Anxiety UP, decompression engaged

Yeah, I work at a community college. I’m a veteran. I have a PTSD diagnosis. I take meds and I’m currentluy seeing my therapist about once a month.

For me, high School was mostly hell on earth. And I attended an all-boy Catholic school. And I would describe myself as near the bottom of the social standing.  At home my older brother could be best be described as psychotic with violent episodes toward me and me alone. He brought his frustration home from school.  It’s strange that my mother sent me to the private school but not him.  He was a senior when I was a freshman.  I’ll never know the logic there…

So on this community college, the kind of humans walking in and out of the library where I work (in the non-library part) are for the most part analogues of my school bullies (rather than my brother).  I’m fine when I’m tutoring.  But that’s a very minimal amount of time in the first part of the semester. And I sit in the room and I worry that the athletes (who “must” be in study hall x hours a week, tracked by our staff) are going to become disruptive, and it will fall to me to bring conduct back to the standard.  And so here is where my PTSD meets my past.

My disease is one that urges disengagement from people. That’s the best solution. I can justify infinite reasons for it.

But I’ve taken this job, and chosen to pursue Fellowship as my faith directs.  And so I’ve placed myself in a struggle point between Scylla and Charybdis. The problem is that while I’m at work, the anxiety builds.  And I’m feeling like Monday + Tuesday are jagged right now.  I haven’t found a decompression path.

I think it’s true that I need to disengage from world and national events. None of my roused emotions and none of my oodintentioned investigating is concerned, it doesn’t help.  Here I sit doing a little journaling and listening to David Gilmour’s new album, and I’m feeling the stress lower.

At times something inside me cries out to quit before something bad happens.

I’m noticing that I never mentioned loneliness, till now, maybe that’s not as big a deal as I think.  I do feel better. The anxiety is in imagining all of the various scenarios I may need to react to, and exhausting myself while also placing myself in a fight-or-flight mode completely unjustifiably.