Because I Have it all Together, and Other Lies I Want You to Believe About Me

I Had a Bad Anxiety Day and Here is What I Did About It

how to deal with anxiety

I had a bad anxiety day. I have PTSD and most days are fine but some days I get a little panicky. I’m not at the window screaming for somebody to let me out…visibly anyway….

It’s more of an inability to calm down on the inside. To sit. Think. Create. I pace a lot. Get exhausted. Can’t find peace. Talking to people is too much. I move a lot but accomplish little.

I’ve learned over the years what sets those days off for me. It was inevitable because I set myself up for it.

I’ve been working too long for the last two weeks. Some people thrive on working until 9-10 at night. I don’t. My work requires a lot of thinking in order to create and it’s eventually exhausting.

My work also requires me to be an extrovert, and I am anything but. Putting myself “out there” all the time is innately uncomfortable. I adore and love people, but I also need to be a hermit away from social media, especially.

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Screw New Years Resolutions – Do This Instead: The Woman in the Ward

Stacy Pederson funny motivational speaker easter 2020 Covid 19

“The Woman in the Ward.”

By Stacy Pederson, Funny Motivational Speaker

I woke up to the familiar sounds of an IV and vitals machine, but the walls were different. It was my fourth time in the hospital. The infection came out of nowhere-once again.

I could tell I was on the ground floor because of the trees outside my window. I didn’t know it at the time, but those trees would be burned into my memory so clearly. On days when it snows here in Colorado, I often have flashbacks of the snow falling on those trees.

They told me the hospital was full on the regular floors. I was the sickest outside of ICU, so they had moved me to the cancer ward.

The room was bigger than I was used to with tasteful wallpaper and paint. It had a serene feel. Serene for a hospital cancer ward, anyway.

The nurses were different there. They were less scurried and more present. Present enough for one of them to hold my hand when I fell apart and cried. It felt like the illness was a constant roadblock that kept me from moving forward with my life.

I was wrong. The illness would be THE thing that would give me an actual life.

The first night fell and I was alone. It was 11:20 pm when I heard it for the first time. It started as a muffled cry, then suddenly a shout. Then a wave of uncontrollable sobbing. It was from a woman down the ward.

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