The Stories We Tell

Have you ever walked out into the night, looked up at the starry sky, and just been marveled at the expanse of it all? It’s really quite breath taking. As someone who has done a fair amount of amateur astronomy in my life, I can tell you, it only gets better when you apply a telescope to it. However, at first glance the human mind cannot help but twinge with another sense: that of being hopelessly overwhelmed. What is this above our heads? How do we fit into it? What to make of it?

I’m sure thousands upon thousands of years ago, in Greece for example, the ancients felt something very similar when they peered up into the night. As we all know, the Greeks (and many other civilizations before and since), tended to form this seemingly chaotic smattering of stars into constellations: associations of stars, each with their own unique identity. It’s fascinating to not only gaze up at the sky and wonder at the expanse of it all, but to also take the more psychological route and find amazement at how the human mind works so diligently to form patterns out of chaos.

But our minds go one step further than just forming patterns; as in the case of constellations, we also form stories. Why? Because the stories bring it closer to home for us, give our minds something to hold onto, and help us remember. A story gives us ground on which to stand. It appears that ever since the dawn of our species, we have used the narrative as a form of not only remembering subtle facts, but also in easing our angst with regards to the world at large. Somehow a story makes things feel more palatable, if even for a moment.

But this comes at a price. Have you ever noticed how, when you watch a movie and a scary scene plays out, that you have a tendency to squirm in your seat? You sweat, your heart rate increases, your blood pressure increases. All in all, your fight or flight mechanisms jump to attention, just like you were actually there, within the scene. This is interesting. It seems we not only find comfort in our stories, but also – quite possibly – pain.

This long and winding road is headed somewhere, I want to think a bit about the stories we’ve written for ourselves, and the roles which we have given to ourselves and to the people and places and things in our life. I noticed this the other day as I was preparing to walk to my car after work: something which (as odd as it may seem to the non-nervous mind) can sometimes really jump start my anxiety. I sat at my desk, preparing to walk to my car, thinking about all of the commotion: the sights and sounds, all of it. I felt my anxiety spike a bit. The story I was telling myself – which included me center stage – had began to take hold of me, and I hadn’t even made a single step away from my desk.

How often have I diligently been the actor in the play my mind has written! I remember it well as I walked down the stairs because my heart was pounding and my nervousness was reaching a peak; I was, for all practical purposes, involved in a life-threatening situation – one that I had constructed for myself in my mind. As I walked down the hallway I tried to pay attention to my footsteps. One after another. My breath I tried to be mindful of, but nothing was working completely. I reached for the handle of the door, pushed it open, stepped out and expected – immediately – to be greeted by an intense wave of coldness as the winter winds struck my face. However, it was warm; the sun was out….

…what happened next was fascinating to me. I suddenly watched my mind rewrite the story. “Oh, this isn’t so bad. I will enjoy my walk to my car.” I noticed this, and I took advantage of that event and stretched the act further: “Why the story at all? To what am I clinging? Why do I need a story? Why can’t I just live now?” As I took my first step out the door I immediately rewrote the entire narrative. I looked up and out and noticed the sights and smells of the world not as an overwhelming and impending doom, but as a welcoming experience. “I don’t have to be an actor in this story, because I write the story”. I felt it, it was like a rush of wind hit me: all of my attachments dropped to the ground, and for about two minutes I felt absolutely free. I tested myself in this moment: what about death? Nope, I realized I didn’t have to be afraid of it. What about health? No. No sense in worry. For about two minutes, I was free. As fast as that sense of freedom came, it flittered away, leaving me with one hell of a confused position.

One of the central notions of Buddhism is attachment, but our Western mind distorts and destroys what is really meant by this. We think, “How dare this religion tell me I ought to not have my XBOX!”. But it runs deeper than that, much deeper. Our attachments are not just the physical things in our life, but in the place we make for them in our life – the roles to which we ATTACH these things. We don’t attach to things, we attach to the concepts we have about those things and freeze in on them, forming a feeling of hopeless claustrophobia within ourselves in the process. We, essentially, fight so hard for a ground to stand on that we’ll define for ourselves a world out of nothingness that may not even be that comfortable; but we do it because we fear groundlessness. To feel pain in our story is somehow a better alternative to no story at all.

