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This morning I woke up hating Dick Cheney. Not in itself an unusual thing, I suppose, but the twist here is the particular reason I hate him today. You see, I hate Dick Cheney because he has a deep vein thrombosis, or blood clot, in his left leg.

 Blood clots have been a major theme in my health paranoia for quite some time and until this morning I rather thought I had warded their spector off forever. Or at least for a good long while. This morning when I woke up, though, I had a pain in my left leg. Just a sort of vague ache and tense feeling in one particular spot. Naturally the first thing that came to mind was Cheney’s deep vein thrombosis. Yippee!

Of course I have had this feeling over and over again in the past few years and never has it turned out to be anything even remotely dangerous. I get a little ache, a little twinge, a little stiffness in my muscle, I freak out about blood  clots and waste a lot of time and energy worrying, and then it goes away.

So why now? Why did this happen all last Summer, then not for months, and now all of a sudden again? Because both last Summer and in the past week or so I felt stressed out. The causes were different, but the effect was the same: I felt stressed, I worried, I tensed my muscles all over the place without realizing it, and that led to these weird little aches. Intellectually I know this, emotionally it still takes some convincing to make it stick.

But unlike last Summer, I now know the mechanism that is at work. Then I was just flipping out because I couldn’t imagine what could cause these very localized aches other than a blood clot. I had nowhere else to hang the explanation, and I am the sort of person who needs an explanation. That’s a problem in itself, but one for another day.

What’s helping me get through this current pain is knowing that the cause is stress and muscle tension, added to having a general feeling of stress that makes my mind more receptive to these thoughts. That’s the real lesson: watching your panic and seeing where it comes from in your mind. Why are you open to panic right now? Is there anything you can do to remove that source? If not at least you can recognize it for what it is and focus on that instead of the panic.

 Of course that doesn’t help me hate Dick Cheney any less.

I was thinking over my last entry and the whole idea of perception of the world and I thought about it in a different way than I ever have, something that really made it more concrete for me. I’m sure it’s nothing original: lots of other people must have explained it this way before, but it was a small revelation to me.

One of my problems has always been not completely being able to accept that I have a distorted view of reality. I know that I do because I’ve thought I was dying every day in a row for months on end, and haven’t died yet. But still there was a part of my brain that said “hang on a second, you go to work every day and do a good job, people there have no idea of anything going on with you, most of your family has no idea, you’re smart and think about all kinds of impressive stuff, how can you be that wrong?” A valid question, I guess.

While I was pondering the notion of depression and anxiety colouring my perception, I took the phrase more literally than usual and the image of stage lighting gels pop into my head. If you put on a blue gel, everything looks blue and the scene is suddenly under water. If you put on a yellow gel, everything looks yellow and bright and sunny. It’s all the same stuff as before, but literally in a different light. I could suddenly see my depression and anxiety as a gel put over my view of the world.

Like I said, this isn’t anything like an original thought, but it helped me finally answer that nagging question. I was not that wrong: I was still seeing the real world, but through a filter that was enhancing some things and screening out others.

Hi, I’m Pete. By way of introduction, let me tell you two stories.

One particular day my wife had a class at 5:00, but she said they would just be getting into groups for an assignment and she should be out most likely by 5:45 or 6:00. I decided to hang out in my office and she could call me when she was done. Except that 6:00 came and went, then 6:30, and then it was coming up on 7:00 when my building closes. I couldn’t imagine what had happened to her. Or, rather, I could imagine all kinds of horrible things. She might have had an accident on the way to school. Maybe we got our signals crossed and she was expecting me to take the bus home. When do busses stop running in Detroit? It’s past 7:00 now, maybe they’re already done. Do I even have change? Her cell phone just kicks over to voicemail, so that’s even more frustrating. My my office was locked up so I had to get out and wander around our corner of Detroit worrying about the intentions of every man I saw walking towards me. I had no idea what to do, I was out of my mind, paralyzed by panic.

That’s how that story would have run if it had happened this past August. That was before medication, before therapy, and above all before I had a good understanding of how anxiety and panic were colouring my perception of the world. This is how it actually happened last night: I was hanging out in my office expecting to hear from my wife at about 5:45 or 6:00, but by nearly 7:00, when the office floors of my building lock up for the night, I still hadn’t heard anything and her cell phone just kicked over to voicemail. It occurred to me that she might have had an accident or that maybe I had misunderstood and she was expecting me to take the bus home. It also occurred to me that maybe the prof had decided to talk a lot longer about the group project than she had thought he would. I couldn’t stay in my office anymore, so I walked over to the parking structure to see if the car is in the usual spot. On the way my phone buzzed. Her class rang longer than she thought and she couldn’t get out to call me earlier, but she’d be at the car in 5 minutes.

Obviously this isn’t saying much about how you can overcome anxiety, nor is there any one way to do it. Everyone has to find what works for them and then stick with it until it stops working. My point here is that you can get better. During the Summer I would hardly have believed it was possible to feel calm again. It seemed like it was against the laws of nature, this is how I was and it was how I would stay. Now I can hardly put myself back in my old mindset. Overcoming anxiety isn’t easy, but regardless of what your panic tells you, it is very possible and you have to KNOW that.