Anxiety

I have anxiety but I havent taken my meds for the past three months.
1. because i read they might interfere with my birth control and i didnt want to get pregnant at the time and 2. i wanted to see if i could go without them. Well tonight I told Scott I needed to go back on them and he didn't understand why, heck I dont even understand why. But Im not very good at explaining things when I'm upset because I just cry so I thought I'd write about it. Maybe if i write about it, it will make more sense to me. Or to my husband. This post is going to be pretty personal...just a warning.
So this started three years ago. It was halfway through grade 11. I started getting this weird feeling in my stomach...its really hard to explain but I feel SUPER nervous, nauseous, and it just feels weird I dont know quite how to explain it. But things like hanging out with friends started freaking me out. Weird, I know, seeings how highschool is all about hanging out with friends. My last year and a half of highschool was complete hell....sorry for my language but that is the only word that describes it. Everyone looks forward to the weekend but I absolutely dreaded it. It meant two days of either making up excuses of why I couldnt hang out and end up being all alone or else dealing with the anxiety and sickness and going out. I felt so alone. I couldn't tell anyone about this because I was so embarrassed. Here's the embarrassing part...every time I got this anxious feeling my stomach would just start churning and churning which ended up in me having to go to the bathroom ALOT if you catch my drift so I started taking imodium. Over the 2 years of dealing with this before I got help I started off taking a half an imodium before each time I went somewhere. I found it made me feel safe, like I could go out and not worry and this calmed my anxiety a bit. But it got worse and worse and I would be taking 6 imodium at a time. And I was taking it all the time. Even if I didnt need it. It just made me feel safe somehow and thats something I didnt feel unless I was taking imodium. Now let me tell you, taking 6 imodium does NOT feel good. I would also starve myself at times. Going on dates were the worst because I didnt know what to expect. Where were we going, what were we going to do? That made my anxiety 10x worse. Most weekends and anytime during the week when I had to go somewhere I would stop eating. If I had a date friday night I'd stop eating at lunch on thursday. I figured if I didnt eat I wouldnt have to go to the bathroom. So starving myself for over a day then taking all that imodium...it was horrible! It made me feel SO sick. I started hating myself. Why couldn't I stop this? What was wrong with me? I prayed all the time over and over and over again that I would be strong enough to be able to stop this but no matter how hard I tried I would always end up with my same patterns. I got pretty depressed but yet I couldnt tell anyone because it was so embarrassing. I mean, who gets so nervous to go hang out with their friends that they get sick? Well this feeling in my stomach started to be there all day and all night...not just before I had to go somewhere. Going to work or even to school became SO hard, I couldnt sleep at night. I either had to sleep on my stomach or press a blanket up against my stomach because the pressure helped lesson the feeling a bit. I found out that I usually didnt feel anxious when I had to go babysitting so I babysat ALOT and this also gave me an excuse as to why I couldnt hang out. Whenever I was alone I was crying because I felt so horrible. Change was really REALLY hard so when I graduated and moved to edmonton I did not do too well at all! I became very depressed...I have never felt this way in my whole life. I could not make myself feel happy and all I wanted to do was go home. This was a hard time for me. I felt so alone and I had no one to talk to so I would pray all the time because I knew Heavenly Father would listen to me and not judge me. I started wondering if I was worthy to take the sacrament because I thought maybe it was a drug addiction seeings how I NEEDED the imodium. I researched it though and you can't get addicted because it doesnt go through your blood stream. Anyways I moved home and a few months later it just got so bad and I was utterly hopeless and I had had the WORST night ever and I was finally like THATS IT! I cant deal with this anymore! I had reached my breaking point! I went to the dr. and told him all about it.
And guess what? Im not weird. There's nothing wrong with me. Im not a weak person who cant overcome hard things. I just have anxiety. You dont know how relieved I felt to know that there was something actually, medically wrong with me. I wasnt crazy! He put me on citalopram and it worked so great! I could go places and hang out with people and hardly not even worry about it! I have always been a very happy person and have loved life so this was very hard for me to feel this way all the time. So am I going to make myself go through complete hell again? No way! If I need meds to help me feel normal then I'm not ashamed to take them. My dr. told me anxiety is a chemical imbalance. I dont have enough of a certain hormone and so I need the help of medicine to balance it out. I know my body and I know what I need to do to be happy and live a normal life. I dont want to sit at home for another 2 years wasting my life away. I regret highschool so much. I missed out on a ton of fun stuff and a lot of good friends! I wish I had gone to a dr. earlier but I was just to embarrassed and ashamed that I was so weak and couldn't even overcome this one little thing that I thought was so dumb. Anyways I'm done rambling on. Im thankful for my husband who makes me talk to him when I'm upset and I'm thankful he is trying to understand this. Its hard I know, because I dont even understand it half the time.