frustrated as hell with my I’m-doomed attitude.

I can’t help it.

The future just… scares me. I have no idea if things are going to be okay.

Worrying About The Wrong Thing: Anxiety Girl Strikes Again!

Tags

anxiety, decisions, GAD, generalized anxiety disorder, jobs, problems, stupid, worries, worrying

One of the things they kept telling us in my Generalized Anxiety Disorder group was that we worried about the wrong things.

Our obsession with worrying about everything actually CAUSED problems because we’d be so busy worrying that we would let problems build and build until they became HUGE problems.

Which was exactly what we were worried about.

Something else we learned was that our worries always tended to end up at the same place. Heather Armstrong says that when her daughter makes a mistake in her piano practice, she visualizes a series of catastrophes that end in her living in a cardboard box.

Well, that’s fairly typical, I have learned.

For some people, that ultimate fear is ending up homeless.

For others, it’s ending up dead.

For me, it’s displeasing people and making bad choices.

Doctor sends you for blood tests because your sore throat could be a sign of a serious problem? Pfft. Not worried. Maybe it’s cancer, but it is almost definitely not. Certainly nothing I can control if it is cancer (which it isn’t).

Need to make a serious decision that will end up disappointing someone? BIG PROBLEM.

I hate making decisions. What if I make the wrong one? What if this single decision alters the whole course of my future life? What if this decision turns out to piss someone off? What if this decision makes me a bad person?!

So now I’m here, waiting for a phone call, worrying that I’ll be OFFERED A JOB.

You read that right. Not worrying that I WON’T be offered a job. Worrying that I WILL.

Last Friday, you see, was a big day for me. I landed a big job on Elance, and a national dog charity put up a part time job posting in my area. Suddenly I had a plan – I would train dogs, work part time for a charity doing something I KNEW I could do well, and make extra money on the side as a writer.

It was like ALL MY DREAMS COMING TRUE.

Then I got another call. From a vet clinic.

This clinic is a sort of rival to my previous employer. She was his employee, and when she left to start her own business, three quarters of his staff decided they’d rather go work for her.

So when she asked me to come in for an interview, I could be really honest.

…I told her exactly why I was no longer working there.

…I told her that I have severe anxiety around anesthesia now, thanks to Mean Vet, who she used to work with.

…I warned her that if she was looking for a surgical tech, I might not be a good choice.

She said she liked me a lot. She thought I would be a good fit at her clinic. She appreciated my openness and my candor. She always made decisions like this jointly with her staff, though, so she would talk it over with them and get back to me on Friday. Would I be available to start next week?

So now I’m scared.

If I get this job, I should definitely take it. A bird in the hand, right?

She seems nice. She and her employee vet introduced themselves by their first names, which is a nice change from the old place where I had to call them “Dr So-and-So” all the time.

But I don’t want it.

Why?

Because then what if I also get the job at the charity? 

WHAT IF I HAVE TO CHOOSE?

I SHOULD be worried that I WON’T get this job.

I SHOULD be worried that I won’t get ANY job.

But instead, I’m terrified that I may have to make a choice. I may have to let someone down – someone who took a chance on me.

It doesn’t help that I have so much anxiety about working in a clinic that just the THOUGHT sends my heart racing.

So… to sum up…

I’m waiting for a call, scared that I will be offered a job.

When I should really be scared that I won’t.

Lurking Anxiety Monster is Lurking

Tags

anxiety, GAD, generalized anxiety disorder, post partum, stress, work

My anxiety has been coming back lately. I’m dealing with it as I’ve been taught: facing the thing that makes me anxious, instead of putting it off. Trying to accept the anxiety and let it in instead of pushing it away.

But I wish I knew why it has come back, or what it is even about.

I’m not anxious about anything in particular, most of the time. I just feel the tightness of it, clawing at me. Like there’s something important that I need to remember. So I try to remember it, and instead I dredge up all the minor to-dos on my mental list, which just add to my stress instead of helping to identify it.

