Hello from a new member - plus advice welcome!
Hello, I'm Kathryn!
I'm here because I found a link to this page via an article about travel anxiety that said this site is a good support network for particularly anxious times. Hopefully I can offer some advice for others here, and vice versa (please see bottom of post for my current worry!)
A (hopefully brief) rundown of my anxiety/depression history:
I have had various manifestations of anxiety and depression for most of my life (about 20 years out of 26). I've been on and off medication for it since 18 (currently not on medication), and in and out of counselling and CBT since I was about 10. Interestingly, I have also recently started to suffer from night terrors again, which was something I experienced frequently as a child.
At the moment, my depression is manageable, as I figured out a few years ago (after quitting my full time job), that my depression is career-triggered (I work freelance in the arts, so my career can be particularly unstable and unreliable, with a lot of rejection). This has helped because now, whenever I begin to feel the beginnings of depression, I can narrow down what could be causing it and often it is related to my career, which helps to rationalise it and gives me some achievable ways to manage it.
I was diagnosed with Agoraphobia when I was a teenager, while attending CBT (I was having panic attacks at school and stopped going to lessons). I don't think I really understood the extent of my agoraphobia at the time, as all I knew was my panic attacks were triggered by not being able to leave a space. However, as an adult, I have realised the extent to which my agoraphobia reaches beyond this. I manage to cope with public transport now, helped by having to travel for work for a while, but in the last couple of years I have started feeling increasingly anxious about losing family members (I have had panic attacks while away on holidays because I felt like my loved ones would fall off the edge of a cliff) and my general anxiety is much higher than it has been before.
Anyway, I could go on for hours about the various things I am anxious about, so I'll get on with my reason for posting here.
I am currently away from home for 5 days for work. It is a trip I have been dreading for months, and I can feel my anxiety building up now that I'm here. I am staying with the two people that I am working with, but don't know either of them well (they know each other well). It's about 3 1/2 hours away from home on the train (quite a big deal for me). I have my own room, which is a huge help, but I am finding myself counting down the days until I can go home - which I think is only increasing my anxiety! Ultimately, I think I am most anxious because I haven't built up a level of trust with the people I am here with - I have quite high levels of medical anxiety too, so this may be rooted in the fear that they may not be able to help me if something goes wrong. When I imagine what would help me most, it is not necessarily to go home, but to have a loved one here with me. Does anyone have any advice on how to get through the next four days? I'm terrified this is all building up to one big embarrassing panic attack, and I will need to go home (which would mean not doing my job properly, and it would look very unprofessional). I feel really trapped and lost, with nothing and no one familiar to reassure me, and like I could break at any minute from the pressure. Writing this all down has helped, but hopefully hearing from some of you will help me to feel more relaxed and less alone over the coming week?
Thank you for reading all of this - sorry it was much longer than intended!
Kathryn
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