So next time a feeling starts to strike you, and you feel the growing and impending strength of it, ask yourself: “What is this, what story am I about to follow, and who wrote it?”

I sometimes wonder if we, just like the ancients when they gazed upon the stars, construct narratives for ourselves and our experiences in order to gain some amount of control and comfort over them; while at the same time missing the simple and ultimate truth: nature knows nothing of these “stories”, these “constellations”. It could be said, simply, that it’s not in nature, or even in reality, that we are trapped.

Freedom is ours for the taking if we’re strong enough.

A war with our mind...

“People are not disturbed by things, but by the view they take of them.”
Epictetus

Let me recall a story from a few years ago.

I remember it all very vividly as it started off as one of the more unnerving situations of my life. Nikki and I – on a cruise in the Mediterranean – were checking out Florence, Italy and time had gotten away from us. In a surge of adrenaline we realized we may not make it back to our ship on time. The whole day – who’s kidding who, the whole trip – I had been on edge, walking about in a sort of simmering anxiety. Moments before we realized the time, my mind had been stewing and fretting; worrying about the possibilities of having a heart attack (yes, I remember that part distinctly too). Yet as soon the possibility crossed my mind that we were going to miss our ship, my brain – in a way I can best describe as “snapping” – snapped into action and out of that constant rumination. For about an hour, there was “real” fear, a real worry, and a real anxiety of something “out there”. There was a real problem to solve. In the end, Nikki and I combined our efforts to solve this real problem and did get back in time.

The weirdest part of the experience was that it actually felt good – hell, even relaxing – to fight our way back to the cruise ship. It was an experience that puzzled me for years. How could something like this happen? How could almost missing our cruise ship and fighting back to it, jumping from bus to bus, actually feel good?

A few days ago I realized the dynamics of that day: the stress of being overseas disappeared – if only momentarily - because my human mind was actually given a fight it knew how to win. Pause on that statement for a moment: my mind was actually given a problem it knew how to solve, that it actually had a chance of winning. This, in contrast to the rumination I had been engaging in since the beginning of the trip which I had no chance of winning. On some deep level, I knew the constant rumination about dying from some unlikely event was an impossible battle, a war I couldn’t win; being given a task I could finally win at was cathartic, and my body immediately relaxed into it.  That was the secret behind that day: I had gone from a problem I could never solve to one I could solve, and my mind knew it. And, dare I say, some peace came from it.

For those of us stuck in obsessive worries, in obsessive thoughts and anxiety, the relevance is direct and simple: our brains know how to solve problems which occur on the outside world, but the same tactics fail when trying to solve problems on the inside world. We cannot solve the problems of our mind in the same manner in which we solve the problems outside our mind. Why? Because a problem-solving mind is a problem when solving the mind.

Here’s the situation: a hornet comes flying after us and so we swat at it; a dog comes running after us and so we run from it. Fight or flight, right? Try swatting at a thought and it sticks to your hand, try running from a thought and it runs right alongside you. Your thoughts are your hand, the very thing doing the swatting; the thoughts run alongside of you because they are you – they cannot be lost. Like a spider who suddenly gets lost in his own web, we get entangled in our own thoughts, and the harder we fight, the more stuck we get. Our tactics, our most basic and instinctual tactics, fail when trying to use them with our minds. And so we remain stuck. Fight or flight does – not – work – with – the – mind. Period. End of story.

So, a problem-solving mind is a problem when solving the mind.

Or, as Einstein is known to have said:

“The significant problems we have cannot be solved at the same level of thinking with which we created them.”

So what the hell? We cannot argue, we cannot debate, we cannot destroy, we cannot run from …. so what can we do? How can we win against these intrusive worries and anxieties?

