I have a pretty prestigious internship doing exactly what my college education has prepared me to do. It is something I worked hard to obtain and something I am very close to losing because of my brain.
Panic attacks, agoraphobia, anxiety, what ever you want to call it hits me before I even wake up on Tuesdays when I am scheduled to go in. It starts with a sort of sleep paralysis. The alarm goes off and I fall back asleep- frozen in fear. I dare not move a single muscle until the alarm goes off again. When I finally do wake up I am wide eyed. I cannot breathe. I cannot move. I berate myself, encourage myself, distract myself but nothing works. It's a sort of complicated ritual actually. If I see the clock change from the time I am supposed to be getting ready to the time I am supposed to leave to the time I am supposed to have arrived I feel worse. Usually I cannot see the time change because it is so horrible. Often I sleep through it. Today was so bad I nearly threw up on myself, afraid I wouldn't be able to even move enough to not throw up in my bed.
I cannot get out of bed. I cannot leave my house. If someone held my hand and led me outside I think most days that would work. Today I would have fought someone if they had tried to make me. I probably would have cried and punched and threw up. That didn't happen but it sort of did in my brain. I do not want to feel like a tantruming child. I do not want to feel like I do not deserve the things I have worked so hard for.

In bed today, while I was fighting this horrible battle with myself, I found myself thinking about my inadequacies. If I live on a farm and have animals depending on me for their food and lives would I have too much anxiety to tend to them? Would I be unable to rise to water the fields? I know I could. I don't have the answer for why. But maybe when my land is more than a plot on a concrete block, agoraphobia won't kick in until I get to the roads that surround it.
I don't want to throw up right outside my front door anymore. I don't want to lose money, respect, and maybe even jobs just because my own brain stops me. I don't want to keep taking these medications that don't work.

I'm stuck. I need out of this life with these strange expectations to wear high heels and have a powdered face and turn in crisp sheets of white paper in time for arbitrary deadlines. I have run away to other countries, into boys arms, and into my dreams where no one can criticize me and none of those things have worked. And as much emphasis as I put on escaping and how much I know that doesn't actually work I know a more natural lifestyle will. It will make me feel like living again and if it doesn't there is no hope.