ANXIETY: Where it All Began [Part 1]

This is the blog post I am scared to make. Scared not because of the thought of sharing it with the very private internet but, it's just that the journey is not over. My story is not one of a girl who has overcome anxiety but one of a girl who is trying to find a way through it. It has been a long road full of self doubt, raw emotions, and crippling thoughts. It is a war with myself; there are countless battles and sometimes I win but there is no lack of times I lose. This is a sensitive and unstable struggle. The smallest things may lead to the bloodiest (figuratively of course) of battles and the outcome is always unknown. So that is why I am scared. Im afraid that as I explain this story a fight may erupt and this whole blogging idea may do more damage than good.

But, hey, you never know until you try. Right?

Oh but where to begin! I could begin here but then you will need to know this for later so maybe I should start at that one point but then what about the time in between those things? Ugh. I'll guess I'll just start at the somewhat beginning .


Prelude: This is pre-anxiety Breanne, somewhere on a beach, sometime in June, 2014
About two days into our family vacation full of sun, sand, and food I noticed a rather large bulge on the right side of my neck. We had just eaten dinner so it seemed to be related too eating but it was not painful just large. After about thirty minutes it went back down. I honestly was not that concerned I thought maybe I was getting sick or something, maybe it was a lymph node, and also I didn't have insurance so I didn't really want to pay to go to the doctor.  Once we returned home from our vacation it happened again and this time my friends and boyfriend said that I should get it checked out. I obliged.The doc said it was a salivary gland that got partially clogged causing the swelling during/after eating. He gave me some meds, told me to drink plenty of water, and try eating some lemon heads to get the saliva going. I did all these things and it went away, yay!

Chapter 1: Achilles was my Achilles Heel

This is Achilles. He was beautiful, sweet, and honestly just the perfect dog. He loved us and we loved him. He was our baby boy. I am not going to explain the whole story because I am already sobbing and the details are not needed. The point is that at a healthy age of six Achilles became sick and after three bouts with antibiotics and several vet visits later, we lost him. He had an ultra sound that came back clean and three weeks later an exploratory showed tumors too big and too aggressive to stop. That was it. Three weeks. We were devastated. I couldn't wrap my head around the fact that in just three weeks he went from healthy to terminal. That could happen to anyone. Me. It could happen to me. Or my mom. Or my boyfriend. What if I had cancer? I would never know. What if its too late....

Right here is where my story begins. 

Hi, Hello.

I am not fond of introductions. I understand the importance of establishing a foundation but still, not my favorite. But for the sake of.......structure? Here it goes:

My name is Breanne, I am 21 years old and I (currently) reside in Northern California. Solid first sentence right? What else? I am from the east coast originally, and by originally I mean I moved to Cali about a month ago. I say east coast because more than one state is involved in what I considered home. My last place of residence was a small town in the North Georgia Mountains where my boyfriend and I lived, worked, and went to college for about three years. I left behind my mother and my grandparents in this beautiful little town, so a BIG part of my heart will always be there. I was born in Georgia and I recently left it (Duh, Breanne you just said that) but I consider North Carolina my home state. NC became home in the 3rd grade and it will forever be one of my favorite places because it gave me so many great things. Okay I can really only think of one off the top of my head but it sounded good...right? I am looking at that reason right now, he is sitting across from me also staring at a computer screen, how romantic. (CAUTION: Here comes the sappy part, I'll make it short.) Me and my boyfriend have been together for at this point a third of our lives. That's seven years, for those of you not good at math. I feel so lucky to have found my soulmate so early on in life. There is nothing like having your best friend with you all the time, it has just been the best time with him by my side. He left his family in North Carolina at eighteen and moved with me to Georgia after my mom got divorced in 2012. So when he got into an awesome programing school in San Fransisco earlier this spring there wasn't a doubt in my mind that I would be moving with him. And now here we are; in a new state surrounded be people and places we don't know and with our whole support systems 3,000 miles away. We have already had some challenges and I am sure there are more too come in the future but we have each other and for that I am forever grateful.

I am starting this blog for several reasons. The first reason being I haven't found a job yet and I am getting a little bored, you can only watch so much Netflix. My second reason is that I want to be able to look back, see who I was, and compare it to who I become. But honestly I just made those two reasons up (like right now), the main reason is that I have been dealing with some severe anxiety for going on a year. I plan on making a separate post all about my anxiety and how it came on but in short I am hoping that writing things down will serve as an outlet or a release. I never really kept a journal or diary, and truthfully I don't usually enjoy writing and consider myself to be a horrible writer.

SO I KNOW, I'LL MAKE A BLOG!

Although the above statements present some serious negative thoughts, I have had a couple of epiphanies in recent years with writing. Mostly stressful situations where my mind was going a million miles an hour and I felt like if I didn't write SOMETHING down my head would just pop right off. One of these stressful situations ironically happened to be when I was supposed to be writing a paper on myself as a writer. I got so overwhelmed with how to even begin a paper about how and why I hated writing papers that I just opened a blank pages document and started writing. I didn't allow myself to stop and proofread or edit mistakes or anything. I just wrote, I got it all out. And when I was done I felt amazing, liberated, like nothing I had ever felt after writing. Somehow I tweaked what I had written into a paper and turned it in for that assignment. It was the first time I had ever been proud of what I wrote and it showed. My professor loved it so much he even nominated my for a freshman writing award that year (I didn't win, but still)! Since then I have been itching to have that feeling again and I am hoping I can find that in this blog.

That feeling is what I modeled the name of this blog after:

UNREFINED because I am going to try and write things without stopping, my only goal being to get it out onto a figurative piece of paper. NOTIONS because I want every blog post to be centered around just one thought or idea that has being swirling around in my head. OF because grammar. NONSENSE because who knows maybe I am batshit crazy and nothing I say or think makes any sense to anyone but me.

Alright that's all I got. I don't know if anyone will be reading this besides me (Hey, future Breanne)!

But if you are reading this and you aren't me:

Hi, Hello. Welcome to my blog, be nice, I am new to this.