I struggle with severe anxiety to the point that I, most days, can't even walk out my front door.
Dealing with anxiety is one of the worst battles I’ve gone through, and I’m still nowhere near being able to live with it and manage it. This, on top of other physical conditions, has kept me not being able to work very much for longer than I would like. My physical manifestations of the anxiety can be different from each day, but the main ones are dizziness, nausea and throwing up. Not very glamourous.
This is also the reason why my latest photo posts are either from inside or around my apartment, or older photos I've shot over the years but never shared with anyone. I'm just not healthy enough yet to venture out on long photo excursions. But I'm slowly getting there.
I thought I would bring you along on how one of my days of working towards my goal of being able to live with anxiety. The latest form of therapy I’m trying is called exposure therapy. Exposure therapy is a form of therapy that involves exposing yourself to the source of your anxiety. From what my therapist says, and my somewhat dodgy understanding of it, is that you start small and progressively expose yourself to stronger sources of anxiety and fear. I have a few different sources for my anxiety. The main issue is my fear of leaving my apartment, which is what I'm working on overcoming first.
Since I'm not able to leave the apartment most days, I have a therapist that visits me every 2 weeks to check up on my progress. Most of the exposure therapy I'm doing now, I'm doing on my own. Which, according to my therapist is the best way to deal with it. Not sure if I agree, but I'm doing my best.
I apologize for the long intro, but I do hope that you are still reading. So what is my exposure therapy exactly? What do I do every day to try to get better? It's actually rather simple and may seem trivial to others. I assure you, for me this is hard as hell. My exposure therapy now is one thing. Go for a walk outside. I have a set route that I'm trying to walk, going a bit further every time. The goal is to be able to walk to the nearest grocery store 3-4 kilometers away.
The milestones along the way are measured in street lights. The plan me and my therapist made was that I would walk to the first street light the first day, the second street light the next day and so on. This turned out to be a bit too ambitious. We had to re-evaulate the plan. What we landed on was walking to each street light 3 days before advancing.
I've failed a few times along the way, giving up when it gets too tough, but I haven't given up completely. I'm determined to beat the anxiety. I am now 6 street lights in. Today was a cold winters day with decent light, so I snapped a few photos on my trip which you can see sprinkled out in this post. I've edited the photos to give them a more gloomy look, to reflect the subject in this post and my battle with it.
In addition to the walking, I have a form that I fill out every day after my walk. This is a way for me to put words and scores on how things felt and to better communicate this when my therapist checks up on me. The form has fields for describing the situation where the anxiety occurred, which symptoms I was experiencing, a scale for how severe the anxiety was and what automatic disaster thoughts popped in my head and giving them a score on how much I believed in them.
These things combined with biweekly therapy sessions has helped me quite a bit. Even though I'm still a mess, I'm way better now than I was last year. I see that there is a light in the end of the tunnel.
I think this is one of my most lenghty posts, already counting 700 words. I'm trying to better my writing skills, and I've always wanted to open up about my anxiety but never really had the guts to do so. Only people I talk about this stuff with in real life are my parents and a couple of close friends. It's a bit much to carry alone, this post is sort of a way of reducing that burden and sharing with you why I have had periods of absence from Steemit.
Ending off I would like to thank all of you for the support you've shown me during my time on Steemit. This community really has helped me in so many ways. Thanks to everyone who upvotes and comments on my posts. To all of my followers for thinking I'm good enough to follow. I can't express enough how much it means to me.
I hope you all are doing well!
Lots of love,
leanvix
All photos are shot, by me, with a Motorola Moto G4 Plus smartphone.
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