My anxiety? How does it feel now? Terrible, but like it was before, from all that I remember. I was medicated for decades, and other than for the taper portion, which was about a year, it was always on Xanax. I was prescribed my dose, took it as prescribed, and that was that; there were no side effects or loss of strength, although a little interdose withdrawal, but nothing unmanageable. Now, I'm a shell. Let me find more universal phrasing for this. At any given time, I feel like I am going to crawl out of my own skin due to a really odd, hard-to-describe feeling, which is what I have in old journals from before medication too. It's almost painful in terms of its unremitting intensity, as though my skin were crushing me. At the same time, I feel frozen in place from the weight of this feeling. My heart does not beat rapidly but too slowly. My breathing is labored, and I know to breath carefully. My stomach gurgles and churns all the time. I am so thirsty that I could die and must drink 10-15 cups of water a day, but I'm still thirsty. My throat is tight so that I choke on my food. It doesn't seem like what I've heard anxiety described like before, exactly, because of the minimal cardiac symptoms and occasional not feeling stressed out. However, it's the same feeling that surges forth during a situational or sudden panic attack, with greater intensity, so I assume that it's adrenaline in varying degrees. I have some depersonalization with this, all of the time. The feeling is like I am out of body, observing my body instead, separately. It distorts my vision a bit though, so that it is hard to navigate through the world. Also, my voice and thoughts seem very distant and echoing. This is baseline. This is what I feel 24/7 now. Then on top of this are panic attacks, which for me strike with the rapidity of lightning. The only prodrome they have to them, which I can easily make happen by putting myself in situations that cause me to want to flee (elevators, driving in the left lane, crossing a bridge, airplanes, sitting in the center of a movie theater -- agoraphobic responses, not claustrophobic ones, and a dozen more that I could list), is a horrible and sudden tingling around the nape of my neck followed rapidly by a very serious alteration of consciousness so that I might realize I am screaming or running or trying to get out of the place. If I am in a car when this happens, and for whatever reason cannot pull over, this is when I have fainted and often convulsed, sometimes right in front of people. If I don't faint, I occasionally have tachycardia instead. I have had this thousands of times, but afterwards, if severe, I'm exhausted and need to lie down. These can never happen while teaching, so I've never taught without medication, and at most, I have a sense of being momentarily wanting to flee, and that's it. I also have associated with this agoraphobia that never lessens no matter how much I try to force myself out, and I can set my watch to feeling terribly ill at ease the moment I open the door, or in worse moments, just opening my eyes. I spent most of the day this summer lying in bed with the sheets pulled up over my face and my eyes closed, or if open, just staring at the wall. I cannot concentrate whatsoever, so I have barely read, which if you knew me, as an academic, you would find hard to believe. I do not, cannot, think when in this state. I meditate, relax, but the feeling of crawling out of my own skin doesn't leave. How do you describe what it means to want to "crawl out of your own skin?" This could mean different things to different people. It does not feel like I've drank too much coffee. It feels like I've been injected with epinephrine, tons of it, at the dentists when I've had a bad reaction to the epinephrine during a filling, but far worse. And, I am crying often, although I feel nothing other than frustrated. I'm not a person to cry, but I'm sobbing in my bed like a child due to the depths of the frustration and depression that I feel. However, my family is with me, and they find my state very troubling, so I lock the door and make excuses for why I won't come out, claiming I have a headache or whatever to them to keep them from growing upset, or in the case of my child, possibly frightened. I refuse to do that to my own child. I think constantly of suicide, not because I am depressed but because it's inconceivable, literally beyond my capacity for thought at all, to think of losing my lifes' work. It's not only teaching. It's my research that has suffered too. At first, I laughed about the return of the agoraphobia, thinking, "Oh good, now I can research and write." Also, my thoughts feel sped up when I do have them, and I go into these states where I'm flooded with one traumatic memory after another, all of which produce further anxiety and despair. Thus I am now bed-ridden. If I weren't an insomniac, I could look forward to sleeping, but unfortunately, there's also that to add to the fun. Right now, I feel filled with a feeling of sickness and disappointment that it's come to this. Part of that comes from not understanding what gives anyone the right to refuse to help me when in fact, they do not possess that right in any way.
So I think that's a rough approximation of what I feel like right now. It is not new. Years of journals that document these same feelings, pre-medication use. They never improved. One day, I was prescribed Xanax. I didn't think much of it. I believe it may have first been prescribed for vertigo, something that I have since the first surgery as a sad adverse but prolonged effect. Sorry to sound so maudlin, but you asked, and I assure you that I'm trying to be factually correct, not reeking of pathos. After a half-hour, I felt like I was a kid, before I was ill. I just felt like myself for the first time in nearly a decade, where I struggled through absurd numbers of unmedicated and then medicated panic attacks (the guinea pig years came with the Xanax, when I was tried on medication after medication after medication, until there weren't many left to try, and I tried to be a compliant patient as I did want help, and I'd never heard of benzos since this was "before the internet" -- I'd taken Valium though a few times for vertigo, and it works, but I didn't get high, and it made me heavy and drowsy and stupid, all of which I felt again on the Ashton taper; I hate Valium although it does stop panic disorder -- I'd say the side effects were similar to imipramine, but that it worked a lot more effectively since imipramine was one medication which I tried for a long time, and it was like nothing but a bag of side effects; I've noticed ZERO help from the SSRI's or SNRI's for my disorder and panic attacks, including for propanalol, which slows down a racing heart, but that's like a very small slice of my problems). The TCA's also don't seem to touch it.
I am considering ECT at this point as my most realistic option. Is it indicated for anxiety? I could have sworn it was. If I have to be medication free, I think that's the only way it would be possible. I've heard it help the hardest patients when I was in-patient. I'm petrified of it and would lose my cognitive abilities, which I'm not okay with, but the panicked, anxious, depressed state also has a severe cognitive loss right now.
Sorry to go off-topic. I'm trying to remember if you'd asked a question, and I'm weary now and will be going to sleep finally. I stay awake only to wait to go back to sleep -- if possible. That is how I've become. While on Xanax (or Valium), you would not know this person. I'm so different as for it to seem unthinkable. I'm energetic, happy, productive, easy-going, a hard worker, and very sharp, mentally. So if I missed anything in your post, sorry, but the feeling is unbearable, and I want to retreat to behind my eyelids again and just meditate or hopefully sleep.