anxiety & people-fear / fretting about friends
icon: "disassociative (a digital painting of a stylized person in profile with wide open screaming mouth and arms up with palms spread wide. Head and hands flow into strands like blood vessels)"
I cried for hours yesterday and in talking with Topaz about it I realized that this isn't a cyclic feeling like I was thinking (I was starting to wonder if it was hormonal), it is something I feel every single day and just usually repress, and once or twice a month it comes out in a gigantic multi-hour sobbing shaking mess. Every day that I see another human being and feel that connection is impossible, the feeling gets a little bigger. I keep hoping something will change. But it doesn't. And I push it down and put a lid (made of hope and will) on. Often the lid pops off and I can wrestle it back on after only 5 minutes of crying. And sometimes the lid disintegrates entirely and I can't build a new one immediately and it's out and it's everywhere and no one wants to be around me because good god stop whining when you already have so many amazing friends!
That question I answered the other day about my most difficult-to-discuss mental issue? this is it. It's usually so squished I can't find it when someone asks how I am doing, but I can sense it there, so it is hard to answer. And when it is not squished sufficiently and someone asks me how I am, it boils over. Or if the person feels especially empathetic, it boild over. So I fucking hate when people ask how I am because it disturbs my only coping mechanism for this.
But my answer the other day I think is also true, because I remembered that Kylei's anxiety is also usually focused on people, but theirs looks different because they are more outgoing. Kylei gets anxious that people don't want to continue being their friend. I get anxious that they don't ever want to begin.
I think I have a lot of anxiety that I just squish very hard. That might be part of the reason my memory is so bad- my brain is always running a squish program and can't put it on hold to actually focus on fetching a memory.
I think that the reason I couldn't understand why I kept feeling this when it is so irrational is that it is chemical. At least, one can hope. I'm going to talk to my doctor about an anti-anxiety med (NOT a benzo). I'm gonna ask about mirtazapine because that is anti anxiety and depression (and I want to go off the bupropion I'm currently taking for depression), its not an SSRI (SSRIs make me depressed) or MAOI (which have risks that terrify me) and it works on adrenergic receptors which feels intuitively correct to me, and prescribing particular meds is always guesswork anyway.