In case you can't tell from my last couple of blog posts, I'm having a hard time right now emotionally. This is stressful, this digging into the final death throes of a marriage that's been dying for a long time. The worry over what will or won't happen, the not knowing how things will shake out in the final dispensation of our lives together, it gives me over to the brittle, acid edge of panic. And of course life doesn't stop just so I can have anxiety, so it wraps its tendrils around everything - work, parenting, tending animals and working horses - until all things seem fraught with emotion I'm not dealing with well.
Thanks to my particular versions of "stuff that's wrong with me," anxiety is a long-term companion. If anxiety were a person we'd have had a common-law marriage years ago. As it is, you would think that I would be used to the physical and emotional repercussions of our partnership, but somehow I never am. I'll start to obsess about one thing, anxiety sets in, and as the dark stain of adrenaline spreads, I'll start applying the fear to things that don't even belong to it.
Maybe someone will cross the line on my way to work today and I'll die in a fiery wreck.
Something will happen to one of the kids, something horrible.
My house will burn down.
Something will happen to one of the cats or one of the dogs, and God knows Juliet's already gone through two of her nine lives what with the whatever thing that bit her and she almost bled to death and the stuff that looks like she got rolled by a car...or one of the horses will get sick or one of the chickens will get eaten.
SG will figure out how really super fucked up I am and run for the hills
I'll lose my job
My car will break down
And so on.
Its like dancing handcuffed to someone who won't let you sit down and breathe. And I keep dancing because if I don't, if the wheel stops, if I take a minute to breathe, I'll fall apart. So I move forward and sideways and around in circles and I keep going because the anxiety, there's no victory over her, just coping and getting through it. The only way through it is, frankly, through. Medicating is not an option, the kind of medication I'd need to cut through this thick skein of feelings would drop a horse, and I just can't do that, not what with the 45-mile commute and the parenting and the things needing doing. Can't. So I cope.
The light at the tunnel is that this prom date with my evil muse is only temporary. Once the material things that are whipping her into a frenzy are done with, she'll sulk off for greener, albeit temporary, pastures, and I"ll enjoy a much needed vacation from her attentions.
Much. Needed.
