Going to Ground....

There's an old saying that reads "hurt people hurt people" - and sometimes the person that gets most hurt is yourself. Today was a complete and total rollercoaster of a day with the full gammet of emotions. I didn't go to church and perhaps that was my first mistake....the first sign of me isolating myself because of the stress and anxiety I have going on right now.

I got up and frantically got started on cleaning out my garage - it took a few hours to do, and at the end of it I had my art studio back, I found somewhere neat to put the BBQ, and I had a car FULL of rubbish to take to the tip. It felt amazing going to the dump and throwing out all that stuff - I get such a high from purging stuff much like a drug addict gets high on their drug of choice. But by the time I got home and jumped on my computer that all changed.

I went on the forums where I had been doing a lot of research on my surgery, and I got upset over a post. So silly really considering I only have met one person from that forum in real life, so who cares really right? But here I was getting very upset and what I SHOULD have done is take a break, go do something silly, play a game or read or relax somehow.

Instead, my tied up, anxious, panicked fearful self decided I wanted to sew something....and somewhere between having a full blown panic attack and then screaming like a God-awful banshee at my sewing machine I realised I had made a mistake.

Ok, so perhaps I'm a little more messed up than I initially thought.

I have learned one thing however that I thought was interesting. Brad at one point while trying to calm me down pointed out that the key to my problem was that I needed to take all that fear, all that anxiety and channel it instead into determination that no matter what happens, no matter how things go over the next few months, I would follow every single instruction and I would make this work - that's all I have to do. Thinking like that does making me feel a little better because it simplifies things for me. It's like the Nike ad - JUST DO IT.

It's really the head "stuff" that scares me. I fear my own emotions. I am afraid of my own mental processes - I guess most of all I fear the abyss because I've been there before. The only thing I am hanging on to at this stage is that losing weight CAN improve depression and anxiety, especially since I will be exercising every day and getting all those endorphins flowing. I know what I have to do, and I know where to turn for help. Food cannot be my "be all and end all" anymore - I have to relearn how to live my life, and I wont really KNOW what that's going to look like until I actually do it. And that's perhaps the hardest thing to try and cope with right now.