Anxiety and Depression

Anxiety and Depression are cruel siblings.  They come together many times and they take over your life.  You fight them and they seem to fight back harder.  Like family, once they enter your life you can't ignore them.  They will always be part of you and you either learn to deal with them and try and make some peace or you live in family strife for years to come.  If they spend too much time in your shadow they will not let it slide.  They will do something big to make sure you pay attention like wait until you are feeling really good on your way to work.  While you are driving in your car stuck in some traffic grooving to the music coming through your car speakers, they will strike: hard and fast.  

Then just like that you are a mess.  The lighthearted carefree and fun music on the radio mocks you.  The traffic suffocates you.  There is no where to run and no where to get off the road.  It hits with full forces.  Driver who pass by glance at you quizzically possibly trying to figure out why there are tears streaming down your face and why you might be slamming you fist against the steering wheel.  You try calling your husband multiple times who can't answer because he is working.  Meanwhile, your throat feels like it is closing and it's hard to breathe.  The hand being hit against the wheel begins to tingle.  You foot alternating between the gas and the brake also starts to tingle.  

You try to breathe.  You need to let work know that you are unraveling at the seams but you don't trust your voice.  That and you know that if they know you are in your car they will more than like call an ambulance for your safety.  Maybe you can pull it together.  You take some the medication specifically meant for these circumstances swallowing it with warm water from your car.  It doesn't go down easily between the sobs, the shaking, and the heat of the water but you get it down.  Still, in the parking lot of your job you know you aren't going to make.  Now you definitely can't call.  They will send help.  

Sadly that kind of help is useless.  They drive you to a hospital, give you some oxygen to get your breathing back on track, and then leave you in the hallway.  They know and you know.  This isn't life threatening.  It would be a waste of a run.  They will have you sit there until you've calm down enough to go home except that your car will be at work.  You'd have to call someone to come pick you up.  With the traffic you were stuck in, they would get there for hours.  No, calling work at that moment is out of the question.  Completely out of the question.  You just need to get home so you turn your car around.  

You're not sure about driving but sitting there could cause alarm.  Your coworkers will be leaving and arriving and they might see.  Someone else make attempt to try to help.  They would mean well but again all the help they could provide would be probably make things worse.  Finally, your husband calls you back.  The medication is beginning to work.  He asks what he can do.  You ask that he call work and hear him sigh heavily.  He's frustrated.  With the panic subsiding the self-loathing takes over.  Hatred.  Sheer, unadulterated hatred at yourself.  

You come home and you feel the pain.  The physical pain from period cramps and a killer sinus headache.  You reach out for relief in more medication and collapse on the couch.  It's at this point that you are most vulnerable to depression's infliction.  You feeling useless, worthless, completely incapable of handling life.  Its painful knowledge is worse than the physical pain and deeper.   Too deep to even produce more tears.  Instead, detachment provides the only release.  You feel your soul lift from your body.  It lingers above the empty shell of your body.  It watches you and it waits.  It will reenter when your depression realizes that it can't get to you anymore and begins to subside.  

Anxiety and Depression are faceless thieves.  They steal your life from you and you wonder when you'll find the strength to reclaim from them.