Do you wake up in the night feeling inexplicably and overwhelmingly sad?

[ThelmaLou]

@The Great Sun Jester

That blanket of bricks hits me at random times. Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night feeling completely hopeless and lost, sometimes it ambushes me at work. I can be plugging along just being me and doing what I do and then * Whammo * my breath catches, my eyes start stinging, and all is hopelessness and ruin–and entirely my fault. Were I a medieval doctor I’d say my brain is prone to developing melancholic pustules that simply burst, flooding my entire nervous system with sadness–because it’s even buckled my knees mid-stride. Instead I just go with “stress.”

I have also experienced that sudden “rug pulled out from under you” feeling.

On the thread “Why would a 9 yo suddenly be anxious about school?”, there was this post:

@Arabella_Flynn

Speaking as someone who does actually have a generalized anxiety disorder, a couple of things in the thread jumped out at me. Someone mentioned getting an eventual diagnosis of Lyme disease for another child who had suddenly become allergic to going to school. When you have GAD or any of the other more specific anxiety wotzits, people assume that it’s psychological stress that triggers panic attacks, but it’s really any kind of stress that can set you a-wobble. I can always tell when I’m getting sick long before my nose starts running or my throat starts hurting, because suddenly the ‘danger! danger!’ alarms start going off almost at random. The human body has a limited number of ways to tell you something is going wrong, and as it turns out, ‘impending doom’ can feel a lot like ‘impending head cold’, only with less overall snot.

which I believe is related to this “impending doom” feeling. When I went through a period a few years ago of experiencing panic attacks really often, I read someplace that they can often be triggered by a physical thing, almost anything really… a twinge, a pain, a cramp, and stress would certainly fall into this category. For those of us with the blessing/curse of an extra-sensitive constitution, our brains go into alert mode and immediately try to find (or make up) an explanation, determine if there is danger, assess the danger, make plans for dealing with the danger, imagine what will happen if we cannot deal with the danger, etc., etc., and it goes on from there.

When that happens, I can’t talk myself out of the possibility of real, possibly life-threatening danger. I’ve had several experiences in my life where something happened and others tried to tell me, “Oh you’re worrying for nothing, it will be okay, it’s probably nothing,” and it most definitely was NOT nothing. In at least one case, because I was on high alert (higher than a blessedly “normal” person), I believe I saved my then-bf’s life… because I expected and anticipated the worst.

The trouble is, shit DOES happen. It could be a heart attack, or a murderous intruder, or a noise in the car that means something could cease to function while you’re going 60 mph. Most of the time it isn’t/doesn’t. But the one time it does, you’re dead.

Anyway… lately, when this happens, I take 1/4 mg of xanax and that helps.

It helps to know that others feel this and that artists and poets of the past have gone through it.

P.S. Has anyone ever seen a giant (like hundreds of acres) field of 6-foot+ sunflowers in full bloom? The first time I saw those humongous, fringed, blank faces all looking in the same direction, my first thought was, “Holy crap! No wonder van Gogh flipped out!”