Feeling Extremely Anxious

This morning is an anxiety day.  I woke feeling as if something were wrong.  Something was waiting to happen and I needed to stop it before it did.  A kind of mystery thriller movie my brain was playing just for me.  Nothing was wrong, though.  Everything was in the right place.  Family members were all healthy and in their proper places.  Ratties were chipper, the cats hadn't destroyed anything in the night.  All on the outside was good.  So my brain whispered, "it must be something going wrong with you." New fears.  Am I sick?  Am I getting sick?  Has the Crohn's done something new?  Little aches and pains that normally mean nothing took on new significance.  Does this mean a flare up?  What does this mean?  What is happening? 

There was a deep desire to curl up in bed, grab a brain candy book and hide from the day.  I've done that in the past.  You can't escape anxiety.  It comes to find you.  It crawls under the blankets and slithers up your spine and wraps around your head and whispers nasty things in your ear.  "Something is wrong," it whispers.  "Something horrible.  Something so terrible that you can't even comprehend and it's going to happen right......NOW!"

This morning I have no time or desire to deal with anxiety.  I am working hard at pushing it out of my head and leave it behind.  My body is taking a while to get the message.  I am so tense my forearms and hands actually hurt.  I feel hyper alert.  Everything is done in quick motions.  My fingers are literally bouncing along the keyboard as I type.  But, the keeping myself on a path, moving from one task to the next is helping.  Routine helps me.  Contact with people through out the day helps.  Music helps, writing helps, drawing and other activities that pulls me into right brain mindlessness helps.

Different things work for individuals.  A long time ago when I was coming to terms with Autism and what goes along with it I had a therapist who told me to "Name my anxiety." I stared out her and then asked, "You mean like George or something?" (I tend to take things literally.  They say it is because of the Autism, I think it's because people just aren't clear about what they mean when they speak.)
The long suffering therapist sighed and said, "No.  Somethng like fear, or want, or loneliness."
"Those aren't good names.  They are depressing." I answered.
"Okay.  Let's try something else." She said.  She said that a lot when she was workng with me.
Later on I realized that she had wanted me to identify the emotions that were behind the anxiety.  What was making me anxious.  Up until then it was just plain old anxiety.  When I tried to figure out if it was the fear of loneliness, (never had been an issue up until that point) or the fear of depression (hadn't been afriad of that either) the fear of being lost, sick, alone, aliens, spiders in my shoe, kitchen utensils disapearing (which is Katy's fear, not mine)  or what ever else was on that horrible little list I found the anxiety just ramped up because now I had actual fears to go with them. 
However, this does work for some people.  By identifying the feeling behind the anxiety they can address it and then work on it.  It was the opposite for me. First came the anxiety and then I would throw a bunch of fears at it to see which one would stick.  Problem was, they all stuck.  And then invited friends. 
So, today, I will just accept that I am dealing with anxiety, the same way others have to deal with migrains or gout or an invasion of ants.  I'll turn on some music and do what I normally do and just work my way through it.  I'll do things with a bit more focus and a lot more depth to take me away from the anxiety and I know that as the day goes on it will lift and get better.  Unless the aliens really do show up.

Veg Man!

This is a busy week for me.  Lot's of school work and I really need to do something about the house.  It has been explained to me that Napalm is not the answer and the ratties, even when stacked one on top of the other, just can't handle the vacuum so I guess it's up to me to actually clean the house.  
This is Veg Man.  An assignment from my digital class.  We were supposed to take old time advertising wood cuts and combine them into a face and then paint it.

The Best Cro-Magnon Man I've Ever Drawn

Okay, here are my two assignments for today.

One Torso

One Cro-Magnon man.  Unfortunately he is supposed to be a drawing of a Benini sculpture, but, considering that less than two months ago I've never drawn a person before I don't think it's come out too badly.

Hello!

Yay!  You found me!  Okay, I know it looks pretty drab right now, but, moving is always a bit of a chore. 

Oh! The Humanity

Today it was time to get down to business. The first thing I had to do was get my materials in working order. I used charcoal for the first time ever today. There are many types of charcoal, all of it dirty and blunt. The instructors carefully showed us over and over again how to make our pencils, stumps, vines, blocks, squares, chunks, etc. usable. The first thing we had to do was carve the heck out of our neat and clean and perfect looking pencils with an exacto blade.What I did to them was an absolute crime. Believe it or not, this is what they are supposed to look like.
However, I would like you to note that that chamois is still neat and clean. It's supposed be totally black by the time the class is over. I have a hard time accepting that. It's so soft and clean now. I like it this way.

Tomorrow I'll be working on elipses and mass drawings of naked people.

Color Me Done and Put a Slight Tint of Stupid On That.

Let's start off with a touch of cute. This is Toulous on his first day in our home a week ago. His twin brother, Cheddar, joined us too. Look how happy that little guy is!

