Skinning....better than Xanax.

Good for you Karen, I'm so happy you had a good time.  And any time we can do something without our medications the better in my book.  Now if skinning could help me lose 50 pounds it would be great.

Awesome Karen!! and I know ALL about anxiety, I've been diagnosed with the worst case my EX Doctor, had ever seen, and taken meds since the early 80's!   yet I find myself thinking about Widgets in the middle of the night LOL, it helps!

PS.. Xanax sucks, it GAVE me an attack!!, I take Ativan, it used to work well.. not these days though.

Glad you had a good time...hope you divided up the driving.

BTW...Mardi Gras was south of you.

Mardi Gras is anywhere I want it to be!  I had my entire desktop skinned for the celebration...I had some ale left over from Troll Thumping Day, and the food I cooked.  I don't have to be in New Orleans to HAVE Mardi Gras!  It just IS.  The town my son got married in is a college town, and there were advertisements on the radio they were having Mardi Gras at one of the clubs in town, and that was in central KANSAS!

(Actually I got back to central Florida on Monday, Mardi Gras was yesterday, so I was here for it, and here is more south than New Orleans.)  

I must need to skin again bad. Hugely burnt out at the moment.

Anyone need a Winamp classic done. I forgot what I was doing before I burnt myself out.

If you build it...they will download.  

I tried that 'Field of Dreams' approach on Antonio Banderas.. he STILL isn't here!!

I can certainly empathize with you. I've had panic attacks and anxiety as long as I can remember. Skinning has helped me too, especially when I just get stressed out from daily stuff.

 

Ssshh.....   ..Brad'll send you the bill for therapy.....

 

He'll have to send me to collections.  I'm totally broke now.

im the same, anxiety attacks, i cant walk up the street, i wont open my door when i hear someone knock on it.  I refuse to leave my house unless its a dire necessity like paying my rent. Constant voices in my head, (that alone drains me alot)  I cant take out my rubbish.....the list is endless.  I have to be careful with my penion too....ive gone on shopping sprees and been on a bi polar high and spent the whole lot, only to realize that i needed it for living, rent ect.....coming down is harder, you have to realize what you did, and try to fix it...... so for most of us, me included, just doing normal things is almost impossible alot of the time.

Most people are ignorant to mental illness, they either lable you crazy or an attention seeker, im deffinatley crazy, but not attention seeking, i want anything but that, but its hard to explain to someone who is sane and can live life normally and do things that we cant.

Ive been bipolar and borderline schiztophrenic for over 10 years.....and my own mother still wont even read up about it on the internet so she can understand me better.  I have been labeled the 'fruitcake" of the family. but ive accepted it now, its not my fault,

i didnt ask to be born this way, so i just take it on the chin now...

 

either way....enough of my drivel.....im very proud of you..!!! so woot woott!!!

 

......the mind can be a real assh*le to deal with.......glad you won over!!  I hope anyone reading this, will think twice in future about berating people with a mental illness...  try living a day in our shoes...its not easy.  or even a day where you just cant get out of bed, or start sobbing bitterly for no reason other than you are depressed and dont even know why you are crying......its tough.

Yeah, if I could just learn to turn off the "inner monologue" sometimes -- I haven't found anything that helps with that.

Ah, the little 'inner demon' everyone has.  Really should come with a manual that prescribes something other than a bottle o' Uncle Jack to turn the little bugger off...  

That bottle o' Uncle Jack uncorked the demons in me.  That's why I quit drinking completely 20 years ago.  Hmmm, no Jack, no drugs, no sex........................WTF,................I'm DEAD. I'll have to ask the other people in my head what they're doing.

Kitty, I rarely answer the door, and I hardly ever answer the phone, I get my kid to do it most of the time, as I'm terrified of phone calls, it's always bad news..

I force myself to do at least one scary thing a day.  Self-administered behavior modification techniques are a lot cheaper than medication -- and I don't get those horrible brain hiccups like I used to get if I missed a day of SSRI's.

Hey!

haha Ed, no dear, your call was AWESOME!!

 

Karen, just trying to go to sleep each night IS my scary thing of the day

Well YA-ah, no kidding!  It's dark out, all the "bad" things are on the loose, the inner monologue gets louder, and if you DO fall asleep, there's nobody watching guard, so you don't know whether you'll wake up when "it" comes to get you!

You have to do the scary thing in the middle of the afternoon, with your eyes open wide, when the sun is up and everybody is watching, otherwise you're only reinforcing the anxious feelings.

Nah dear, I'm an Insomniac is all

Oh.  Nevermind.                     

Are you talking about Joe Black or whatever it is that lives under the bed?

No, I'm talking about things like drunk ex-boyfriend's finding me, 2 a.m. phone calls from my kid that she's gotten into a car accident, jihad terrorist plots being called into action on the other side of the world against us, all the routine SNAFU stuff that happened after 5 p.m. that can't be addressed until business hours start again at 8 a.m., the escaped mental patient with a hook for a hand....whatever it is that fate has already decided is going to be the cause of my death that approaches closer every day -- "IT" ...which might be Joe Black but I know definitely doesn't live under my bed, because that is where my dog has decided to sleep lately and she is the one thing that I trust to have my back in the case of an attack on my person.  Eighty muscly pounds of "don't mess with mama" and a mouth full of teeth is my security, but she has cancer, the vet gave her 3 months to 3 years to live...after that I'm going to have to invest in a gun, I guess, because I'm getting to old to play these pit bull games with the home owners insurance and the idea of breed bans happening all over the place.

Karen...if someone bothers you..."skin" him alive. Anxiety is a terrible thing...whether justified or not...and I wish you could change it into happy thoughts. More easily said than done, I fear.

I've found that whatever it is that's going to happen was never what I had thought, and was never as negative as I feared.

As Dr. Sydney (originally Milton) Friedman said on "M.A.S.H." (one of the truly greatest series ever, and please don't think of it as making light of your fears...rather, just a funny image in times of stress): "Ladies and gentlemen, take my advice: Pull down your pants and slide on the ice."

Actually, that should go on the 'words of wisdom' thread.

The older I get, the more I understand those mandatory Martini's my parents had at 9 p.m.  Still, I wonder whether it's actually inherited, or did they condition this in me?  The "little bit bipolar" - that I know I inherited from Dad; no question about it -- but the worry stuff that's so typically Mom...I sometimes question whether had I been raised by somebody NOT so negative and willing to point out everything that could go wrong, whether I'd have ended up like this.