I am trying. I promise you that I am. I have been doing my breathing exercises every morning before I get out of bed and wake my roommates. I have been taking my medications mostly everyday. I have been allowing myself to cry. These are all things I have always struggled with. I never really wanted to accept that I had a problem, despite my constant writing about it. I truly wanted to believe there was nothing wrong with me, and even when I did accept it, I didn’t want to do anything about it. I just wanted to live normally without having to pace myself. Now I am in this environment, and I am beginning to realize its importance.
You see, I have psychogenic non-epileptic seizures, also know as pseudo seizures. If you do not know what this is, it consists of getting overwhelmed and losing consciousness. It isn’t a constant thing for me. It happens every few months or maybe every few weeks if I am at a bad place in my head. It is really scary for not only me but for the people around me as well. I am aware of this, so I have been trying my absolute best to stay calm and underwhelmed. I never realized how hard doing just that is. Especially when I obsess over every little thing. Sometimes I can feel myself starting to get light headed and nauseous, and my natural reaction is to stress about stressing. I try to force myself to calm down even though I know forcing it will only make it worse. It is really hard. I am almost scared to feel anything at this point.
Sometimes in class I will start over-thinking about what I am going to say. This is something completely normal for me, but now the expectations are so high. I find myself stressing about small details like vocabulary or structure of my response even though it’s verbal. It’s completely pointless, but I can’t help it. This will lead to my mind falling blank and a wave of dizziness trying to take me down. If you ever see me staring at nothing with a blank expression on my face, I am probably trying to stabilize myself. Some say I go extremely pale, I’m not sure. This is the warning, especially if I am standing up, that I might faint.
The situation does not really affect me too much. Yes, I have to be very careful about my reaction to things, but I have pretty much trained myself to stabilize when necessary. I just need to get used to the new environment and all the responsibility I now hold. Once I finally relax, I shouldn’t have to worry so much about sending people into chaos because of a stress seizure.