Yeah, I didn’t die, though I felt like I might the past few days. It was probably just a combination of sleep deprivation, insomnia, hypochondria and maybe some minor illness? I don’t really know what was/is wrong with me exactly, which is why I’m gonna try to go to the doctor later today.
About three years ago, around this same time of year, I had a similar mental breakdown type situation. I basically was a little constipated, so I took laxatives, which most definitely did not fix my problems at all. Instead, it made me feel like I either had a blockage of some sort, or maybe I had internal injuries? It was probably just some pulled muscles and inflammation due to the fucking laxative overdose.
Anyway, once I stayed awake for a week and finally slept normally, I pretty much felt better immediately. This time, I figured it was something similar.
It started about a week or two ago. I was having trouble pissing. Like I would piss, and then feel like I still had to go, or I might piss myself. However, I figured it was probably just a case of urethritis, ate some cranberry sauce, drank some cranberry juice and then I was fine.
A week or so went by and I almost forgot about it, when the irritated pisser came back. This time, I had back pain too, which of course, I linked to the fucking urethritis and googled the symptoms, ending up feeling like there might be something wrong with my kidneys? I took a hot shower and the back problem went away. Also drank some cranberry juice for the next day or two, and the problem went away.
The next day, I stayed awake for about 21-23 hours. Binge reading all day. I felt fine the whole day, and the previous few days…
And then shit hit the fan, metaphorically. My piss problem went away, but I ended up with something much much worse. It felt like there was a throbbing in the back-left side of my head, not pain, just a constantly and incessant pulsation. I didn’t understand what was wrong or how to fix it, aside maybe sleeping, but I couldn’t sleep. I just woke up after all.
Every time I walked up and down the stairs, I could hear my heart beating in my ears and the whole day, I could feel my pulse by lightly touching my neck or my chest. My assumption was a high blood pressure.
Anxiety definitely doesn’t help, and was probably my main problem and the reason it was so hard for me to ‘get over it’. I kept telling myself, over and over: “You’re alright. There’s nothing wrong with you. It’s just anxiety, and it’ll pass. You’re healing, you’re fine. There’s nothing wrong. I’m healthy, I’m fine. It’s not a big deal. Don’t worry about it.”
I didn’t have a full-blown panic attack, but it was a slow, unbearably long experience. Where I just couldn’t even ‘think’. I read some stuff, watched some stuff, tried to write a bit… But it was like I was in a quagmire, or an endless fog.
When the day finally came to an end, things got worse. I tried to sleep, but I couldn’t lay on my side. My neck felt like it was being pressed on. A common symptom of anxiety, obviously, but what was I supposed to do about it?
“You’re gonna be fine. There’s nothing wrong. Just go to sleep and everything will be better… Why the fuck can’t I breathe?!”
And thus, I ended up going upstairs, out of the basement and up to the top floor. I made my brother’s old box-spring bed, hoping that maybe it would be more comfortable and could sleep for more than an hour without waking up with my heart racing and my brain pounding…
I was wrong about it being comfortable. It hurt my ribs to lay there. I woke up in an hour, not panicking, but feeling like my body was on fire. My throat was dry, my head was hurting, but I drank something and went back to sleep. Every hour, I repeated the same thing, until I finally slept for 6 hours.
It was around 3 am, Tuesday, February 26th. I made a massive mistake. I felt fine. Much better than before. My head didn’t pound as much. I got a little sleep. I thought I was fine. I really thought the nightmare was over.
It wasn’t.
I had a cough, so I drank a hot tea. Thinking it was just a hot tea, what’s the worst that could happen? It calmed me down a bit, I stopped coughing, my throat felt better. I wasn’t be strangled like before.
So I had a second tea. That’s when shit started getting weird. My heartrate and blood pressure were rising. Probably? At least it seemed that way. I freaked out, obviously. That didn’t help at all.
At a certain point, I think it was around 11 am? I told my father, “I can’t calm down. I’m sorry, I just can’t think, it feels like my brain is going to explode… I keep fidgeting, like my heart might burst at any moment, I need to fucking calm down, but I cant!” Or something like that.
He said, “Alright, I’ll go to the grocery store and pick you up some chamomile tea. That’ll calm you down… Do you wanna come with me?”
Keep in mind, I hadn’t left the house in years. Just because I didn’t want or need to leave the house. I was fine here. I write, I read, I play games and stuff. That’s how I’ve lived for the past 5 years or so. Leaving the house is counter-productive. It increases my chances of getting sick, injured, wastes my time overall and I was busy.
“Yes… Yeah, I’ll go with you.” But I felt like a different person that day. I wasn’t afraid of going outside or anything. It was in the 50’s so not too cold. I wore some jeans, put on some shoes, wore a flannel shirt and a fucking leather jacket over-top of that.
I went outside and the sun was shining, it was the city, but it was still nice. I almost instantly relaxed. Like a weight had been lifted off my soul. The air was cold, but not too cold to breathe. It was great.
