End of Year Brain Dump 2019

I’ve been struggling a lot emotionally lately. I don’t know if it’s the holidays or a combination of things that have kicked in, things that have triggered PTSD, anxiety, and depression back full force, causing me to lose sleep and lose my appetite again. I seemed to have been doing fine up until about a month ago. I need to get back to counseling, but I don’t have my next appointment until the end of January.

What changed? Some of my habits changed. Since the holidays are here, I’ve been going out more, which means drinking more, which has brought up some suppressed feelings about things I wasn’t ready to deal with before. Suddenly, I’m aware of things that I don’t want to think about, but I’m unsure what to do with these feelings.

Major anxiety and depression has my mind going back and forth, creating stories that don’t exist (this is where I need to put them into a fiction story just to get it out), and I can’t focus on anything. I haven’t been this bad in two years. My appetite has changed. I don’t have much of one, and I don’t know if it’s due to stress (I tend to not eat when I’m stressed) or other things that I’m allowing to bother me. Perhaps it’s hormonal, but I don’t think this is.

Holidays. Parts of my family do not get along or speak to each other anymore, which makes it difficult on everyone trying to get together. It also makes it sad for the rest of us. Being single once again during the holidays is also taxing, kicking in reminders of how our society views women as failures for being single at all.

All of this reminds me of when I was a senior in high school when my first boyfriend cheated on me and dumped me without telling me. I was devastated. I have that same gut anxiety feeling right now. I remember then that I couldn’t eat and couldn’t sleep, but I rode my bike a lot just to let out some physical angst. The only thing different is that I’m in my 40s, haven’t been working out, and I have more life experience. So why is this awful feeling coming back? Triggers.

I suppose I need to learn to recognize what really triggers all of this, but I’m thinking it probably has a lot to do with abandonment issues and feelings of lack of love and trust from people that I’ve loved and I thought loved me, too. At this point, do I even know what love is, because what I thought was love apparently was not. Hmmm….