Anxiousness

Always trying to find some cause or blame for my growing anxiety, which itself is the cause/blame of my slipping grades. Grades going down leading to anxiety, sure I guess I can see that snowballing off of itself, and progress in school leading to more difficult coursework leading to higher stress, that might also account for some. But it never felt like that. It felt like a lifestyle thing, unrelated to school. Using a pressure valve allows/creates excuse for continued use of that valve, leading to greater and greater procrastination, perhaps? But the procrastination doesn't cause my anxiety.

Looking back in the revision history of a Google Doc of a stageplay I'm working on (Google Docs saves all changes you make, and allows you to look back through all revisions and even restore them) I can find mention of a character's "panic attacks" going back to first being written in on February 10th 2016, during my first semester here, quite a ways back. (The character is based on me, of course, or at least the version of me present in the original dream that inspired the premise of the play.) So they've been with me for at least that long, the anxiety attacks, but haven't/hadn't been that big a problem, judging by my 3.75ish GPA back then...

You still have the panic attacks? one character asks, and on a revision dated 3 March, I write in a reply, (which had been the intended one from the beginning if memory serves me correctly, but not put in until 22 days later for whatever reason): They come and go. And only when I'm paying attention. 

This response is nonfiction. That's how my anxiety attacks worked for me. If I paid attention, I'd be able to get anxious, and kick into fight-or-flight. If I zoned out, it couldn't/didn't happen. It was all fairly mild stuff, and it went away for a bit after that; I'm not sure when it came back. Or why. Or hadn't at least, but maybe that's still true...

I was reading an interview between Tony Attwood and Temple Grandin yesterday, and something that Temple says stops me cold:

Another really bad thing, especially in the high-functioning end of the spectrum, is that as the people get older, they get more and more anxious. Even if they take Prozac or something else, they're so anxious, they have a hard time functioning.

So maybe there isn't an environmental cause after all. Nothing Freudian, it's seriously just part of my brain chemistry for whatever reason. I'm not sure if there's any research out there on the cause of this increased anxiety, but I don't think it really matters either. The important thing is this: it's not in my mind, it's in my brain, and it wouldn't be inappropriate at all to seek medical attention for the issue.

Though of course if the anxiety really does get worse and worse and worse like Grandin's suggesting...


Quote taken from an interview dated Dec 9, 1999. Published in, um MLA citation format I guess,

Grandin, Temple. The Way I See It: A Personal Look at Autism and Asperger's. Arlington, TX: Future Horizons Inc., 2008. Pg xxiv.

I think that's how MLA citation is done.