Anxiety makes me hungry

I take my GREs (Graduate Record Examination, to be exact) on Friday. For those of you who don't know, although I'm fairly sure you all do, the GRE is like the big kid version of the SAT and it involves a labyrinth of vocabulary words no one uses in daily conversation, quantitative reasoning problems intended to deceive you and make you weep and cryptic reading passages. When I scheduled my GRE for October 1st a few months ago, I thought I'd have more than enough time to prepare; I promised myself that I'd follow a strict study schedule and pummel vocab into my brain and everything would go swimmingly.

Yeah, that didn't happen. Now, I have a total of four days to prep for this exam that plays a deciding factor in which graduate programs I get accepted by and it's too late to reschedule or cancel (and even that involves a $45 fee.) And these next four days? I work all but one of them. Yep, I'm fucked in an aggressive and painful manner...like, sit on a bag of peas and limp for a week fucked. Currently, I'm sitting in a carrel taking a well deserved break from studying to evade what I'm sure would be a bountiful anxiety attack.

This can't end well.

What with my general 'oh-fuck' mentality about this test and my work schedule, I can feel myself slipping up. Week one was a piece of cake, but once the seasonal depression, binge drinking and academic panic attacks come on? All I want is to pound back a Red Bull, stay up all night studying and then gorge on cheeseburgers with mac sauce and Chinese take out. I'm having trouble concentrating on studying because I feel so fucking lethargic, antisocial and exhausted.

Every year like clockwork, I feel myself starting to get depressed in September and it only increases as time goes on. September through February is a dark time for me and I spent most of my time crying, eating, sleeping, or just hermiting in my room like a bear cub hibernating for the winter. Most of the time I do a pretty good job of outrunning my depression but these gray days just kick me right in the teeth.

This year, as a preemptive strike, I've started taking the Celexa I was supposed to be taking for the past oh, year. I'm a psychiatrist's worst nightmare when it comes to medication---I never take it regularly, I self-medicate when I feel compelled to and rarely do I let my doctor know that I have never taken my medication consistently. My freshmen year of college, I took my dose of Effexor fairly regularly and then started to forget doses, as I always do. I wound up at my doctor's having an EKG done because I was experiencing the symptoms of withdrawal---who woulda thunk? I mean, my main concern at the time was that my doctor would violate her Hippo oath and tell my grandmother I had my nipples pierced but regardless, I recognized the severity of my actions. Did it stop me from doing the same thing multiple times? Of course not.

So I've been taking my multivitamin, vitamin D and Celexa daily now like a good girl, hell, I might even use my happy lamp for once if it will combat this mopey shit I'm feeling. Every day I feel like I'm on the precipice of a colossal breakdown and it isn't exactly conducive to a healthy lifestyle. If anything, it makes me drink copious amounts of alcohol and eat buffalo chicken pizza and quesadillas at 3AM.

The ever lovely Carlovely taking a hit from our incredible coach, Raggedy Antics.

I've been missing derby practice because of work also and that brings me down and is actually physically exhausting because when I DO make practice, I haven't skated for a week or so and my body is screaming at me, OH HELL NO. Yesterday, our team started contact and looking at the pictures, I was so envious and disappointed I wasn't there. Luckily, we're training a new employee at work and hopefully Sunday schedules will start rotating normally. October also means we practice twice a week indoors---I just need to keep my chin up this week and reassure myself that, yes, I will be there, and I can hip check the fuck out of my lovely derby gals.

I need to keep my chin up in many ways and not lose focus. I have so much momentum and stopping is not an option. I'm going to kick the living fuck out of this depression until it is hobbling in the opposite direction, crippled and ashamed.

Now it's time to listen to Kelly Clarkson and try to relearn and retain mathematical concepts I learned when I was 14.