The Tug-of-War Between Anxiety and Daily Life

I feel like I want to write you something different, not the same old mopey crap, one day good, one day bad.  However it is exactly how living with this illness is.  One day is good, one day is bad, one is terrible, one is mediocre.  Some days I don’t want to get out of bed, today was one of those days.  I just didn’t want to be here or anywhere.  I wanted the voice inside of me to just be quiet, stop telling me what I should be doing or could be doing.  Just be quiet.  I went for two naps today, to try and reset and cover my head and hope for better when I got up.  Everything seemed to annoy or irritate me.  I said to Kevin “I want to blow my head off”.  I said to Kierra, “Life is awful”.  “What on earth made me think having three kids was a good idea?”  I then tried to answer my own question by saying that one day, “God would show me why.” This as I held Brant’s sopping muddy shoes in my hands and assessed where the mud trail had all gone, along the driveway and house.  Kierra tried to calm me and make me laugh with saying “who knows maybe he will win the lottery one day.”

I don’t like being like this, I don’t like being so negative and yelling and being annoyed with the kids.  I want to love, cherish and enjoy all their little moments of being little but I have these anxious thoughts in my head about making sure the house and yard is clean and perfect for Ava’s grad bbq.  It is a week away and it is ridiculously turning me into a different person.  It’s not even going to be a lot of people but just the thought of the food preparations and drinks, decorations, cleaning in the house and having the yard ready, has me anxious for something that is actually just being plain ridiculous at this point. 

As I yell about the mud all over the driveway, Kierra says “mom take it easy, mother nature can clean that up with rain within the week.”  I know the anxiousness is ridiculous and possibly even the worst thing about it is I don’t even do anything to make it better. Example, the Fridge is a disgusting mess and instead of cleaning the fridge, I work in the garden or mope in my bed, do laundry or yell at someone.  The whole time I’m thinking I’m never going to get the fridge clean before next week, when in reality I have hours and hours and hours to clean the fridge.  So what exactly is my problem? 

Do I just want to complain about it?  Do I just want the fridge to be dirty so I can say I was so busy I had no time to clean it? Just because I’m too lazy to clean it? Why do we worry about things and procrastinate things at the same time only to keep churning our worry?

I decided to go for a dirt bike ride, you know because that makes more sense than actually cleaning the fridge.  I feel alive when I go on the dirt bike, I feel all my responsibilities melt away and it’s just me making sure I stay alive on the road and enjoying the scenery.  It made me thinks of things that bring me joy and how beautiful it was to be free from my whirling to do lists going through my head.  To do lists that I will whirl through hundreds and hundreds of times but only accomplish the things that I really want to do….like decorate. That I have no problem getting to because I enjoy to do it.  Someone please help me figure out how to enjoy to clean the fridge and do housework.  Getting meals on the table and getting the dishes washed is about as much as a gold star I can muster most days. 

As I told myself today as I laid in my bed with the covers over my head, tomorrow is a new day, tomorrow I might feel like doing it, I might put my headphones on and listing to some jamming music and start attacking all the cleaning projects that torment my mind or maybe I won’t.  Then I guess there always is another tomorrow and worse case scenario is that there is no tomorrows and my fridge is a mess but I have food and drink for all and of course I have the decorations! Maybe I’ll just focus on what I can do and have to do and the rest will happen or they won’t and maybe just like Kierra said “mother nature or some other force” will help with the clean up and if it doesn’t then please excuse my fridge while you grab a cold beverage that I thought about what is your favorite while I was shopping and to me that was most important.  My main goal is for you to have a great time and for us to all enjoy each other’s company, sometimes the goal has to take the precedence because without the goal, just what in the hell are we trying to achieve?

Chat again soon,

Michelle