Anxiety And Tension
Dismantaling General Anxiety Disorder!
General Anxiety Disorder, impacting approximately
500,000 people in the U. S. alone, is also called Generalized Anxiety
Disorder, and consists of the following symptoms, which I will include
in a scenario:
JJ anticipated EVERYthing, from what my boyfriend
said about her after she left the room to what her grades would be like
in graduate school, which was years away.
JJ
would apologize for the exaggerated worrying she would do, over and over
and over, and then worry that she had burdened me too much with her
worrying ways.
JJ was hard to be with when she was in this state
of General Anxiety Disorder, especially when we were just arriving
somewhere and she was jacked up, shifting about in her seat, acting as
if any minute someone would enter the restaurant, party, or even restful
living room and kidnap her at gunpoint.
Then JJ would be
exhausted, after having spent less than an hour at a store or movie, for
example. If we were studying, she stare off, expressing the feeling of
having a blank head, kind of nub. Or she would be grouchy as hell over
the smallest, most insignificant things, over minutiae that hours
earlier she had been all antsy about the outcome of.
And JJ slept
very little—the worry or restlessness eclipsing natural tiredness or
“normal” falling-to-sleep habits/patterns. Sometimes, she would be sick
to her stomach, literally.
She had trouble in her other social
circles, at school, and at work. She would come over to hang out, and
within a matter of minutes, was clutching my arm repeatedly and having
me investigate outside for creatures or criminals…or was interrogating
me about my having once talked to her long-distance chat-room boyfriend,
accusing me of starting my own affair with the guy.
On many
occasions, however, you would have no clue that JJ suffered with or from
General Anxiety Disorder. She was calm and confident and even supportive
of others in their own life challenges. One day, I was amped up over a
car accident (caused by a hit and run driver who slammed the hell out of
me and had to be chased down). She gave me one of her pills (I know this
‘aint legal. Let me be.) That pill had me flyin’! Turns out, it was
Xanax—a medicine prescribed by her shrink for the General Anxiety
Disorder.
I tell the symptoms by putting them in a narrative
format…because I am not a medical practitioner. But I would swear by
that little pill, the size of half a jelly bean. Why worry? It is a
condition no one should have to suffer, and no one should nurture or
aggrandize, for, as I think it was Mark Twain who said “Worry is an
investment on a product/property you will never get to own.” And that’s
a paraphrased version, but I am not going to worry about it, especially
after seeing what those with General Anxiety Disorder go through with
worry, and especially since JJ will likely read this and do all the
worrying all over again for me.