Well, here’s a little information of Anxiety Disorder for you:
GAD stands for “Generalized Anxiety Disorder” – it’s something that causes someone to worry or become anxious uncontrollably, usually it’s taken out of proportion and the situations are made worse than they seem. It gets so bad that the anxiety begins to dominate a person’s thoughts. Some symptoms may include: ongoing worry, tension, trouble with sleep, trembling, irritability, nausea, sweating, and so on. I’ve been doing a little research on it and it says that it affects 4 million people and tends to affect women more than men.

I woke up in the middle of the night about a month ago and suffered from a panic attack. It was about 1:15 in the morning – I sat up and panicked, my heart was racing and I had a hard time relaxing. I ended up asking my partner to take me to the hospital. I couldn’t figure out what was going on with my body and it was scary. It’s the second panic attack that I have had since last year, when I got to the hospital – I told them that and they proceeded to admit me and then they did a blood test, urine test, chest x-ray, and a CAT scan on me to rule out anything being wrong with my heart, circulatory system or anything else. Nothing was wrong so they discharged me from the hospital and gave me papers that told me that I was suffering from “Anxiety Disorder”.

I’m very embarrassed by it all and I have kept it secret ever since I began to suffer from anxiety. I don’t feel that it is something that is easily understood by everyone. It’s not really easy for me to talk about, especially because I feel that it will change how people I know view me. At times, I even feel like I am crazy and far from normal because of it. I feel that now it would be best if I get it out in the open and get a strong support network started – after all how can I get past it if I can’t even be open about it.

I feel like I can pin point the beginning of when my stress began to become overwhelming. It began during Hurricane Ike – we didn’t evacuate, we stayed behind and I stayed with my partner and his dad to help out. The hurricane left us without power – which gave us very little cold beverages and cold food to eat. We had to work and ration things out – I remember walking around with my partner. We walked around to see what stores were open and which were not. I remember walking back to the apartment and I had to lie down because I was feeling small heart palpitations. I shook it off and didn’t really worry about it.

After that, I began to go through a lot of stress – stress because I was out of my classes for 2 weeks and I had to struggle to make sure I passed everything, I was also at odds with my parents. I never dated much in my life, and when I met someone – I never was really open about it with my parents. I just didn’t feel comfortable about it. Which I felt was for the better because they turned out to be jerks anyways. When I met my partner – I was finally open about it, maybe it was because I just got such good vibes about it. I even called my Mom to tell her about the great date that I had on the way home from it.

Unfortunately, my Mom wasn’t nearly as supportive of my dating as I thought she would be. My Mom made a lot of mistakes growing up. One involved her getting pregnant at a young age – though she eventually miscarried. I don’t know as much about my parents past as my sister does – but I am sure part of it had to do with her and my dad partying and doing drugs in the young years of their relationship together. My parents weren’t necessarily smart at times, not with themselves, each other, or the friends that they made. So when I started dating – my Mom projected all of that onto me: According to her I was taking diet pills because at the time I was losing weight, and I often got lectured about how I shouldn’t take them. When I wasn’t there, my sister would tell me that my Mom would often talk behind my back and call me irresponsible, talk about how all guys are only good at first, and suggest that I may be taking pills or something. See it was tough being a 22 year old (on the verge of becoming a 23 year old) at the time and still living with your parents. It’s even tougher when they still want to view you as a child. It was so bad that my parents wouldn’t even let me close the door to my bedroom if my partner and I were going to be in there alone. I became frustrated, see I’ve always been a good girl, maybe a little rebellious growing up – but it never involved crazy sex escapades, drugs, alcohol, or anything else. I can’t even stand to be near someone smoking a cigarette. My Mom was just so convinced that I wasn’t going to be smart and I would make all of the same mistakes she did. It eventually led to my Mom and I fighting with each other through an e-mail. I ended up having to leave work because I was in tears, I couldn’t handle it and I feared that my Mom and I were beginning to alienate ourselves from each other .

Also at the time, I was having a little bit of a hard time getting used to being a relationship with such a great guy. I was used to receiving some form of emotional scarring in one way or another – so unfortunately I expected that same thing from my new partner. Neither of us had been in a good serious relationship before – so the both of us had to change and get used to it. I had to learn to drop my barriers and fears about men and being in a relationship and he had to drop the habits he developed from being a single man. I had a lot of trouble dealing with him not being able to filter out that he wasn’t supposed to scope out other women anymore. I normally would catch him looking at other women right in front of me and this caused my thoughts to spin out of control. I admit that I had never had good confidence in my looks and body and I made it worse. I began to compare myself to other women that fit that skewed form of beauty that I felt I needed to be. I worried that he would find someone else and leave me, or that he would get bored with the way I looked and go looking for someone else, or that I even had do things like threesomes just to keep him interested (that idea just came from knowing that it was something that all guys fantasized about). When my Mom and Dad’s marriage began to get rocky it was apparent to everyone that he started looking at other women. When I was 11 I found porn on our family computer and if there was anything on TV showing skimpy women he always wanted to watch it. So unfortunately I began to associate wandering eyes with unhappiness in the relationship. Which I realize now isn’t always the case and I know there is not anything wrong with it. This was just my thinking at the time.

This is part 1, in part 2, I’ll finish up the rest of the story and tell you how I am handling it all.