As it turns out, the solution may very well be within simply observing these things, in simply seeing them and not reacting them, in – quite simply – being Mindful of them: Mindfulness. A growing list of scientific literature (if you’re interested in it, let me know) is showing that in simply observing – not in reacting to nor contemplating against – our thoughts, we tend to disengage them. This is based on the notion that we breathe life into these thoughts by reacting to them, otherwise they just remain as thoughts, and that’s all. This – mindfulness – may be the way to “fight” thoughts within our own mind (though using the word fight isn’t really appropriate). Within Mindfulness we don’t swat at the sticky thoughts, we don’t run from the quick thoughts: we simply let them be, like fish in a bowl, they just swim about – and we consider that “just fine”.

Now, I’ve known this – but just recently, as in the last two or three days, I’ve started to KNOW this. I can’t explain it, but just reading these words and agreeing to them is not enough, you have to live and breathe and really understand what they mean, see it in your life, and witness it time and time again. You have to watch yourself fighting and – by way of fighting – strengthening your worries. These things literally have no weight of their own, no strength that we don’t give them, no power that we don’t bestow upon them. These thoughts just are: they are transitory, ephemeral and foggy.

I’ll end with two statements. 1) This is the first time in my life where I’ve actually seen this reality so deeply and with such certainty; for some reason I can actually feel my body relaxing – if even only a little bit – in the fight against these intrusive and obsessive worries of mine. And 2) while driving home this evening and realizing what I’ve realized, my mind presented a question to me which I’ve never had it present before: now what? On some deep and very basic level, I literally saw a bit of worry, a different kind of worry: a worry about what am I going to think about now that these thoughts, these obsessive worries, may be intruding me less. Now what?

I’ve got a long way to go, but I feel like I’m on the path. Something good is happening….I’ve realized a war within our mind cannot be won. So like they used to say in the sixties:

“What if they gave a war, and nobody came?”

More on Focus

While reflecting on what I wrote about yesterday, I started thinking more about the notion of focus with regards to handling anxiety and major depressive disorders. Now, the first thing someone who suffers from anxiety or depression might say to me, if I were to mention they may be suffering from a lack of effort or focus, is, “I want to rid myself of this so badly, I don’t know how I couldn’t have the right effort or focus”. As is usually the case with such things, however, there is a subtlety involved: badly wanting something is far, far different than exerting the effort or maintaining the focus to actually get it. How many people badly want to be millionaires? How many people actually follow through with the effort necessary to become one? As another example, take a moment and reflect on the last time you saw a child throwing a fit in a checkout lane because they really, really wanted something, now we could hardly define their particular fit as focused and effortful, at least in the sense that I’m using it. What a child exerts when they want something badly is a selfish state of agitation expressed outwardly, there is no real effort or focus involved. Effort and focus imply concentrated work; not a wild spasm.

If one has jumped from one counselor or doctor to another, or from one self-help book or method to another, a case could be made they aren’t employing focus; they are wildly jumping from one topic to another in hopes a solution will present itself. And who wouldn’t? We’re typically promised from the healthcare industry amazing results in short order. But what does that mean, really? Each person markets a 12-step program, but in truth they’re actually marketing an alternative 12-step program to the one that failed you before. And just so we’re clear up front, I am not calling the sufferer lazy, nor am I calling them stupid: I’m simply calling them (and myself) somewhat delusional.

For anything to actually create the change we desire would require major work, sometimes equivalent to the work done by a surgeon to get their license, or a lawyer to get theirs, or to the training of an Olympic gold medalist. And no, I’m not stretching when I make that analogy – I honestly believe, for most of us, the change we desire is that hard to achieve. There is no secret solution where it all just “snaps” together, the only “secret” to the whole darn thing is how unbelievably hard it will be. If you’re awake 16 hours a day, would you spend each of those hours – every minute of every hour – working with massive intensity to achieve what you want? If not – then you’re probably not going to get it.

Again, Buddhism speaks of such things: right effort and right concentration.

