Wednesday 29 May 2013

Purrfectly Crazy

Sometimes I think I'm actually crazy. I don't mean the good kind, I mean the how the fuck did I end up this way kind of crazy. As you may have read before, I have anxiety disorder. Okay that's not quite a post explaining it, but it mentions it. So sue me. Ever since I was a little kid, I've had major problems with stress, anxiety disorder and panic disorder.

Even after being in therapy for years, and knowing that both anxiety disorder and panic disorder are both very common, I still feel batshit crazy. Like even above normal for other people that have these disorders. When I was a kid, I could never sleep over at any of my friend's houses. Pretty standard separation anxiety. When I grew up, it morphed into a whole sleuth of different problems and anxieties that I'm only just beginning to get a grip on.

Since I've grown up, sometimes I have separation anxiety in my romantic relationships and still sometimes with the relationships with my parents. Pretty standard development of childhood separation anxiety. But I also have this insane commitment anxiety with my romantic relationships that is above and beyond normal commitophobe stress. I can just hear my therapist saying in my ear that I'm sensationalizing the feelings and that they are totally within a normal range, but I'm pissed off right now so I'm not going to listen. Mature reaction, I'm well aware. Bite me.

The standard therapeutic treatment for anxiety is exposure therapy - if you're afraid of spiders, one week you look at pictures of a spider, next week you look at a video, and in a few months time you spend time in the same room as one. It's not a spider, it's not heights, it's not snakes, or confined spaces. It's nothing physical that I can actually touch or react to, that's what pisses me off so much. 

I'm learning to deal with both these manifestations of my anxiety. There are a few others that get my motor running, but that's not the issue here. My Sailor is amazing at helping me with it. She's been through so much with me, and it's starting to get better. Until we got a cat.

No, it's not the punchline to a joke. We got a cat and I flipped the hell out. Let me put this in context for you - I was the one that wanted the cat! I have wanted to have my own cat since I first moved out of home. I'm twenty-two, I live in a small apartment perfectly equipped to have an indoor cat. I adore cats, I dote on them, I love them. I practically begged my Sailor to let me get her. And then the same night that we got her I woke up at about three in the morning and went batshit crazy.

I don't even know why. Something to do with the responsibility or long-term commitment of getting a pet. It's never happened to me before in my life. It was straight out of the blue, I wanted our kitten so bad, and then we got her and I just couldn't handle it.

Again, Google is no help to me at all. Googling "I have anxiety because I just bought a cat" does not yield any helpful results at all. Half are pretty standard dealing with anxiety tips, the other half are how to deal with separation anxiety in your cat.

I feel so damn abnormal even in the category of crazy people. Who freaks out because of a kitten? I mean seriously. I mean, here is a picture of a kitten.





Who the hell could freak out about that? I mean, it's yawning and everything. And the kitten we got is just so damn cute. I love her to pieces. But continue to freak out about owning her. And the poor thing has me as an owner. She's going to end up just as crazy as me. Poor thing.

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