“Stay afraid, but do it anyway. What’s important is the action. You don’t have to wait to be confident. Just do it and eventually the confidence will follow.”
Tag Archives: Anxiety
Just-A-Quote #36
Just-A-Quote #21
“You who are suffering and read this, turn your attention to the way you think, not to your feelings. Come to terms with your attitude, and your feelings will look after themselves.”
Breathe
Lately, I’ve started feeling the beginnings of my anxiety and depression acting up. Hadn’t felt this way in several weeks. I still feel down, anxious, and out of sorts right now, but I know it’ll pass. And, eventually, I figure out what triggered it and can prevent a future one from a similar trigger. Anyway, this experience has reminded me of a pin I pinned on Pinterest. I found the sign below a couple of months ago on the internet. It was created by the Lonely Lotus and the words are by Danielle Koepke. I think it has been one of my most popular pins. It’s been repinned more than 500 times. Since I’ve dealt with anxiety for most of my life, Danielle’s words mean a lot to me. However, I didn’t realize how much the words meant to others. Hope you find it meaningful.
I’m planning to post more of my favorite Pinterest pins. Maybe I can make it a monthly or weekly blogging habit. I really do need to get back to blogging here, but life has been very busy with family, school, work, and a knee injury. To see more anxiety related pins you can go to my anxiety Pinterest board by clicking HERE .
Scatterbrained – 6WS
Lately, I’m feeling calmer, but scatterbrained.
Normally propelled by my anxiety, my
current calm perplexes me and has
me stuck in a changing state
of mind. I guess my mind
is being open to something new.
When I think of scatterbrained, I think of Dr. Walter Bishop from the Fringe TV show. He’s extremely intelligent, but he is often all over the place. But those frequent scatters of his mind often lead his team and the viewer to some profound truths. Although I doubt I’m as intelligent, I am feeling the intense scatterbrain, poor focus part. I have felt this before several years ago and eventually got back on track again. The difference this time is that my anxiety symptoms have decreased drastically in the past couple of months. However, I feel a bit lost without the extra push of motivation that the anxiety seemed to give. Then again, my past excessive anxiety is not something I want to come back to. The little poem above is something I came up with to express the confusion and frustration I’m feeling. Anyway, from experience with a similar scatterbrain state in the past, I find that it usually signals something that needs attention or resolving that I have been avoiding. I’m not quite sure what that is right now, but I have the feeling something’s opening up, and someone is trying to tell me something. God does work in mysterious ways.
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Inspired by
Stuck in Obsession
“…to repeat monotonously some common word, until the sound, by dint of frequent repetition, ceased to convey any idea whatever to the mind…”
–Edgar Allen Poe
Earlier this year, I took the photo above while looking out a window waiting for a class to start. You can see the reflection of my shoes on the lower right corner. I thought of this photo when I saw Ese’s prompt for this week. I played around with the photo on my phone’s Snapseed app to make it black and white and give it a confused feeling. It reminds me of feeling stuck and obsessed within one’s thoughts and hesitating to act. And I think the quote from the Edgar Allen Poe poem also gives some description of this feeling. The times when I have felt both anxious and depressed, I also become obsessive. When I become depressed my concentration seems to diminish, and my thoughts seem to go into a swirling loop. Like the photo above shows, I’ll stare and obsess over my options and worries instead of walking down the path and taking action. Sometimes I’m able to distract, think, or pray myself out of it. But sometimes it’s too overwhelming to snap out of it, and those times I’m stuck until this altered state passes. The depression, anxiety, and obsessiveness eventually pass, but together they literally create a useless or meaningless feeling of having a wall, or window, between me and motion.
