Two months into my current dose of antidepressants and I’m pleased to say that the lack of misery/constant depression has stayed consistently gone. I’ve had my ups and downs during this period, my sleepless weeks that make the whole world seem darker, but it has been a weight off my shoulders to not have to fight myself every step of the way. Well, mostly. I’m still fighting myself occasionally, in ways that I was only sort of prepared for, and that by only one weirdly intense interaction with someone and the constant refrain of people complaining about weird increases in anxiety. Turns out, one of the side effects I’m experiencing is irregular but intense anxiety spikes. My brain will pick one specific thing and get incredibly bent out of shape about it no matter what that that thing is or what I tell myself. The first one was about a weird experience I had in a discord and how I should have responded, where I worked myself up like I haven’t in a decade despite my best efforts to calm down and work through it myself. The second one was about my birthday, though I didn’t recognize it for a strange anxiety spike given how negatively I normally feel about contemplating my birthday. Currently, I’m struggling to contain the anxiety I feel about knowing that the world population status on Final Fantasy 14 has changed as part of today’s update (the day I wrote this) and I need to take this time to make alternate characters because there’s no telling when the world will close again or how long it will be until it opens up again in the future. I’ve had a couple others here or there, but they were all easier to work through: things that took a few calming breathes or waiting a few minutes for my mind to calm down rather than the day or days that these other ones are taking.

Now, I’m no stranger to anxiety. It has been as constant a companion as my depression and more difficult to deal with automatically since actually addressing it requires spending time to acknolwedge it, assess if it is worth my time and energy, and then act or dismiss it as appropriate. My depression, on the other hand, I didn’t need to actively think about. I could just ignore it and the constant muttering voice of misery it created within me. That said, my anxiety was the first thing I actively learned how to deal with while in therapy, so I’ve had the most practice getting it under control. The skills I’ve developed over the last decade and a half have had little utility here, though. The anxiety I’m used to dealing with was the background noise of life. It rose, it fell, it hummed, it screamed, it whipped itself up into a tornado and it dragged me down in whirlpool. It was constant, shifting, and a pressure I could lean again, correcting myself as necessary in order to prevent myself from being knocked over by a surge or dragged down by an unexpected eddy. This is not. This is seemingly random. It shows up like a nail punched through a sheet of plywood, driving itself in a seemingly random depth, doing different damage every time, and leaves like it was suddenly wrested free. There is nothing, it is fully there, and then there is nothing again. It is, so far, always unexpected. It is always a single point rather than a wave of force, and it is almost always something completely ridiculous.

Take my current one for example. At worst, I have multiple weeks before the population status changes again, even with tons of people who have been waiting almost as long as I’ve been playing the game who are probably already moving between worlds. At best, months at a minimum, if it ever gets filled up again. It might not! Recent events in the Final Fantasy 14 world have changed the way that people interact with the part of the game that I call home and that might never go back to the way it was. Plus, it’s not like I’m taking a month off or anything. I’m just trying to relax and do other things for a couple weeks rather than log on every night. Rather than appreciate any of that or wait even a few days so I can get a clean night away after declaring I’d take a break, my brain and heart are trying to spin me into a tizzy about the world status changing in a matter of days. I can feel my heart leaping in my chest as I consider it. I can feel my brain trying to fixate on the thought and start bargaining with me for an earlier work departure time than I’ve decided I need (to make up for a short day the day before I wrote this). My body wants to panic about this despite my best efforts to soothe myself. Not even telling mysef that I’ll hop on tonight, after work and my errand, is enough to calm me down because this feeling isn’t rational or based on anything. My brain’s just cooked up some extra anxiety juice for itself to marinate in and all I can do is allay it to the best of my abilities.

This is still better than depression. It might not be great, but it’s something I can deal with using far less energy than dealing with even an hour of my depression took. Plus, I’m sure I’ll start to figure out the patterns before long, figure out what triggers to avoid as I go about my life, and then I’ll not only have a handle on it, I’ll have a handle on avoiding it as well. Time fixes both the anxiety itself and the problem of these strange anxiety spikes. As long as they stay about (ultimately) inconsequential stuff, I can handle them just fine. If I start to get anxiety spikes about things I legitimately should be worried about (such as the state of the world and my country and my state and so on), then it might be more difficult since I’ll need to check every time to make sure it’s not based in reality. I mean, this is what sudden (proper) anxiety also feels like, when I’m confronted with a situation I need to assess and carefully handle or avoid, so I can’t go around dismissing it every time it comes up because then I might miss something important. Like whether or not I’m going to be letting down my FF14 friends by not being around anymore. Which is definitely a normal and healthy thing to be thinking about while feeling incredibly anxious.