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Anxiety Again, Questioning My Sanity

4 years ago - Edited 4 years ago1,510 words

I'm still dealing with this anxiety, and writing about it seems to help, so here's another post in this little series about my broken brain! Yesterday I was seriously worrying about my sanity after seeing in my phone's history that I made a couple of calls in late November 2020 that I have absolutely no recollection of and might have made while asleep??

On Monday, after writing ∞ the last post in this series where I decided this was all just hypochondria ∞, I felt I'd solved it, got distracted, and was fine! Pretty much symptom-free! I was so relieved to see the end of it.

But both yesterday and today I woke up at 3am sweating, panicky; this time at least I think it was due to worrying about all this in my dreams. I can't even escape it in sleep! I spent much of yesterday trapped in the vortex again.

I'm fairly sure it's anxiety, but as always there's still this "but what if it's not??" that's so hard for my subconscious to ignore. All the symptoms I'm having - which fluctuate - could easily be attributed to anxiety (it was nausea more than head stuff last night, and it's never both), and I'm not having any issues that I'd expect if it was brain related. Moving around dispels the symptoms; you'd expect them to get worse if it was from brain issues, right?

I've been trying a whole bunch of guided meditations, progressive muscle relaxations, head and neck stretches, I've gone out for walks... They do help - at least I've not spiralled into complete panic attacks - but the symptoms come back minutes after I've finished. I feel like I'm constantly fighting against it and barely holding things together.



I got a couple of calls from a hospital nurse yesterday regarding the change of appointment times for my next scan and doctor consultation; unfortunately the scan can't be changed from the 24th (of this month), and I'll be talking to the doctor on the phone a whole month after that. I used to get the scan and consultation on the same day! I'm not the only one annoyed by this either, or so I found out from sadly saying as much to the nurse, but there are a bunch of bureaucracy reasons for it being the case for everyone now, she said, also sadly. Bleh.

But here's something odd. When looking through my calls history for the nurse's number to add her as a contact (at her recommendation since I said I never remember which nurse I've talked to when I can only hear their voice and there are a bunch of them), I noticed two outgoing calls back-to-back on the 21st of November last year: one to my step-dad, and one - shockingly - to that friend I used to have, B, who's long since ghosted me and probably has a very low opinion of me. Huh??

I've sent her a handful of cringey messages since she ghosted me when I'm at my lowest points and the guilt feels overwhelming - "I'm sorry, I wish we could talk about what I even did wrong, I hope you're okay", that kind of thing - but I usually take a long time to work up to the point where I send them, spend a while checking over them, and feel embarrassed afterwards for days or more. They're never spur-of-the-moment things. And I never make phone calls to anyone (which is why these were right at the top of my calls history despite being from months ago). So why on Earth would I have called her??

There were two calls made back to back: one to her, which the history says was immediately cancelled (thank Mbombo), and then one to my step-dad, which lasted seven minutes? Huh?? They were also at 10:30pm, which is later than I've been going to bed for for a while. So did I do this when I was asleep or something??

I have zero recollection of it, and it's FREAKIN' ME OUT, MAAAN! I haven't had a chance to ask my step-dad about it yet, so I will when I can. I did mention it to my mum though, thinking if I called him then maybe she'd have known too, but she was as stumped as I am.

There was a time when my parents went away on holiday for a week or so, and while home alone (and subconsciously in alert mode in case of INTRUDERS) I had some strange auditory hallucinations (someone calling my name), which I wrote about either in this blog or on Twitter... I noticed that both B and my step-dad were listed as emergency contacts, so I started panicking about imagining someone else using my phone to try calling them both, and that meant someone really was in my house during that period, or I had some kind of psychotic episode I've completely blocked out of memory...

But I checked my old blog posts, and there's ∞ this one from the morning after those calls were made ∞. Interestingly, I wrote there about similar issues I'm going through now regarding anxiety, digestive issues, and most notably the head pressure sensation. A bit alarming since the scan I mentioned in that post that was meant for January is the one I'm still waiting for, but I seem to recall postponing it because the symptoms had completely disappeared. Hopefully they will again this time.

In that case it seemed that specific mental unpleasantness factors (loneliness, faint suicidal thoughts resurfacing) had set off the physical concerns, and I apparently wrote a post about creative envy (Toby Fox's music appearing in Pokemon Sword and Shield) a few days earlier. So in both that case and this, a few other mental concerns built up to eventually manifest somatically.

It's useful having a blog that allows me to check back on these things to notice patterns!

Still, those outgoing calls are absolutely bizarre, and they don't seem to correspond with my parents' trip from what I can tell, meaning my step-dad would have been in the other room when I made that 7-minute call while asleep? What a mystery... Really raises some serious concerns about my sanity!

I'd assume it was an accident, especially if they were emergency contacts which I think you can call even on a locked phone, but I don't get how I could possibly have accidentally touched the phone, and why would both have been called minutes apart, with one call lasting 7 minutes??



These symptoms flare up only when I'm not sufficiently distracted, but becoming distracted seems to be tricky. I was occupied on Monday doing... I forget what, and was fine, but yesterday I felt too tired from lack of sleep to focus on creative stuff (I tried composing music but didn't get anywhere with it), games weren't very distracting, and I suppose I ended up spiralling into the thought vortex again...

It's bothering me that I'm not making progress on Atonal Dreams, though obviously I'm not in the best state of mind to be handling the non-creative marketing/testing/talking-to-people-related aspects at the moment! There must be something else I can do while in a safe creative cocoon though... I wanted to compose some battle music for the maelstroms, and to redo the normal battle music, so I might try that... though music inspiration is annoyingly elusive and can lead to frustration if I'm too creatively constipated, so... I'll just have to give it a go and see.



These posts don't get many views, but writing them out does seem to help! Hopefully you're getting something out of joining me on this awful little journey if you're keeping up with them! And hopefully you're doing better than I am mentally; I wouldn't wish this on anyone!!

Currently I'm still mildly shaking, and have other anxiety-related sensations like a dry-ish mouth and shallow breathing (which I try to deepen whenever I notice it), but my heart's not racing, it's odd... Ugh.

I wish I could just have the dull depression back!



Oh, here's something I could use this opportunity to do:

There's currently no notification sent out to anyone when I post a new blog entry. I've been mentioning the weekly dev posts on Twitter, but it feels weirder mentioning these personal ones on there so I don't. The script that adds these posts to the site used to send out emails to accounts with appropriate notification settings, though I disabled that because it made it take like a minute to submit a post.

I used to have a mailing list before I added the accounts, and I notice other indie devs use those, so I'll probably add that back when I can concentrate on doing so! Maybe there's some external service I can use for that so then the posts don't take ages to submit, and so there's less chance of the emails being classed as spam or trash.