Overwhelmed and Afraid

I'm no stranger to anxiety; we've been good pals for eight or nine years now. Depression and mood swings are also good friends of mine, though they've ganged up on me this term.

Whispering little words of deleterious actions.
Telling me how worthless I am.
How I need to stay inside; the outside world is dangerous.
How everyone will leave me.

I've become so overwhelmed with my school work, though it is only two courses. A lecture and a lab. Fairly easy, just tedious to study for.
They are classes for a degree I do not want, yet I continue studying for it with such vigor that I wonder if I subconsciously want to become this...I'm diverging.

I have very little, if any, social life. I have a decent grasp on my anxiety the majority of the time. But this upcoming month is filled with things to do...and I am not an outgoing person. My birthday is less than two weeks away (the magical drinking age of 21), the upcoming weekend I go on vacation, and March itself is full of fun things. No, that's not sarcasm.

So...why am I so scared? These are all good things. They are healthy things; things any "normal" person would love to do.

But I cannot shake the sense of it being overwhelming. It is an all encompassing feeling. It causes dread in my stomach, and I've found that going to class if becoming harder and harder (at least attendance doesn't count). I tend to curl up in my room, sometimes sobbing, resisting urges to relapse into harming...and I can see that I'm starting to become agoraphobic (having studied and gotten a degree in psychology makes one super aware :/). I've tried distraction methods, upping my medication dosage (which helps when I lapse into panic attacks and when this feeling invades my sleep schedule), and calming methods. Calming methods help take the edge off the most, but: it's still there

I'm still trying to claw myself out of a hole from a heavy depression bout, I'm not there, and every day I waver on my progress of getting out.

I am so sick of hearing, "It's all in your head."

I barely leave my neighborhood, unless I absolutely have to. The idea of going anywhere is exhausting, let alone doing it. And I'm afraid, constantly. I don't know why, but it's a subtle feeling that I'm going to be alone (thank yooouuu BPD ); but that feeling is not wrong and it only locks it in deeper. I live with my elderly grandmother, who's battling cancer, my parents are deep into their own lives, and my friends are all away at college or have moved (I graduated at 19). The only family I actually have left, live across the state. The boyfriend is long-distance and comes up every two weeks.

I don't know how to tackle this, and it gets worse at night. I drop into an abyss at night; everything becomes 10x worse than in the day.

I see my long-term therapist this upcoming Monday, but for right now, I have no idea how to deal with this, even after dealing with anxiety and depression for so long...
I need advice, because I'm at such a loss on what to do.

Dear Denki:

You wrote this post some time ago. I am sorry you didn't get replies. If you are reading this, please let me know and I will respond to your post or to a new one you will add here. I hope the therapy is working for you.

atina

Hello atina,
I am much better than how I was when I wrote that. That therapy didn't help, which was extremely surprising and a touch disappointing, and I did relapse a few times a little while after that. So far I'm coming up on ~43 days free from relapses now though

I never get that many replies, if any (depending on the forum, I tend to get more replies in the Dissociative and Personality Disorder sections for some reason).

Thank you

I really appreciate the concern, and I'm happy to say I haven't had a major depressive bout since writing that out and my last relapses

Dear Denki:

I enjoy the intelligence and humor in your writing. Too bad therapy didn't work out. You are 21 and the anxiety and depression started when you were...12 or so? I wonder what happened then?

I know anxiety very well, decades of it. And I do know how mine started. And why. I think I am able to live with it now, to not be overwhelmed. All the ways I tried to calm myself before... Fear is the most powerful emotion there is.

atina

Atina,

I'm sorry this reply is almost a year old. Around 13 years old my parents divorced, but since I already had the "double dose" of depressive and anxiety disorders I think it just flipped the switch. I had been going to therapy since I was seven...mostly because my mother noticed I was a very angry child. Looking at it now, depression can and sometimes does manifest itself as aggression (even earlier than that I was bullying other children and biting them; I've been told the latter is a form of passive aggression).

Regardless of that, things have gone quite swimmingly since the last post. I've avoided the forums in case of being triggered...and I already was about an hour ago tonight due to watching a short video on OCD and catching some of my traits...but I am happy to say that 2016 only resulted in about nine or ten instances of self-harm

So my 2017 resolution is to keep it at zero, and if I can't do that...then my resolution is to love and forgive myself and realize and recognize my emotions as valid. As a passing storm that I just have to wait out.

Thank you for your support

Dear Denki:

You are welcome. Do avoid the forums if they trigger you. Do Well with your 2017 resolutions.

atina