basically anxiety is more like kind of like this wasp is stinging you in the back, depression is more like, you just want to go to bed [laughs]. You just don’t want to deal with the world, you just want to be alone and isolated and I’d say that the two kind of swing back and forth like I’ll be kind of really anxious and kinda wired and doing all these things like cleaning my room or uh, uh running different errands to feel busy like I’m doing something with my time that’s worthwhile and then when I’m depressed it’s like I want to just like sit by the river and not, not deal with anyone or anything so I think that like you know, depression comes, sets in after I’ve had this big burst of anxiety. Because I realize, you know, wow, this an all the time thing for me, it’s just an endless cycle, it never ends.

I know that my depression causes anxiety. And my anxiety causes depression. I can see how anxiety makes me want to do things and it-it makes me feel like I have to, it-it makes me feel like I have to be the best I can, or else people will judge me. And then that depression comes in like, yes, people will judge you because you are awful. So they kind of work hand-hand. They’re they’re sometimes very hard to separate in my own head. I’m sure looking at me, you’d be able to say, well, yeah, that’s probably more of an anxiety thing than a depression thing. They’re both just things that I have to deal with together. They fit into each other.

I would have to say probably as far back as I can remember, I at least had pretty significant anxiety. I remember when I was really little if someone was late for something I would have this really bad catastrophic reaction like, Oh no, like, they got in a car accident or they are never coming home, or something like that. I remember being very scared to be in a room by myself, I had, you know, I had this feeling that just around the corner somebody was going to leap out and get me and pretty much I had that feeling almost all of the time.

I think the sort of social anxiety thing is like I’m not super comfortable meeting new people that can also like trigger a depressive state, for me at least. Like having a bad interaction with someone, having an awkward conversation I encounter with someone I’d feel like bad about that throughout the day and then it would sort of, I guess like having those encounters would, over and over and over, would then sort of get me down and if it happens enough then it sort of triggers an episode, like badder, longer cycles.

It feels like the depression gets me to where I start questioning a lot of things and kind of like how my mindset is. I’m very pessimistic in that state and I’ll kind of just send myself like a mental self-sabotage spiral of just doubt, self-doubt and it just sends me into that panic attack. Because then I start to feel really small and just scared about this whole life thing, it really starts freaking me out.

Between that and the medication, the journaling was a big thing. Because I would my mind is constantly going like, What am I going to wear, what am I, am I going to look ok? Is the weather, is it going to rain or are my shoes going to get wet? Like you don’t need to worry about all that stuff and then on top of that, Is my grandma ok, is my sister ok, is? What am I going to do today? It’s just all at once. So I can just sit down and just write about what’s going through my head even if it’s just, I want a cup of coffee. It’s not, it’s floating in my head and I’m not talking about it, if I don’t have somebody to talk to, I can just write it down and then it’s not in my head anymore and I can move on.

Sometimes it, it, it is really helpful. Like I’ll picture that or sometimes if I’ve, my thoughts are racing, I’ll just picture a big, fat stop sign. That’s been really helpful to me as well. And from there, I can say, wait a minute, you’re at the stop sign, there are these other possibilities with this situation. Or it can work out this way, you know?

Not a lot of people, not a lot of people tend to do that. Not — and I actually had to train myself to do that. Like I think I just read about just how to stop an anxiety attack and that I think that was one of the, one of the coping mechanisms to picture a big stop sign and consider other options. So that, that’s a big one for me.

Now, was that something you, you invented yourself? Did you, where did you learn about that, the stop sign?

I don’t remember what article it was in.

Yeah, uh-huh.

I think it was in a magazine or something.

Uh-huh.

But, but and I tried it a few times and now it just comes like second nature. Yeah, if, if I’m, if I’m just feeling kind of down or my thoughts are racing, then I’ll try picturing the big fat stop sign and that helps a lot.

I didn’t start that right away is because I have some social anxiety mixed in with my depression. Which made it very difficult to do anything other than just sort of reflect personally on it and I still haven’t gotten past the phase of, I don’t know if embarrassment is necessarily the right word , but I still had that reluctance of talking to anyone about it, I just wanted to keep to myself at the time.