So what I’m really saying by these last two posts isn’t that there is no hope for us, but that we actually have all that’s required already for the change we want in ourselves – the problem is that we often fail to recognize what’s really required of us to achieve such things, to realize such freedom. What we need is within us, but it’s dormant – and the only way to sprout it to fruition is more work than we – and myself included – probably ever though necessary.

Focus and Motivation

This is something I’ve been thinking about over the past couple days, and I’m starting to wonder if this might actually be a major component of someone’s path out of anxiety, depression, OCD, etc. The biggest problem, however, is the proper way to do this is quite subtle (if I’m on to something); as it’s not a matter of just being motivated to get better, nor maintaining the focus to get better, it’s a matter of maintaining the right focus and having the right motivation. Let me explain.

I’ve been in and out of psychologists and psychiatrists for the better part of a decade now, and I’ve learned a great number of treatment methods; in fact, I would say I’ve been a target for the best treatment methods available over the past decade. I’ve also been exposed to, probably, a dozen psychiatric medications at one point or another – I’ve used a great many of them, and experienced the (sometimes horrible) side effects of them. I’ve been there, and I’ve done that…and yet, to this day, I can still experience debilitating anxiety. The past week or so I’ve been really pondering the question: why still? And – after some intense meditation on the subject – I think I might be understanding the dynamics a bit, and quite possibly why others continue to suffer after much treatment as well. And it lies in  one of the most, in my experience, under-discussed areas.

My answer to Why? May actually be in the very question itself: Why?

I have been practicing Mindfulness (a Buddhist practice which has, recently, started gaining a large amount of attention in the academic circles for its high degree of efficacy in dealing with various anxiety disorders [here are some articles on the subject]); and from the Buddhist perspective, there is such a thing as right Mindfulness (and, for what it’s worth, also right intention and right concentration). A couple days ago, as I was walking to work, I started feeling a slight raise in anxiety (this tends to happen frequently to me in the morning), and immediately started thinking about the various Mindfulness and breathing techniques I could use to start to bring me down from the anxiety. I was, effectively, using Mindfulness as a cure for the anxiety. Now, according to the pure Buddhist approach, this isn’t the definition of right Mindfulness, as right Mindfulness is Mindfulness for the sake of, well, being Mindful. Here is the subtle point: being Mindful for the sake of curing self isn’t Mindfulness, it just isn’t. In essence, the tactics are sound, (I’m following through the motions accurately), but the reasoning is flawed. 

How so?

Because trying to save or cure or protect or preserve any definition or notion of me or mine or I is wrought with difficulties and trap doors. Self is a fluid, dynamic, transitory process of emotions and thoughts; not a stable, constant, and easily-identifiable thing in and of itself. To hitch your motivation on trying to preserve or keep “me” safe is like trying to tie your boat to the water itself in lieu of the dock; no matter how hard you try, the first wind that comes along will blow you further out to sea. The very attempt at preserving “myself” is flawed, and  yet – in every single attempt I’ve made through most of my life – the tactics, tools and training I’ve applied has been for just that: me.

“I hate this feeling – I had better start practicing some guided imagery to keep me from feeling it.”

“I am getting anxious, I will start doing some breathing techniques to keep myself from feeling bad.”

“I feel like I might have a disease, I should use some rational self talk to convince myself otherwise.”

But me – I – the very thing I’m trying to protect, will just as quickly shift directions and start projecting or exhibiting something else immediately after whatever rational thought has been made, or feeling has been stopped, or anxiety has been prevented. I’m trying to fill a bucket with a hole in it – there is no end to this game. I’m starting to see – in a very real and solid sense – how many of the most fundamental of Buddhist thoughts are not only accurate, but quite possibly a very valid answer. Gautama Buddha was no dummy. In a way, this is exactly what Buddhists mean when they refer to  being trapped in Samsara.