The grocery store is almost a mile away from my house. Half the way was uphill and the other half, downhill. It honestly wasn’t nearly as hard as I expected. My parents always tell me I need to get out and walk around because I’m so out of shape, but the truth is that I ‘run’ up and down at least 50 flights of stairs a day. I’m a lot healthier than I expected to be honest.
Of course, after going to the grocery store with my father and buying a bunch of stuff, we ended up having to carry all that shit back. He has this backpack that he put jugs of milk and cartons of this fruit juice inside, which was a decent amount of weight on its own. But I carried most of the stuff.
It was two canvas bags that he brought with him. Each one held about 15-20 lbs of groceries. Including my little box of chamomile tea. Thus, we had to walk almost a mile back to the house. It wasn’t that bad at first, but about half-way there it felt like my shoulders were being stabbed by the weight of those bags.
By the time we got home, I completely forgot about all the bullshit. I drank my tea, felt my body and mind relax. And I even had an hour long conversation with a Facebook friend that I literally never really talked to before then. Like a video-chat.
Anyway, I felt better. I relaxed and finally, at around 6 pm, I went to sleep. I only slept for 6-7 hours, but it was a ‘real’ sleep. I didn’t wake up panicking or anything. I just slept.
When I woke up I was pretty calm already. The pounding in my head was gone for good. When I touched my neck with my fingers, I had to press in pretty far before I could feel a pulse. And my heartrate was normalish. At least I felt that way.
But… I felt like nothing mattered. I watched shows, read stuff, wrote stuff and it literally felt like I couldn’t understand what I was supposed to be doing. As if I was a different soul, controlling the same body. I didn’t enjoy writing, reading, anything really. I felt so fucking lonely.
The feeling didn’t stop, but only got stronger as time passed. I wanted to be with someone more than anything else. And I had no fucking idea how to make that happen. Hell, I still don’t. It was a weird emptiness that I wasn’t used to at all.
Of course, my throat felt like someone was squeezing it too. And I kept having trouble breathing. No matter how much I breathed, or even if I slowed down and calmed down, it wasn’t getting better. I was on the verge of a panic attack when my father suggested that we go for a walk.
And so we did. It wasn’t nearly as far, but my feet, legs and left knee hurt really bad before we even started.
That loneliness and longing didn’t stop though. Even though I wasn’t freaking out as much about the breathing thing, I still felt extremely ‘depressed’ and desperate for some kinda human connection. But ultimately, I woke up today and after a few hours of similarly depressing thoughts, a switch was flipped in my mind.
I feel like ‘me’ again’. For fuck’s sake, look at this big long 1700 word explanation of what’s been wrong with me lately!
That’s like a whole goddamn chapter of a story, or more! And yet I wasted my hands and time writing this shit? What’s wrong with me?
Anyway, I’ll be going to see a doctor later today regardless of whether anything’s actually medically wrong. It’s been years since I went to the doctor, and there might be a minor infection or something that can be ‘cured’. At the very least, if I know it’s anxiety, then I can calm down and deal with that.
To be honest, I don’t feel anxious right now at all. I feel pretty good, except my right-thumb knuckle is really sore from writing this shit in under 15 minutes lmao.
Mike777ac 
Isolating yourself in your house for a long time can be really bad for your (mental and physical) health in my experience. I had a similar situation where I had about ~4 years where I went out rarely and stayed at home to work on my stuff. I’ve always felt that “it’s almost done!” so I often rejected invites from friends, etc because I had to finally finish what I’ve been working on for years. In the end I got some digestive issues and my anxiety went from sth minor to the point where I felt anxious just from going outside.
The doctor told me that it’s most likely due to mental stuff and that was true. I started to pay attention to go out almost everyday, first just for simple walks for about half an hour and then later cycling or running to get back into a good shape. I also started to never reject and kind of invites, anything that got me an opportunity to be among people. It was difficult to stick with this, especially at first as it was very easy to make up excuses like it’s too hot outside, I’ve got sth important to do, I don’t want to meet other people now, etc. Fortunately I still managed to do it and nowadays I feel a lot better: my digestive issues are no more, my anxiety is gradually disappearing and I feel a lot less lonely. Obviously people aren’t the same, but I think it’s generally unhealthy to shut yourself in for such a long time.
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The main thing for me is that I don’t know what’s wrong. I’ve said this before, many times, but I have really strong OCD. It’s a weird mental disorder that manifests in various ways. For me, it’s usually just germaphobia type stuff… However, if there’s something even minor wrong with me, I end up obsessing over it. For example, I had a few cavities years ago, and I thought my teeth were gonna rot outta my head for months and months, but it turned out that the teeth/gums that hurt, weren’t even the ones with the cavities lol.
The moral of the story is that even if it’s just that one of the lymph nodes in my neck are swollen, it freaks me out and I feel like I’m being strangled. Then my OCD kicks in and I make it worse by overthinking it.
Also, I probably need a better bed. Since it hurts to sleep on it, and definitely doesn’t help lol. I’m thinking about buying a Laptop so that I can write, read, ect without being stuck in my house all day, every day lmao.
