It’s no surprise to those who know me to hear me say that I am a worrier. I’ve been a worrier for years now, and I tend to go through spurts during which it intensifies and drives me nuts (an exaggeration. I think), and then dies off again. If I am to put a label on this beast, I’d say that I suffer from generalized anxiety disorder, which in a nutshell, means that you feel a general sense of anxiety and worry over a wide variety of things.

I had a nice little break from it when I moved to Halifax. Surprising, I guess, since I removed myself from my familiar surroundings and plopped myself into the Unknown - no job, no friends, no idea whether I was going to love living here or not. Three years later, it’s obvious that everything worked out and that I have built a life here.

So you would think that, for an anxious person, I should have been beside myself, nearly immobile, sitting in that first apartment wondering what the hell I had just done. But no. I was in my element. I grew more independent. I found a job within a month. I made friends. I met and fell in love with Neal. I got promoted to a paralegal position. I moved in here, we got engaged. And through most of that, I had nearly no anxiety.

Sure, I worried about things from time to time, and I would occasionally feel a little pang of anxiety. But hey, I’m human. The obsession that accompanies the worry? That was nowhere to be seen. I thought to myself that maybe, just maybe, I had beat that anxiety beast once and for all.

Not quite. My theory is that I gave myself (and the beast) a shock. I had obsessed about the prospect of moving to Nova Scotia for close to a year, and despite the odds, I moved and made it work. I felt like a clean slate, like I could start again, reinvent myself.

I.Would.Not.Be.An.Anxious.Person.PERIOD.

Well, sadly, I guess your past always comes back to haunt you, particularly if you’ve never found a way to adequately deal with said anxiety. If I had to pinpoint a time when the anxiety started to make a comeback, I’d have to say it was when I started to suffer from IBS-D and had all of those stomach issues. Imagine having to go to work and not know if you were going to make it without a rather embarrassing incident. Hell, imagine going ANYWHERE with that thought. I’m sure it’s no surprise that I felt a great deal of anxiety and helplessness over that, which, I believe, kickstarted my generalized anxiety disorder (GAD).

I’ve actually been meaning to write about the outcome of my IBS-D experience, because maybe there are other women out there who are dealing with the same thing and just haven’t stumbled upon the solution that I found. I’m highly superstitious, and I’ve avoided writing about it in case the IBS-D came back with a vengeance.

Not so long before I started to have symptoms, I started taking the birth control pill. I had never bothered before because I smoked and given my family’s history of strokes, I wasn’t about to increase my chances by smoking and taking the pill. But then I quit, and stayed away from cigarettes, Neal and I had become serious, so it seemed like the obvious choice to start the pill.

Well, for one thing, it totally fucked up my period. I was always pretty regular, every 26-28 days, but this messed it up royally. There was really no telling when I’d start, or how long I’d be on it. The doctor tried adjusting it a couple of times, but since I wanted one with a lower hormone count due to the family history, it just wasn’t working.

For the longest time, I didn’t see the connection. All I knew was that I was developing IBS-D-like symptoms and I didn’t know why. I researched and researched and researched it online. I felt helpless and disgusting and unhappy. Though I wouldn’t use the clinical definition, I can say that I was becoming depressed over it. I was living with Neal, we were engaged, and that made me so happy, so how could I be so unhappy at the same time?

One day, while researching some more online, I came across a possible answer. It didn’t come from a medical website. It was a forum for women, writing about their experiences. I was shocked at the number of women who had experiences where they would start taking the pill, develop IBS-d, they’d stop the pill and it’d go away, then they’d start taking it again and the IBS-d would return. I remembered reading somewhere that IBS-d can be brought on by fluctuations in hormones. Well, what is jam-packed full of hormones?

It also happened to be a time when I was in the second week of pills and I started a full-blown period. I finally said “Fuck it” and stopped taking it. Cold turkey. Doctors generally want you to finish the packet, but I figured that since my cycle was messed up anyway, it really wouldn’t make much of a difference.

That was in January. I waited patiently. I thought I saw improvements in my digestive tract, but I was scared to get my hopes up. But the improvement continued, and now I feel much more like my normal self.

So. All of that to say that if you’re having issues with IBS-d and you’re on the pill, you may want to think about that. But I’m not a doctor - I just know it worked for me (and for another girl at work, actually).

ANYWAY. Unfortunately, although the IBS-d symptoms went away, I was left with the anxiety beast again. It’s horrible. I’ll worry about one or two main things, and when that gets resolved, I’ll find something to replace it with. Whatever I choose as the subject of my worry will become an obsession for me. Sure, I still function, I still go to work, I still see friends, I still smile and laugh. But when I’m left on my own, such as when I come home, the fears, the worries, all come flooding back. I worry that something will go wrong with the car. I worry something will go wrong with the house. I worry about money. I worry about health. Anything, really.

I really think that a lot of it has to do with not trusting myself to have the ability to deal with things. That’s the common denominator in all of that. For some reason, I’ve lost a bit of that independence and confidence in myself that I had when I shocked myself by moving to Halifax.

Because of this, I went to a naturopathic doctor today. I’m not sure what it’ll accomplish, but I was there for an hour-and-a-half, and she gave me B Complex vitamins (Neal: a little different from the B12 insofar as it contains pretty much all of the B vitamins, so it’s supposed to be better) and a tincture (an alcoholic extract) made up of licorice, Eleuthrococcus and passion flower (though it’s only a 1/2 teaspoon three times a day, so it shouldn’t have any effect on me driving or anything). She also made some dietary changes, which is the area I’m not so pleased about. She has limited me to a maximum of 1/2 cup of coffee per day, though I can drink green tea to my heart’s content. My thought is that she knows it’s a pain in the ass to drink 1/2 a cup of coffee per day, so I’ll just give it up. I usually had a couple of cookies for dessert after lunch, but she has limited me to 3 times a week (though maybe I’ll just cut it down to 1 cookie almost everyday. Heh).

I don’t know if this will work, but it’s worth a shot I guess.