When I woke up this morning at my parents’ I was feeling the usual nausea, the usual tightness in my legs and the usual sense of discomfort.
I reached for coffee and cigarette immediately, like I always do. It’s a killer habit I know and I also know it doesn’t support the anxiety but it’s like I can’t go without. I could barely eat breakfast – stomach was too tight.
I texted my neurologist and got no reply. At that point my anxiety had started escalating and I decided I wanted to cut the crap immediately and so I asked my partner to call him and get an effing response. I couldn’t call for two reasons:
I was surrounded by my parents and my daughter was with me;
I was too shy to voice my fears.
My partner called him. He confirmed I haven’t been feeling poorly due to the removal of amisulpride but rather due to my underlying condition. He insisted on reassuring me that I am okay. I am a normal person. There’s no disease in me. I have a condition that will be successfully addressed through the right medications and therapy.
I’m on my third day of quetiapine and must admit I’m feeling less worse than yesterday. So far I’ve only taken one Xanax tab in the morning.
Legs (muscles) are sore and slightly tense. I got two heat waves only since the morning.
At some point something happened this morning. I decided to pack the stuff I had brought at my parents, get into my car with my daughter and go home to change in swimsuits and come to the navy club.
We also went for a quick shopping tour, just my daughter and me as she was out of bathing suits.
My voice has been better today.
I’ve smiled.
I’m looking around me.
I’m not crazy nor will I become crazy. I’m a normal person just like everybody else, I have a beautiful daughter that is sitting in front of me right now eating her unhealthy crisps 😀 and insisting I go for a swim with her.
I’ve had bad experiences that impacted my way of functioning and thinking. New cells can be created. Check what this article says about it.
Who said I can’t be one of those people? Drug addicts manage re-wiring their brains. Of course a person with anxiety can learn new patterns and introduce new synapses.
Patience.
Faith.
Love.
And meds when needed.
I’ll be blogging about my experience with meds as soon as I’m ready to do so.
For the time being, I’ll give into my daughter’s requests and go for a swim with her ☺️
I went to Zagreb for the weekend with my partner and the entire weekend was a constant battle against the knot in my throat, the nausea I’d start feeling the minute I opened my eyes, the mental confusion and the horrible intrusive thoughts.
The only slight help I’d get was from Xanax 0.25 tabs – but not completely.
I had a massive panic attack while in the airport on our way back to Rome: I started sweating profusely, heart was racing and thoughts were getting all mixed up.
One thought in particular was harassing me: kill yourself. Stop destroying the life of everyone that loves you. Disappear from this planet.
I broke down, sobbing like a baby, and texted my therapist while crying on my partner’s chest desperately. I cried (and I cry) because I don’t want to feel this way.
I want to be a good mother on top of everything. I want my daughter to feel happy, serene and mostly safe in my presence. And so I had been doing until this past week.
What happened during this week that altered my brain so badly?
Only thing that comes to mind is that I’m coming off the old therapy and have started introducing the new one – which, my doc explained, is more effective and has less side effects.
It’s not the same doc I’ve been seeing for the past years. I’m now being helped by CENPIS – a center of excellence where multiple professionals collaborate to support patients.
But meds take time to kick in.. in the meantime, I’m utterly terrified of my feelings and was unable to go to my house.
Too scared of being alone.
Scared something would happen to me and I’d terrify my daughter.
And so I came where I always come when I’m in crisis mode: my parents.
I had promised my daughter I’d cook a nice meal for her tonight and we’d have dinner at home, just the two of us, like we haven’t done in a while due to my anxiety.
Well guess what? I had to let her expectation down.
I need support. I need to feel safe. I need to know my daughter is taken care of if something happens to me.
Final thought: anxiety is very real. Please be patient and ask professionals how you can support a dear one that’s battling a battle like mine.
I’ll keep you posted on when I manage making that nice dinner for my adorable girl. For the time being, we’ll have the grandparents feed us both – although I’m incapable of eating anything.
When Covid restrictions were being lifted, I was applying for a job at BCG. I had been at Deloitte for some years now and realized there was no potential for growth or salary improvement.
I was contacted by BCG for interviews and so figured I’d reach out to current employees to inquire about the process. I remembered a former colleague of mine had moved there and so I decided to contact him.
Little did I know it would turn out to be the biggest mistake of my life.
He was very kind, suggested we got on a call to discuss the interview process and offered to help me prep.
He was perhaps a little too kind as from that moment he started calling daily and at weird timings. I remember vividly hearing his kids screaming in the background and shortly after I started getting pictures of his children and consequently shared a few of my own daughter.
The first interview happened on June 14, 2021. He knew about it, called me and asked to discuss it over dinner. Two weeks had passed since the process with BCG had started and during these two weeks we were texting and calling regularly. I realized I had started liking the former colleague I once thought of as cocky, rude and inappropriate.
I recall making myself as pretty as I could for that dinner. I was very excited and jittery.
He arrived in a scooter, wearing jeans and a colorful blazer I hated but not enough.
