Daily Reprieve

I have spent the day battling panic attacks as academic performance is about to be tested in a few hours. I have pulled out all the stops utilizing a lot of my traditional coping mechanisms.  I felt no anxiety leading up to this moment.  I speculate that a good portion of motivation is this ability to naturally excite and utilize graduated anxiety.  I have heard many other alcoholics talk about this absolute absence of motivation until they are right on the deadline, when it is pretty much too late to do a good job at the task given.  Their repeated and desperate attempts to tap the graduated anxiety response, “to get motivated,” eventually taps the primal fear mechanism which is paralyzing.

I have had shortness of breath, nausea, continuous headaches ranging from the base of the skull to the brow, muscles trembling, light sensitivity, inability to concentrate, a profound fear that I am losing my mind, impulsive behavior where I just got up and drove off to no where in particular.  I did the clock test, where you concentrate on drawing a clock with the numbers and when I drew the left side of the clock I was far more agitated and had greater difficulty getting it correct.  This might indicate problems in the right hemisphere of the brain.

I came close to self-medicating with NyQuil.  That is when I took off to get into a meeting.  And sanity began to return.  I am still battling, still praying and seeking the intuitive guidance of my Higher Power.  I will be so glad when this semester is complete.  God help me.

Additional observations; feeling of skin stretched across face, sense of being detached, startle reflex when attempting to rest, hands and fingers tingling, spontaneous erections.

This entry was posted on December 5, 2012 at 5:30 am and is filed under Uncategorized with tags Addiction, Alcoholism, Journal, Life, Personal, Recovery, Spirituality. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.