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Gratefully inspired by
Ese’s Weekly Shoot & Quote Challenge
This week’s prompt – Obsession
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Blue Skies – Haiku My Heart
longing for the clouds,
she stares at the bare blue skies,
heart beats quick, searching…
Yes, I agree, blue skies are beautiful, but I prefer the clouds for some reason. Why is that? I dwelt on that thought for a while and this other thought came up. Blue skies remind me of the agoraphobia I use to experience when my panic disorder was at its worse. I preferred sitting or standing close to a door or exit for fear of having a panic attack and feeling confused, out of control, and frozen in fear not knowing exactly how to escape or find comfort around me. That rarely happens anymore, but the wide blue space in the sky, without the comfort of the clouds reminds me of that feeling of being in an open crowded space and not having a way to escape or find comfort and feeling a state of panic. Today, I’m able to be in a crowded open space and it doesn’t bother me too much. Similarly, the blue sky doesn’t really bother me, and I can appreciate it, but I still remember the missing clouds.
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Lonliness
“They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
Between stars—on stars where no human race is.
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places.”
― Robert Frost
I took this picture when my husband and I were driving to the Grand Canyon from Las Vegas during our honeymoon. I remembered it when I read the Robert Frost quote above, so I searched in my box of old photos and scanned it. The quote, I found when I searched for loniliness quotes on Goodreads. I thought is was perfect to express my experience with lonliness. My lonliness seems to often follow a bout of anxiety or depression that leads me to isolate myself. The isolation initially feels comforting compared to the frightful feeling I get when I’m severely anxious or depressed and around people outside of my husband and son. So to me being alone can, like a desert, be both beautiful and sad. In case you’re worried, lately, this severe anxiety/depression only seems to come along once a month during PMS. So, the isolation and lonliness doesn’t last very long. Before, it seemed more frequent. I guess the years of faith, experience, medications, and therapy have helped.
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Inspired by
Ese’s Weekly Shoot & Quote Challenge
This week’s prompt – Lonliness
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Feeling Fear
“I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it. The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear.”
–Nelson Mandela
I took the above photo yesterday while waiting for a class to start. Since I started graduate school in 2010, I’ve had to feel fear many times in classrooms like the one above. The fear has gradually decreased in intensity over time. I owe the decrease to facing the feared presentation, discussion, assignment, or exam despite the fear. And I’ve learned that the fear may never completely go away, but I must go on and do what I have to do despite the fearful feeling. My history of panic disorder and social anxiety has made accepting that lesson very difficult, but as time goes on it’s becoming easier to accept. Using Mr. Mandela’s words, I guess I’ve had to muster up a little courage and bravery to get through school.
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Inspired by
Ese’s Weekly Shoot & Quote Challenge
This week’s prompt – Feel
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Haiku Heights – Squeeze
gripped by despair, she
turns to the greatest wisdom —
squeezes back with love——–
Haiku Heights – Crescendo
chatter crescendos,
her courage decrescendos–
ear buds to the ears…
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I felt very much down this past Saturday. Looking back, I can see why. I came very close to having a panic attack Saturday morning while I waited for my son to get out of his swim class. It was his second session. The first session last Saturday went great for him and I calmly read while I waited. But this week turned out different. I was sitting calmly reading and suddenly there were at least three different conversations going on in the same waiting room. The cacophony of voices touched a bundle of nerves in me. And I started getting anxious and confused. Reaching for my ear buds and the music in my iPod was the best way to sooth my nerves
Somehow, I thought anything close to a panic attack was gone from my life before this incident. I really should know better than that by now. I guess I forgot that this happens with anxiety. It tends to rear its ugly head when I least expect it, but I’ll be okay. It’s not the end of the world. It has happened before. The only reason I felt so sad and upset is because I’ve made so much progress in the past months with my anxiety. I’ll get a little nervous here and there, but I haven’t felt the trapped, confused feeling in a long time. All I needed was some rest, quiet time, and to remind myself to remember to breath, relax, and have faith that it’ll be alright. Good thing it was the weekend. I’m a sensitive, caring person that sometimes gets anxious, but not as frequently as before. There, writing it down makes me feel better about the anxiety episode. Now, before this next Saturday swim class, I need to remember…
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“Accept all strange sensations connected with your illness. Do not fight them. Float past them. Recognize that they are temporary.”
–Claire Weekes, Hope & Help For Your Nerves