It might be related to the fact that my old workplace has shoved its way into my life again in a highly stressful way. The issues don’t directly involve me, but they strongly affect me and people and dogs that I care about (I obviously can’t share it publicly, but if any of you want to know, send me an email and I’ll share what I can. I’d like to share it with someone, but I’m not idiotic enough to post it here).

If so, then it’s not so much the anxiety of this particular event but the ghost of anxieties past, come floating with the new troubles, like an old smell. Maybe it arrived with the news but it lurks around corners, emerging when I least expect it.

It’s mostly just when I’m alone. When I have Babby with me, I’m never anxious.

Tired? Sure.

Frustrated? Sometimes.

Joyful? Often.

Relaxed? Every time I nurse.

I feel bad for mothers who don’t breastfeed, because it’s practically impossible to be nursing ( when it’s well-established, I mean, not the first few weeks when it hurts like a mofo) and stressed at the same time. Hormones won’t let you. You might as well try to have a panic attack in a warm bubble bath with soft music playing.

Besides,  how can you be anxious when you’re dealing with someone who makes this face?

Babby: Not Anxiety-Compatible

 

General Updatey Thing

Tags

acupressure, anxiety, counselling, GAD, generalized anxiety disorder, Perfect Girlfriend, Perfect Husband, pools, swimming

Yesterday was my third session with a new counsellor lady. The shrink at the women’s reproductive mental health unit set me up with her. It sucks to drive an hour into town for a counselling session once a week, and I don’t really enjoy them (how can you, attending something that invariably makes you cry??) but I go because I know it’s good for me. The counsellor is okay. She’s a young graduate student originally from Shanghai, and I’m clearly one of her “practice” patients. She spends a lot of time getting me to rub various parts of my body, supposedly acupressure points, to try and release my tensions and open up my energies or something. I’m willing to try it – with labour approaching, any kind of relaxation technique could be valuable. She spends a lot of time on breathing exercises, too.

I always feel kind of shaky and vulnerable after counselling – being forced to talk about all the stuff you try not to even THINK about kind of messes you up for the day. But she had talked to me about how we can’t change feelings but we can change behaviours, and thus change thoughts, and thus eventually change feelings, so I decided to do what my CBT group leaders would have called an “anxiety exposure” and go to the pool on my own.

It was awesome.

In the recent heat wave that has hit Vancouver, I’ve thought of the pool several times. But I had never gone alone before, and besides, some part of me feels that if I start swimming by myself, Perfect Husband won’t take me any more (he tolerates swimming but doesn’t really enjoy it) and I love swimming with him. But the pool was deserted and swimming and thinking, swimming and thinking, then pulling out The World According to Garp and reading on the steps in the cool water was definitely a good way to recover from the counselling session.

I’ll go again today. Perfect Husband is very proud of me.

My friends are planning a baby shower for me on July 25th, which I’m looking forward to, but here’s a shot of me, many months ago, receiving a massive care package from Perfect Girlfriend:

Me at 3 months pregnant. We didn't know it was going to be a boy yet, but Perfect Girlfriend had a hunch

"What's THAT, Mom?"

Social Nudity Anxiety

Tags

anxiety, GAD, generalized anxiety disorder, massage, pregnancy

Perfect Husband booked me for a pregnancy massage today. It would be nice to get those knots out of my back and be able to bend over comfortably again, although ironically my back feels better today than it has in a long time.

But I’m not really looking forward to the massage.

WHAT IF I GET NAKED WRONG?

The Time Has Come, the Walrus Said, to Talk of Orange Popsicles

Tags

anxiety, GAD, generalized anxiety disorder, Popsicles, to-do list, worrying

Okay, first, before I write anything else, I have to ask:

Does anyone prefer orange Popsicles? I keep wondering why Popsicle companies always insist on putting orange ones in. The other flavours may be raspberry, or strawberry, or grape, or pomegranate or something, but there is always, always orange. Like, it seems like 50% of the Popsicles end up being orange in any given package. Why?? They are the least exciting flavour. They are the ones that always get left for last. People rummage for the red ones and the purple ones, and only start on orange once all the good flavours are gone. Ditto for orange suckers, when it comes to that.