There is an English word for what I mean when I use the word motivation (and it’s probably a bit more strict), and that is conation:

“One of the three aspects of the mind, in particular dealing with "willing and desiring", the others being cognition (awareness) and affection (feeling or emotion). They may work as a whole, but any one may dominate any mental process”

So it’s not just enough to want to get better, nor is it enough to be willing or to desire to get better, but the secret sauce – if you will – is in the intent, the very reasoning behind why you want to get better or, to steal Buddhist parlance, in possessing right intent.

So what is the right intent? I’m exploring and learning what that is and how to maintain focus on it; that is part of my journey. I think that might be part of the fogginess: it’s going to be different for different people, possibly – but ultimately selfishness (as was/is my motivation to date) is a dangerous and probably hopeless cause, and it is the primary focus of most therapy. Think about it. They don’t call it self-help for shits and giggles. If your compass for progress treats “me” as North, you’ll quickly find yourself chasing tail for the remainder of your life.

And what of focus or concentration? Bad habits die hard, and the very neurotic or destructive behaviors we engage in are habits just like any other; meaning, of course, they are hard to remove. The “good” habits – the ones which will, as Thich Nhat Hanh is known to say, “water the seeds of joy” are very infrequently watered, as it were. We don’t employ them because we, mindlessly, don’t engage in them. We offer them lip service, but we do not actually engage in them to enact change. It’s like reading a mathematics textbook without actually doing any of the homework – you will probably pick up some terminology, but you’ll probably fail the exam miserably.

And we’re failing the exam.

So, if you stand back for a moment and kind of see the web I’ve been spinning, you’ll see how these two things: intent and concentration, can come together and mix themselves to produce a consistent flow of energy to cause change. That is, if we can maintain a valid intent and strong enough concentration to keep them around.

More to come, as I’m feeling very curious about these thoughts…

Overreactivity

Today’s Rating (5/10 – average).
Tested: 24 times.
Panic Attacks: 3

I’m debating on whether I want to give today a higher rating because I did actively apply something I’ve been trying to get myself to apply now for a while, I’ll stick with what I have now, though, because I also applied some pretty bad principles too.

I have discovered over time that diet plays a large role in my problems with anxiety (I have a minor case of reactive hypoglycemia), and so when a panic attack is about to hit, often a can of coke will bring me out of it (if it’s related to low sugar, which it sometimes is). The problem, as you can imagine, is that a can of coke will spike the blood sugar, causing it to rise, and fall again as the body begins to self-regulate; and for me, it falls too far too fast. Shortly (within 15 minutes), I’m back in the anxiety again, but this time possibly far worse. It’s a horrible roller coaster with, seemingly, no way to win. The answer, just as I was afraid, is to actually ride the wave a bit and to let the body self-regulate (well, the actual answer is to simply stay away from high-carb/sugar foods in the first place).

And today, actually, about an hour ago, I did just that – I sat through a panic attack which was (according to my monitor) related to lower than normal blood sugar levels. The body self-regulated shortly (the exact mechanisms by which it does this is beyond this post, but it is interesting), and I was feeling better. The key, however, is that this time I felt better naturally, in lieu of artificially. A major problem with this disorder, then, is the over reactiveness of the sufferer – to reach for things (behaviors, foods, etc) as an ailment when, in fact, these things are actually making the problem worse.

But we all have encountered this, haven’t we?

When we’re stressed, some of us reach for a cigarette, others reach for a sweet, some reach for alcohol, some reach for sex; the list goes on and on and on. The reality is that we, as humans, are so afraid of being uncomfortable and demand so viciously that we absolutely not have it, that we overreact in the event we do have it and fail to recognize that it’s sometimes the body’s way of telling us something: the patterns to which you’ve attached yourself are not working, find something else. We look for the safe, immediate, quick fixes; and often those very things cause us more trouble.

Today was a minor victory in that I’m learning to trust my body a bit, although it does come at a cost: I’m using a lot of sugar strips while monitoring it. I hope that slows down as I start to gain a bit of faith in my body on this matter.

Self-testing

 

Today’s rating: 6/10 (a little better than usual).