By the way, it’s been about 7 years. The past 2 years I didn’t leave my house at all(Until last week.) But before that, I only left for stuff like dentist appointments, jury duty and occasionally to eat at a buffet or go to Walmart. I was a textbook shut-in. I couldn’t even be bothered to go out in the summer and enjoy myself.
Maybe this is some kinda punishment for me complaining about the heat during the summer? lol
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I know that kind of feeling (even if fortunately to a smaller extent), I mean getting obsessed about even small issues. There were multiple times when I’d thought that I may have some kind of terminal illness and it turned out that it was just a minor thing. However this kind of thing was a lot worse for me during that ~4 year period and that was also the reason it was difficult to get over it. Every time I felt a stomachache, my first thought was that it’s sth really serious and that there’s no way I’ll be healthy ever again. Still, for me, forcing myself to drastically change my life style made me feel a lot better and normal, almost like how I used to be before.
I can still be very panicky when I’ve some kind of pain that I haven’t experienced yet, but I know that it’s just my own bullshit (I think back to times I felt this way before and make myself realize that most of them wasn’t anything serious at all and that I got through even the ones that actually were). So I can manage these situation a lot better fortunately now and if it doesn’t go away for some time then I force myself to visit a doctor no matter how much I hate it. I don’t know what could help you in your situations, I can only say what helped me and what I think is important in a situation like that.
As I’ve written before, the biggest improvement was due to getting out, regularly exercising and socializing. I’d also been seriously considering visiting a shrink at that time, but I like to solve my issues by myself (which often turns out to be sth stupid lol) and fortunately it seems that in the end I managed to do that. One of the biggest lesson for me was probably that you shouldn’t let yourself get used to issues, problems. Of course there’ll be things that you can’t change no matter what, but a lot of things are solvable, by e.g. going to a doctor or an expert that actually knows their stuff and can help you. All in all, I think shutting yourself in is something that’ll be always more detrimental to your health.
Btw, sleeping on an uncomfortable bed definitely sucks, I changed mine back a couple of years ago when I realized that waking up with a backache is really not a fun way to start your mornings.
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My camera and microphone are garbage lol. Anyway, I walked like 2 miles today… It’s a lot easier when you aren’t carrying anything. Though it did start snowing for the mile back home lmao.
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I just saw your video. I’ve always been imagining you with a deeper voice. You look pretty similar to Cr1tikal, so maybe that’s why, but I’m fairly sure I’ve been imagining your voice the same since before I knew about him.
Anyway if you just want to write outside you might consider just hooking up a second monitor to your PC over a long cord and using a full sized keyboard.
You can also buy some long af USB repeater cables and HMDI over Ethernet converters for not too much money (49ft usb = 20$ , 50ft HDMI = 33$)
And I see you mentioned using crummy keyboards in the new chapter. There are ergonomic keyboards for about $30 to $40 online. Personally a fan of the MK550 from Logitech since it’s a wireless mouse & keyboard combo.
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Nice lol. I never really thought about that before lmao. Anyway, my voice is normally pretty high, but my old mic made it sound significantly higher or at the very least, didn’t pick up low end at all. My current one is kinda similar when it comes to singing, but when it’s just speaking, I think it picks up a decent amount of low-end. I can go really high, but not very low for the most part lmao.
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Well, I couldn’t hear some parts of that (to be honest I’m not the best at the listening part of english lol), but it’s good to hear that you went outside! The way I managed to “trick” myself into daily walks were basically very simple: food. I went to the store each day and only bought enough food for about the day and that meant that I really had a reason for my daily walks.
Here it’s fortunately past the winter weather, but during the winter my exercises were almost completely filled by snow shoveling as it snowed a shit ton this year 😀
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There wasn’t much snow this year, in my state at least, and even when it did snow, it melted quickly most of the time. However, we’ve had some absurdly cold weather this year too lol.
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The weather is only going to get worse from here on out the effects of global warming is pushes the temperature of the planet pass a Tipping Point is going to stop the Tradewinds from from flowing and it’s going to cause another Ice Age within our lifetime it’s going to be fucking sucky because best case scenario most of the northern and southern hemisphere is going to be under ice worst case scenario the whole planet gets covered in ice what a fucking great time that’s going to be and you’re all probably wondering how could the trade wind stop blowing cause another Ice Age well the trade winds are what carry most of the hot weather across the planet keeping a lot of the more northern and southern areas of the planet warmer without them they’re going to rapidly cool down
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Worrying about an upcoming ice age or nuclear winter is kinda pointless lol. There’s nothing you can really do to survive or prevent it. On the other hand, it’s more likely that our governments already have some secret plan for everything lmao. Our technology will advance to a point where we can ‘fix’ whatever problems might arise.
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” I hadn’t left the house in years”
I gotta ask. How pale are you and do you ever go outside? I googled symptoms of vitamin D deficiency and back pain, depression, and fatigue are 3 of the 8 listed symptoms. Might not be the problem, but I figured I’d at least mention it.
Glad you are visiting a doctor and have your parents around if anything does go bad though.
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Yeah, that might be one of my problems lol The last few days I’ve gone out in the sun, but it’s still winter so…
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