Maybe it’s because they want you to run through the box faster, and buy more. You think you’re getting 14 Popsicles, but once you’ve eaten 8 or so, you realize that all that is left is orange ones, and after a couple of days of half-hearted eating you go and buy a new box. But surely any brand that sold grape-only, or red-only, would rocket to the top of the charts as the most popular brand?

These are the things I think about.

Another thing I’ve been thinking about – why am I finding it so much harder than some of my group-mates in facing my anxieties?

The only answer I really have is that unlike some of my fellows, who are terrified of talking to their ex-wives or abusive relations, or who avoid driving because they are afraid of car crashes… I don’t have any stressful situations which I am avoiding. Instead, my avoidance is the cause of most of my anxieties. Cleaning the house doesn’t make me anxious. NOT cleaning the house makes me anxious. Writing in my diary doesn’t make me anxious. NOT writing in my diary makes me anxious. So, I’m supposed to be doing things that will make me anxious, so I can tolerate the uncertainty. But I’m also supposed to start doing the things I’ve been avoiding doing. So should I clean the house, or see how long it takes before it resembles an episode of Hoarders?

Because it’s totally all the things that I’m avoiding doing that are making me anxious. And then I begin to associate the things on my mental to-do list with the anxiety that thinking about them all the time causes, and then that makes me avoid them more. Which makes them build up into bigger problems. Which makes me… you guessed it… more anxious. Like, the more I stress about being late for work, the later I end up being, because stressing about being late for work makes me avoid getting ready. It’s really, really stupid.

When I think back to the times in my life when I have been happiest, it has been times  when my to-do list has been pretty small. I love being on trips because I don’t have to worry about cleaning the house or washing the dishes. I can just have fun and be on vacation.

But when stuff builds up like this, it becomes a vicious cycle. All the stuff becomes overwhelming, so I avoid dealing with it, and it becomes more overwhelming, so I avoid doing it more, which makes it worse. And now it’s hard to feel any kind of joy at all because the weight of all the things I have to do are pressing down on me all the time, and some part of my brain is constantly going, “don’t forget to look for that missing DVD. Don’t forget to trim your dog’s nails. Don’t forget to sweep – look at all that dog fur. Don’t forget, you have to get printer ink so you can print your resume. Don’t forget, you need to preserve those torches. Don’t forget, you still need to install baseboards around the house. Don’t forget…”

I’m supposed to write my worries, but they aren’t worries so much as endless thoughts about the things I’m not doing.

So, here they are, for the world to see. You can all help me not forget.

• Groom Beloved Dog
• Clean floors
• Throw away or organize clutter (Perfect Husband got a great start on this last weekend, when he went into the Baby’s Room aka The Room Full of The Boxes We Haven’t Unpacked Since We Moved Last August and Cat Litter) and spent a whole day sorting through the junk. You can actually see the floor!)
• Wash dish rack
• Do laundry
• Figure out why there is laundry under the bed and deal with that, too
• Figure out where that smell in the bathroom is coming from and eradicate it
• Figure out where the missing DVD went
• Buy stands for the torches
• Buy book case/entertainment unit for the living room
• Buy stuff to fix the soot on the torches because I keep worrying that it’ll all rub off
• Get house measured
• Get baseboards
• Get baseboards installed
• Finish painting the house
• Paint the baby’s room
• Buy new eye glasses
• Clean car
• Turn up the earth in the garden
• Get sod for garden
• Get outdoor planters
• Get plants for said planters
• Get small charcoal barbecue
• Pick up patio set from friends who have offered us said patio set
• Frame pictures needing to be framed
• Hang framed pictures
• Call friends who think I’m dead
• Write in diary regularly so I can worry there instead of worrying about how I need to go and write backlogs
• Write backlogs in diary
• Get hair cut
• Go swimming regularly
• Get psyched for our upcoming trip to New York
• Tell my mother about our upcoming trip to New York

That’s all I can think of for now, but I know there’s more. I’ll let you know when I think of it.