One of the most frustrating parts of this disorder is the inordinate and disproportionate amount of self-testing that’s inevitably involved; and depending on what you’re testing, it can not only be intrusive, but it can be costly (financially and emotionally). It definitely gets in the way of my life, and I can tell it weighs on others around me too.

I’ve got two things I primarily obsess about: one is heart-beat rate (which is actually pretty common amongst people with anxiety disorders), and the other is blood sugar (which is not so common to us, but which is quite possibly linked to a good number of anxiety conditions in existence today). The heart-beat testing is actually not all too intrusive (though it can be odd to see someone standing in an elevator with their index and middle finger on their radial pulse), but the blood sugar testing is absolutely intrusive (for those who aren’t aware, testing blood sugar actually involves pricking your finger with a needle and placing blood on a test strip).

Why all the testing? Because the obsessive-compulsive mind is fixated on the aspect of control; and it determines (and crazily focuses on) that which it cannot control as a threat; therefore, certain things crucial to life (such as blood sugar or the heart in general) become center stage and frequently tested for “goodness” or acceptability. For each person with OCD the exact things tested are often different, and sometimes it even does have something to do with a real condition (as with me and my blood sugar testing), though it rarely is in proportion to the actual disorder (again, as with my and my blood sugar testing). And no – I don’t have diabetes, and it’s not relevant to the discussion to explain what I do have, but just note  that I test (waaaay) too much.

So, bottom line: self-testing is a control issue, an intense need for certainty, predictability, controllability, and stability in the world that basically has gone haywire and out of control. So when you see these people with out of control OCD, they’re basically trying to control their world, and it’s unpredictability is driving their anxiety disorder through the roof. It’s also worth noting that while *there is* an underlying biochemical and neurological component to all of this, the sort of malfunctioning in the brain’s wiring that causes this can be rewritten.

So what do I do to work on this stuff? Well, it’s interesting. Obsession starts with the thought: an intrusive, maladaptive thought which – like a really bad song that gets stuck in your head – essentially replays itself over and over and over again. For example, this morning, I counted upwards of 75 times – as I got ready – I reminded myself that my body will fail on me today (through a heart attack, or something of a similar vein). Just like my analogy of the bad song, it literally gets stuck in your head and it repeats, and repeats, and repeats – to the point, quite literally, that it drowns out everything else around you. The experience is like a contraction: it actually becomes claustrophobic, in a way, as you start to see your circle of compassion and awareness collapse in around you and all you hear is this horrible reminder that “you’re going to die” or “something terrible is about to happen”. Often people in this situation scramble for more control, and reach for something to use to control the situation; this is known as the compulsion (hence, obsessive and compulsive). The compulsion is the thing to which we attach our minds because we’ve labeled it as the controll-er….the very thing which our mind has latched onto that can control the situation. For some, going through a particular pattern of doing something is that compulsion, for others – like me – self-testing is the compulsion. But whatever it is, the obsession is the stuck reminder of our lack of control, and the compulsion is the thing which we do to answer that thought.

Ah – but I was going to answer what I do. There’s a lot of tactics out there, but ultimately, for me at least, it comes down to methods of expanding my awareness or, basically, trying to give my mind more to focus on. Note that I said “more” to focus on, not “something else” to focus on. It’s an interesting game people with OCD play with themselves when they try to remove an obsessive thought: all it really does is reinforce the thought (for example, try not to think of a pink elephant as I’m typing this….you can’t, can you? Why? Because in the act of mentioning not to think of a pink elephant, I mentioned the pink elephant). So the answer is slightly more subtle: including MORE in your thinking. As an example, I’ve adopted the “Yes, and…” method lately, and it seems to work:

“Ugh, I feel crappy, I bet it’s my heart…I bet I’m going to die”
“Yes, and look at the sunset, isn’t it nice?”

“You feel dizzy, I bet it’s your blood sugar”
”Yes, and I bet this is one good way to solve that computer programming problem you’ve been thinking about”.

