the anxiety we all get that does not fall under a classification or a diagnosis
There’s things I’ve done I can’t erase
Every night we fall from grace
It’s hard, with the world in your face
Try to hold on, try to hold on. . .
~ Bon Jovi, ‘Keep the Faith’
I believe in the Holy Trinity, and I believe in the Blessed Virgin.
I believe in God, and I believe in science. Continue reading
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Does anxiety make us do stupid things? Or do our stupid actions cause anxiety?
As I roll around this spastic hamster wheel of my own creation, I realize it probably doesn’t matter. The result is the same. Utter and complete exasperation. Heart-pounding worry. Multiple imagined scenarios of worst cases.
I forgot to order my meds. Again.
Every few months, I find myself staring down the empty bottle neck of my meds.
It shouldn’t sneak up on me like this. My physician, insurance company, and I have a nice, little arrangement for ourselves. She writes the script, they fill it, I retrieve it from the mailbox. Couldn’t be any less painless. Continue reading
Hello to all you amazing Canvas readers! Remember me? Maybe? Just a little? Clearly it has been a long time since I showed my lovely face around these parts. Some of that has been life, part of it has been Blog For Mental Health 2014, but most of it. . . Well, here goes.
The last post I wrote for Canvas, well, I started composing it at the end of 2013, moved on to actually writing it into March 2014, read and re-read the 1,800 words I had managed to knock it down to, and after all that I finally shelved it. You see, as some of you know, I was incredibly ill from September 2013 well into January 2014. Continue reading
I make people uncomfortable.
I make people squirm.
I remind people of those dark corners of themselves they’d like to forget. Continue reading
For a long time, it was as if I lived two lives.
Parallel, and at times, intersecting, but to all those save a close few – totally distinct. One hidden from the other; one nonexistent except for the shadow it cast on my life.
When I could get out from under it, it was much easier for even me to pretend that shadow life didn’t exist. I wasn’t suffering. I wasn’t having trouble coping. I didn’t need help. Certainly, no one needed to know about it. Continue reading
Anyone who has ever looked up a “serious mental illness” like bipolar disorder has been smacked in the face with dire warnings and frightening statistics about misdiagnosis. If you google my lifelong companion ADD, you’ll see lots and lots of dire warnings and hand-wringing about overdiagnosis. But you won’t run into are dire warnings, frightening statistics, and hand-wringing about repeated, compounded misdiagnoses.
Louis Armstrong and many others have sung the words, “When you’re smiling, the whole world smiles with you.”
I believe in those words … I do. Smiles are contagious!
But I have not been able to smile for around 12 years now. A gift from my experience with Bell’s Palsy. Continue reading
I am extraordinarily lucky: I have complete coverage health insurance. That means all therapy, lab tests, prescriptions, and other services – even chiropractic – are covered 100%. It sounds too good to be true, right?
It is.
The catch is that it’s a high deductible plan, and while my husband’s employer pays the bulk of the $11K deductible, we pay about $2K. Continue reading
A Canvas Of The Minds 