I am not a happy camper lately.

For the last three or four days, I have been experiencing a period of almost constant anxiety. I feel crazed and haunted all the time. I can’t seem to calm down for long. I feel like I am being hunted and I can’t relax at all.

Oh, I can sleep. I can even sleep fairly peacefully… no more crazy scary dreams than usual, no waking up feeling more tired than when I went to sleep, no waking uyp dizzy and disoriented either.

But once I am awake, the anxiety sets in. I feel restless and agitated all the time. I feel like I am waiting for something big and bad to happen, and I wish it would just happen already so I could deal with it and get it over with.

It’s like being in the waiting room of your dentist’s office, waiting for a procedure you know will be painful and gross and very upsetting, and the dentist is running late. So despite how part of you might be glad the bad thing hasn’t happened yet, you are mostly just mad at the dentist for making you stew in your own trepidation like this.

Ironically, when I feel agitated and anxious like this, I end up spending more time in bed. The nature of my illness leads me to deal with anxiety by reducing stimulation, and retreating into sleep is the ultimate expression of that. When you sleep, you do not have to deal with stimulation at all. You get to skip out on life completely for a while. The ultimate escape.

Well, penultimate, perhaps.

So I have been spending far more time lying in bed than usual. I spend my time sleeping, or reading, or playing games on my tablet, or just laying there with my fan pointed at my forehead, my conscious mind blanked out so my inner mind can process and integrate whatever it is that is bothering me.

Even just sitting here typing, with no music on or anything else to distract or stimulate me, I feel far too anxious, and the desire to retreat to my bed and finish this entry later is very strong. It is only my usual bullheaded determination to finish what I start that is keeping me here, typing away to you nice people, when I could be “safe:.

Naturally, all this worry has me worried. I am pretty curious about just what it is that happened lately that has led me to this state of heightened agitation. I can’t think of any one thing in particular that is the trigger. I haven’t gotten any sort of news that has me upset, and there’s no life changes coming my way as far as I know.

Mostly it is just an accumulation of things, I suspect. At some point, I started taking on agitation faster than I could dissipate it, and since them it has been building and building.

And now I feel kind of freaked out all the time.

I can think of a few contributing stressors. I slept on my right shoulder wrong recently, and so it is kind of sore. Nothing enormous or life-changing, just a stiffness and soreness that makes doing anything with that arm (like, say, use the mouse) a little more painful and uncomfortable, and that certainly adds to one’s stress level like only pain can.

Plus, my sister Catherine and her hubby Joe will be visiting me in around a month, and the evil forces of social anxiety are already hard at work making me dread the coming visit instead of anticipating it with great joy, like I want to do.

After all, I haven’t seen Catherine in decades and I have never even met her hubby Joe, and I am so happy that they will be visiting and I will get to see them.

Or at least, the sane part of me feels that way,

But the crazy part is terrified of the whole thing. Why? No good reason. That’s what makes it crazy. I could not even begin to offer any sort of rational rationale as to why I am terrified of the whole thing. I just am.

I mean, what do I think is going to happen? Rejection? Disapproval? Exposure? This is my sister, not some stranger. She knows me well enough, even after all these years, to know what to expect from me. And yet, I feel deeply ashamed.

So that is weighing on my mind, and probably contributing to this state of stress. I have been having low level anxiety attacks by the dozens. I have tried getting some exercise, and thank goodness, that does help a little bit. Takes some of that excess energy out of the equation.

But deep down, I think I am going through some sort of emotional crisis. All this emotional chaos is merely the side effect of a serious emotional renovation project, and I will be far better off once it’s all done.

In the meantime, I am going to have to put up with feeling crazy all the time. I feel like doing something nuts like throwing my computer monitor out the window or smashing my tablet over my knee or running screaming into the night.

Thankfully, I have you people to talk to, and that gives me a slightly less deranged outlet for my insanity. Hopefully, this whole thing will end on its own soon and I can go back to my usual lower level of total insanity.

When I am done typing this missive to you all, I will lay down again, perchance to sleep, or possibly just to state at the ceiling without really seeing it while my mind races and races and I try to get it to slow down and tell me what it wants.

What it wants, I suspect, is to start screaming and never stop, but that is not currently a primary option.

Talk to you again tomorrow, folks.