Aren’t you excited?

eGADs!

Tags

anxiety, depression, generalized anxiety disorder, worry wart, worrying

“I’m sorry to tell you that you don’t qualify as depressed any longer,” the mental health woman told me on the phone.

“Oh… I see…” I said, not knowing how to take that.

“That means that we can’t put you in the depression group therapy after all,” she explained, “but you do qualify for our Generalized Anxiety Disorder group. There should be one starting in the new year.”

I told my about doctor this, but I was a little dubious. While I am certainly a rather neurotic person, I don’t have panic attacks or anything like that. She gave me an anxiety scale quiz thingy to do. Then she told me to go to Anxiety BC because they had a lot of useful self-help info for people with anxiety problems.

The upshot?

It turns out that I worry too much.

Now, anyone who knows me but at all will say something along the lines of “No shit, Sherlock.” I have been a worry wart since I was a kid. (Which, it turns out, is actually a symptom.) I know I worry too much. What I didn’t know was that I actually fitted into DSM IV criteria. All you need to do to qualify as having GAD is:

• worry a lot
• worry uncontrollably (people can control their worrying? How? It’s like controlling your reflexes or the weather, isn’t it?)
• Also have three of the following: restlessness (nope), being easily fatigued (yep), muscle tension (yep), difficulty sleeping (YEP), difficulty concentrating or mind going blank (sometimes).

That’s it. You don’t need panic attacks, or crazy social phobias or the need to flick the light switch 14 times before you can leave the room or anything like that. You just need to be tense, and worried, and a little insomniac.  Who isn’t?

Although apparently it often goes hand in hand with depression (yep), phobias (look, corpses are SCARY, ok?) and other anxiety problems.

It’s very weird finding your personality being described as a disorder. The Generalized Anxiety Disorder (or GAD) page should start with “Hello, Carol, I can read your mind!” In fact, it probably would, but it knows that that would worry me.

It calls me “allergic to uncertainty” or (more politically correctly) “uncertainty intolerant” and it describes in embarrassing detail some of the little personal quirks that I tend to try and keep quiet about most of the time. For example, it says :

GAD worry can also be described as “scenario building”. That is, worry is often an attempt to try to think about every possible scenario in the future, and then trying to plan for it.

Like, one time I was driving to a friend’s house and was mentally rehearsing greeting her newest housemate, a Chinese guy named Mike, who I had met the other day. If he came to the door I planned to say “hey, Mike, how are you? Is my friend home?”

This is a fairly normal introvert strategy, right? But then the Mike in my head said,

“…I’m not Mike.”

You see, my friend had a number of Asian housemates, most of whom I hadn’t met. What if the guy I greeted wasn’t Mike after all and I was too nervous to notice?

The imaginary Mike who wasn’t Mike then began to call me a racist and generally berate me in an abusive fashion.

“I suppose we all look the same to you!” he accused me in my head.

I became upset and began mentally rehearsing apologizing to the imaginary Not-Mike and try to explain that I was not racist, just bad with faces. It didn’t help that of course he looked just like Mike, because he was in my head. It all became very heated and uncomfortable. When I actually arrived at my friend’s house I decided it would be much better for me to just stay in the car and have my friend come out to me, so I could avoid the Angry Chinese Not-Mike confrontation that I felt would inevitably develop.

It turns out, that’s not so normal.

Who knew?

EDIT: It also turns out that constantly checking and rechecking one’s work (like, er, constantly editing posted blog entries to fix minor grammatical errors…) is also a symptom of GAD.