See? It’s different because it doesn’t attempt to stop a thought (nor to really even argue with it), but to almost get it lost in perspective to everything else going on outside my mind. The result? The result seems to be a diminishing of the thoughts claustrophobic control over me, as things start to becoming more relative and placed into perspective (if you’re claustrophobic, then you open up the window and see what else is going on outside). Quite simply, if it weren’t for this tactic, my day would have been a 4/10 instead of a 6/10….at least.

I’m going to start making public how much I’m testing, as hard as that may be to do, I think it’s important. So, starting tomorrow you’ll start to see the numbers….

What am I doing?

“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself--and you are
the easiest person to fool. So you have to be very careful about
that. After you've not fooled yourself, it's easy not to fool other
scientists. You just have to be honest in a conventional way after
that.”

~R. P. Feynman

What am I doing? I’m writing a blog about my crippling anxiety disorder. Why? Because I have fooled myself about it. I have failed in almost every way with regards to living with this disorder and I feel my failure regarding this disorder is due to me not totally being real with myself and with everyone in my life about it. I can’t do what I need to do (“unfool” myself) without being open and public and real about it. So that’s what I’m doing, and that’s why I’m doing it. In a strange and selfish way, I suppose, I need you, and so I’m leaning on you. But in a more realistic manner, I need the feeling of reality that being open with someone (everyone?) about something provides; I need that solidity in my life, and I need to remove all of the smoke and mirrors I have subconsciously used to tell myself I’m making progress when, in fact, I’m not.

However, there’s another (perhaps) more altruistic reason I’m doing what I’m doing: because I honestly believe being public and open and real about this disorder can help others. There are some I know, personally, who suffer from the same or similar ailment, and there are many whom I’ve never met that *I know* also suffer. There are large walks for AIDS, and walks for cancer, and walks for Diabetes, but there are no walks (at least that I have seen) for anxiety disorders (probably because we’d all be too nervous to do it, ahem – I had to say that before you did). But honestly, our culture sees any disorder of the mind as a weakness of character, as something not as dangerous or real or harmful to someone as a physical disorder; and that’s sad because, let me tell you, it is. Heart disease, diabetes, cancer – the whole lot - can often be caused, or at least greatly pushed along, by uncontrolled anxiety and depression. If you want proof of this claim let me know, and I’ll dump onto you a truck load of research indicating how unbelievably costly – in terms of both money and health – anxiety can be to our culture, and how it can be a “gateway” to these other “physical” disorders. However, if you’re still not convinced, then that’s fine, just don’t read my blog.

I’m going to write about my experiences, I’m going to rate my days, and I’m going to focus – intensely – on the things I need to be real about. My hypochondria is through the roof and it, alongside my (yes, clinically diagnosed) obsessive compulsive disorder, intermix to create a great deal of self-checking and monitoring (blood pressure, pulse – the whole range). For example, sometimes I need to check the doors in my house four or five times (when I’m not on or miss my Lexapro, it can be fifteen or twenty times) before I go to bed. All of this has also handed me a pretty nasty case of agoraphobia (which is actually a condition where one fears being away from a “safe zone” out of fear of having a panic attack in a public or inescapable location). So, yes, I have the whole gambit, the whole range, and the whole shooting match, as it were.

But in the end, I’m going to try to focus most intensely on those things which work, on the successes and breakthroughs, and the “wins” against this thing. Believe it or not, but I have made tremendous progress already, but all of that progress is for not if I cannot actually live the life I want to live because I still cannot get past the fundamental elements of this disorder. Over the past year I have explored my spiritual (though still very secular) side through my outward practice and study of Buddhism, and that has also gained for me a great deal of inner peace and tranquility and – to be honest – openness about my anxiety.

I fear that I have rambled enough, but I had to be open about this thing (as that’s the whole point), and reveal myself as clearly as I could from the get-go. And I hope I did that. We’ll see where this thing takes me, this unhindered exposure and “welcoming” of my disorder, and if you’d like to join me on the ride, I welcome it.