With school starting tomorrow and my resolve to dedicate my life to my passion and yadda, yadda, yadda, I decided to really push it and get the boxes finished to send off to people.

I've been creating away night and day. Dolls, flowers, bags, and all sorts of other stuff.

I tried to take photos today but they came out really awful so please forgive me but I wanted to show you all something.

Some of the first fabric flowers I made. They look better in real life. As I said, I was not good with the camera today.

A chicken.

A couple of bunnies.

Anyway, so there I was busting my butt making stuff and I started feeling not so good, so being the brilliant individual I am I decided that I must be getting sick so I better press harder because it might get worse and then I would not be able to do anything at all. My days were now feeling like I was slogging through thick, deep, painful, mud.

Last Friday I woke up in horrendous pain, hugely swollen glands and my back teeth hurt soooo bad.

Again, I decided to flaunt my intelligence and figured that if I ignored it and gargled with lots of Listerine it would go away. Don't ask...it made sense at the time.

Guess what? It didn't go away. By Monday night I was convinced that all of my back teeth had gone bad at the same time. The nodes under my neck were so swollen that I couldn't move my head and I felt simply and totally terrible. Oh, and I had a fever, too.

Woe was me.

So, off to the dentist I went. They took more x-rays, frowned at them and took some more x-rays and frowned at them too. The last time someone did that they ended up taking out a fairly important body part. I was worried. The doctor somberly examined my mouth and probed my nodes. Sounds kinky doesn't it?

He then said, "I can't find anything. Your teeth look fine."

"Really?" I said. I was actually happy. No doctor has said anything looked fine on me in years. This was great. Wait a minute. No it wasn't. My gland things were still swollen and I was still in pain.

He then looked at my x-rays and frowned and said, "Wait a minute."

I deflated. I knew it. They found some thing after all.

He asked if I had been getting a lot of headaches lately. I said, "Yes."

And then a bunch more questions came and he nodded happily at each answer.

He then said, "You're having a TMD related problem."

TMD? TMD? I"ve heard of TMJ but what the...? Now I have something new?

Not to worry. Apparently I've been so stressed I've been grinding the hell out of my teeth which causes similar symptoms to TMJ (massive headaches, face pain, etc.) but...this is treatable. I was fitted for a bite plate and go pick it up tomorrow. Nice. Something easy, not deadly and something that will go away once I calm down. I can live with that.

But...what about the fever and the glands and the rest of it?

It's either my body reacting to the stress or a virus or an infection or something.

I'm on antibiotics and today I can move my head without too much pain and the swelling is down.

I'm sorry for screwing up again.

I was trying to do a good thing, it just didn't work out that way.

Where it stands now.

I am going back to school full time this semester and I will be swamped. I am looking forward to this with great joy and anticipation.

I realized during my little mental sojourn that I am not that bright sometimes. I go off in a million different directions and accomplish nothing and then I have the temerity to sit and whine about never reaching my goals.

I seriously do not deserve a cookie.

I have this 'thing' where I am afraid to tell anyone my true goals because I might fail. Instead I run around doing everything and anything but what I want to do. So, here it is. I'm going for my MFA in Illustration. I want to write and illustrate graphic novels and and children's books. Writing and drawing are my absolute passions. I can't imagine life without them. I also want to teach art and writing. (Online because of the whole health thing.)

Before Crohn's dragged me rudely to earth and piled about a ton or two of bricks on me I taught computer classes at NAU. Website building, managing and simple coding languages like .html, javascript, CSS and JAVA. I loved teaching. I loved seeing the ah-ha moment when someone finally connected. I loved it when people who had walked into the classroom actually afraid of the computer shook off those fears and mastered the 'net with great pride. I always wanted to give them an admiral's hat and a sword and a medal. I was so proud of them.

The weird thing is, I HATED coding. I was good at it, but, I hated it. Hate! Hate! Hate! Want to hear something else stupid? I actually ran my own website design and management company and made good money at it and I HATED it every step of the way.

Now, why would I go and do something like that when I loved writing and art so much?

Because it had been drummed into me that it wasn't a 'real' job. Because I believed that something so wonderful wasn't for someone like me. Yeah...I know, don't ask. I get weird ideas some times.

Anyway, I'm tired of being an idiot and I'm going to pursue my dream whole hog. So to speak. (Isn't that a weird expression? Whole hog. Can you go half hog at something? Or maybe just stick a ham hock in?)

While working towards this goal some things are gong to need to change.

I'm still going to do Etsy, it's just going to take a while to get things in the store. As it is now, as soon as I make something it goes right out the door plus I have half-packed boxes of promised gifts, etc. all over the house.

So Many Stories is sadly going to have to take the back burner, however, I will help with different organizations and in other ways with giving other Autistics a voice.

So, here I go. I'm jumping off the deep end and going for it. Let's see if I can swim.