I couldn’t stop staring at him during dinner. I was completely captivated by his smooth talk, his (seeming) confidence, his sense of humor and his blue eyes. I felt the chemistry was there and was taken quite back when, once dinner ended, he didn’t kiss me.
Once I got back home, I texted asking why he didn’t approach me. And from there, it all happened.
He was working on a project in Germany back then, told me he’d fly in the following week to meet me and so he did. This went on for three weeks.
At that point I was completely hooked. I started wanting to reciprocate his travels and to meet him over the weekends as well. He said no.
I couldn’t fly to Berlin to meet him. We couldn’t spend weekends together because “work” for the company he owned on the side.
I was into it too deep. The late night talks, the endless phone calls, the mind blowing sex. I was completely hooked, could barely sleep. All I thought about was the made he made me feel: ALIVE.
Mid July comes, I start getting suspicious that something wasn’t right with this constant work excuse. I asked if he was still with the mother of his kids because it just didn’t add up.
And that’s where the manipulation started. I was accused of being paranoid, crazy, treating him like a child and so on and so forth. Completely captivated by this man, I ended up apologizing. Intensely.
We went on. One day of mid November of the same year, he called me and said he was bringing his kids to Rome to introduce them to me. I got a bout of anxiety: did this mean the relationship was getting serious? I swallowed my anxiety and went to meet those kids I had been video calling with for months.
His daughter ran towards me and jumped in my arms. His soon took a little while to open up but eventually did.
November was the month when I figured we were something and I got him his first gift: a Darth Vader Lego collection piece.
Time went by, things didn’t change: we could only meet when he wanted. I was too in love and believing he was truly working – even when he disappeared completely over the weekends.
The days we’d spend together -mid week- I was never capable of sleeping with him. The minute we’d go to sleep, I’d start getting fierce anxiety attacks and the need to get out of his house. It always happened. I just couldn’t fall asleep next to him.
Fast forward to a year or little more, he caught COVID and was very dramatic about it. He asked it if I’d join him on this gaming platform to kill time and of course I did. Once on that platform, I noticed he constantly ignored me to interact with this other user – manupikachu. Something didn’t feel right.
I started googling that user name, it was all I had. I obsessively kept on researching for days and months until I finally found an Instagram account with a name and last name. Next step was looking this use up on LinkedIn: as I suspected, it was a woman that had also worked at Deloitte.
I knew it, I just knew that the worse would happen but swallowed my fear and asked him – mentioning name and last name – who that person was.
He had no emotion. He simply said it was a woman he had had something with in the past. I finally stopped believing the bullshit and told him we were over. He was in Milan, he begged me to wait and said he’d catch the first train to Rome to come tell me to my face that he loved me and wanted to be with me.
And what did I do?
I waited. I hugged him. I cried and sobbed my heart out. My dream coming true. He was finally ready to commit to me.
The important step I missed out on: upon realizing that user had a name and last name and was a woman, I felt devastated by a sense of doom and sadness I had never experienced before. And so I started seeing a psychiatrist, begging for help to be normal again.
With the drugs lifting me up and my dream come true, we finally became a couple.
But something in my mind wouldn’t shut up. I kept sensing something was wrong and so one night, while he was asleep, I went through his internet history and found tons of researches on that woman and things like “why can’t I forget my ex although she treated me badly”.
My heart sank.
Here we were, AGAIN.
I confronted him, got manipulated again and fell for it.
His birthday was approaching – June 6. I wanted him to feel special on that day and so I planned: a weekend by the sea, a wine tasting day and had a cyber cake designed for him (see the pic).
Summer was near, I had tried planning holidays with all the kids too for months. I grew fed up, booked tickets for my daughter and me and we flew to Saudi to visit my sister.
The minute I traveled he started treating me horribly: he was cold, never calling, never texting. And on my birthday, I got the following: “buon compleanno.” Not an emoji, not a call. And obviously, a no show at the airport as I had planned to spend my birthday with him as well.
My daughter and me reached home in Rome at around 5 am that day. At 8, he started calling obsessively saying we had to get ready to go climbing – something I’ve never done.
I said no.
I said this is not the way I wish to be treated on my birthday.
This is not the way I wish to be treated in general and mostly – I cannot be with a man that won’t stand up to his truth. So I gave him an aut aut: either he’d tell that woman the whole truth or I would do so personally. Otherwise there was no way I could respect him and go on.
He refused to do so.
And so I did it.
I will not waste any mental energy on that woman.
I’ll just wrap this post telling you the minute I broke up with him – on my birthday – he went and got back with her. Although she had heard the full truth from me, she still went and got back with him.
I have no hard feelings for him.
I sincerely pity him.
I never hope to cross paths with him again as I know my heart would sink in my stomach: not over feelings for him, but out of awareness of the pain he put me through.
A pain so intense that led me to psych medications, amplified my GAD and literally broke my heart.
Life has been so much better with him out of the picture. But that’s something I’ll discuss in a separate post.
GG
P.S: the bakery got his initials wrong 😅 it should have been FP.
Mental Health Fitness: breathing the pain in individually, breathing it out collectively 