Anxiety, Part ? (by Judy)

I don’t know how many posts I’ve written about anxiety, so this is part whatever of those posts. Maybe they’d make up a nice little (or big) collection. I don’t know.

However, I digress. I’m anxious. I don’t have what is known as free floating anxiety, as defined by psyweb:

Free-floating Anxiety is anxiety not associated with a particular object, event, or situation.

Nope, that’s not what we’re dealing with here. In fact, I could outline each one of those for you:

Free: my anxiety is definitely not “free;” it comes at a great cost to me and those who love me.
Floating: It doesn’t feel like it’s “floating;” in fact, it feels quite grounded in my reality.

I can also discount that it’s not related to an object, event, or situation. I would say the “object,” if you can call it that, is my cancer. We can actually isolate some objects, the tumors in my liver that we want to go bye-bye. Event? I don’t know if I’d call cancer an “event.” I mean, I don’t get dressed up for cancer. I don’t have to go anywhere to have cancer. Yet in some ways, I guess it could be an event. The only problem is that it’s a long event and I’m not sure when this bloody event will end.

A situation? Oh yes, only more so: a situation that I don’t like, that is and has changed me and my life, that is most certainly unwelcome here. “I have a situation” doesn’t quite cover things like cancer, but it fits in some ways. I guess.

So my anxiety definitely isn’t “free-floating.” It’s expensive (literally and figuratively) and grounded in my day-to-day life as a woman with a recurrence of metastatic breast cancer.

I’m anxious. I tend to get anxious between nighttime and sleep, for some reason. I don’t know why and I want to try to understand why. On the other hand, maybe understanding why isn’t what I need in this case. Maybe I just need to get my butt to sleep! I think this is a possible subject of conversation with my ever-so-talented therapist, T.

Anxiety. I hate it. It keeps me up. It hounds me with horrible “what if?” scenarios. It makes me cranky.
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Outside, it just started raining. It’s a summer downpour, one in which the rain seems to fall straight down from the sky onto the ground. I hope it doesn’t wake up Energy Boy; he hates storms. I doubt it will bother Absent Minded Professor. I wonder if the rain pounding on the roof is just what I need to lull me to sleep. I will give sleep another try in a few minutes.

For now, I’ll write in the hopes of writing out my anxiety: my expensive, grounded anxiety of which there is definitely a cause.

I’m feeling sleepier. The rain is stopping. AMP has stopped snoring quite so loudly.

My bed is calling.

Perhaps I can have a dream free of anxiety, whether it’s free floating or expensive and grounded.

I pray for peaceful sleep . . . . for myself and for any of the other night owls out there, the ones to whom sleep doesn’t come easily, whether your particular brand of anxiety is free floating or not.
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Cross-posted to Just Enjoy Him.