Today has been an off day.

I woke up at 3am to pee. Nothing about that is unusual. I wake up around that time every day. I pee, I take a Zofran so that when I wake up 3 hours later, I am able to get out of bed without dry heaving. Pregnancy, it is glamorous. This morning I had a bit of a stomach ache, again, not terribly abnormal. But instead of just taking my Zofran and going back to sleep, I suddenly felt anxious.

So, I did what I do whenever I’m anxious at night (which again, is not a totally foreign thing) I put on an episode of Friends and drifted off to sleep. I fell into a dream that we had the baby but kept forgetting to feed him. I woke up an hour later, again, in panic. I fell back to sleep and had another baby dream and again woke panicked. This happened several times and finally at 5:30 when my husband’s alarm went off, I decided I had done enough of the fitful sleeping for the day. And if you know how much I hate mornings, you know that the anxiety must have really sucked for me to make that decision.

It took a solid 30 minutes of distraction (Facebook, twitter, emails, etc) to get myself calmed down and from there, I was able to get up and move on with my day. There was nothing in particular that seemed to be driving the anxiety, but I could feel it upon me all day. I wasn’t anxious about work, in fact I was excited to get there because I knew once I got going, I would be okay. And as I assumed, I was fine as long as I was occupied, but as soon as there was a down moment, the anxiety crept back in.

I have struggled with anxiety for a long time, but I have been able to manage it well for the past several years. And the few times I couldn’t manage it well, I had medication. And it wasn’t that I didn’t manage it well today, it was just that it wouldn’t go away. It wasn’t a panic attack that lasted 30 minutes or an hour and then left, it was this full day low lying anxiety. Even as I drove home for the day, I still felt like my skin was crawling, like I was buzzing with anxiety that I couldn’t shake.

I am home now and I decided to forego the couch and just move right into bed since my husband is on call tonight. I’m not going to sleep, but I just decided that comfort was key, and finally, I am feeling a little more like myself. I have some concerns about tomorrow, but I know that I can’t tackle those yet and that I need to cut myself some slack and relax. Coping with this kind of stress on little sleep is exhausting.

Today was a difficult and weird day, but if anything, I proved to myself that I can handle it, on my own. It doesn’t mean it’s going to feel good or that I’m going to love every minute of it, but I can tackle this. I can choose control and while it’s not the same floaty feeling as the medication, it is powerful.

I can handle this. I may just need to be reminded of that from time to time.

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