I'm here! I'm here!

And the top quote on my quote of the day thing is so appropriate, I think.

Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less.
Marie Curie

That's what I was going to blog about today: fear. Fear and anxiety, since the two go so hand in hand for me. When I left the house this morning, I would have rated my anxiety level at about an 8 out of 10. I'm honestly amazed and more than a little proud of myself for getting out of the door. Lol, who would think that scraping and clearing the car can be therapeutic? It was, though. It gave me time to be out of the house without really leaving yet, and a nice monotonous task to calm my brain down.

I'm starting to gain more understanding about the fears and anxieties now. It might not lessen the feelings but it makes them so much less overwhelming. So it's much, much easier to function even with a panic attack looming. No mistake about it-there was a full blown panic attack waiting to happen. It may happen yet today. If it does, I'll survive. Won't be fun, but I'll manage it.

Prin gave me a good analogy about stress some time ago (I'm paraphrasing here. My memory won't cough up the exact words. Sorry, Prin!); you're a cup that can only hold so much stress and when you exceed that amount, you overflow. The trick isn't to manage the overflow, it's to keep the cup constantly low enough that a sudden influx of stress won't cause an overflow in the first place. Or, I think it went-you don't get a bigger cup, you learn to empty the one you've got. I've realized that I don't do that enough. I'm still at the manage the overflow stage of the game. I'm probably to the point now that the cup is at about 3/4 full instead of up to the brim all the time, but I'm still in danger of spilling over if there's sudden changes in the routine.

My own way of viewing it was to say that I back-burner everything. "Don't have time to deal with that right now. I'll put in on the back burner." The first time I got counseling, when I said that, the counselor looked at me and asked me if my stove wasn't kind of full by now. *Blushes* Just a bit, and I'd imagine that many of those dishes were burnt past recognition by that point.

I know that I've got some things on that back burner that need dealing with. And I've got some things that have been in the oven for a long time that should come out.

I'll start with not freezing up in panic and terror. For this morning, that's enough. It's time to stop shoving things away, though. I'll have to think about that. :D