Panic attacks are fun. A bowl full of debilitating, irrational, sobbing fun. I have luckily only experienced 3 of these in my 31 years of life. I say "luckily" because I know some people who live daily with this struggle. I can only imagine how it would feel, living every day in constant fear of something so overwhelming. Yuck!
As easy as it is to place blame, I know I do it to myself. I am generally a very positive person. Always looking for the beauty and good in life(cheesy, but true). Like most people, I like to have control and structure, but am smart enough to know that you can't always control what happens around you. You can only control your reaction to it. The battle I often have, is whether I should listen to my logical brain, or tell it to go fuck itself...
Last night, my logic got bent over.
Up until a few months ago, I was working 6-7 hours at the radio station, heading to the salon to do hair for another 4-7 hours(depending on the week), then DJing at the bars on weekends for a good 5 hours. On top of that, I have 2 boys under the age of 10, and a wifey that wanted me home and not exhausted all the time. I needed to spend the weekends with my family, so I quit Djing the bars...on top of that I needed to have some time to take care of myself, so I decided to only do hair 4 days a month. That was a hard one, especially having built up so many clients over the past 8 years. I have always had a really hard time with disappointing people. But I was stressed, unhappy, always tired, and didn't have the time or energy to even think straight.
Even though life isn't going as smoothly as I'd hoped, I was doing pretty good with the new schedule. But this week, the need to make sure everyone else was taken care of and happy, outweighed the need to take care of myself. So many of my clients needed their hair done, and I was booked up a few months out. So I decided to open up another day just for this week... then it filled up, and I opened up another one...until every day of my week was full of 14+ hours of non-stop work. I figured I'm making money, and it was just a week, right? Yeah fucking right! Sudden work overload again, plus other "fun" life problems caused me to only get 3-5 hours of sleep every night this week.
Yesterday was the icing on the cake...it was an absolutely awful day at work! Nothing was going right and I couldn't turn the negative energy around. I'm sure that sleep deprivation made it seem much worse than it was. I got home, and all I wanted to do was go to bed. After spending time with the fam, I tried to go to sleep. I felt my heart beating fast and hard throughout my entire body, and couldn't shut my brain off. I took a melatonin, tried watching TV, but felt my heartbeat getting faster and harder. I looked at the clock and it was 3:30am. I had to wake up in a little over 3 hours. With my busy schedule, I'm one of those people who need at least 6-7 hours of sleep. Knowing I had to work for the 4th day on such little sleep, I completely lost it. Shaking-sobbing-can't breathe-feeling-like-you're-having-a-heart-attack moment. This "moment" lasted for an hour, and I probably would have gone to the hospital if my babe hadn't been there to calm me or if the Xanax hadn't kicked in when it did. A few hours of sleep finally came to me, and I had to call in sick to work.
Needless to say, I don't ever want to be subjected to the pain and intensity of a panic attack again... I know my body has been telling me to focus on myself, and to chill the fuck out! Stress does some crazy shit to your body....but I'll leave that for another blog. I've said it before, but it's time to listen to my body/mind. I don't need to put myself through this again. I have to learn to say no to people, because a panic attack makes me feel much worse than disappointing someone does. Panic attacks make me feel completely out of control, and I will try as hard as I can to never experience one again... It sucks waking up the next day feeling like a total pussy.
