I must have been feeling particularly adventurous this morning as I decided to try and drive to the shops to do some grocery shopping. Mind you I took Yale as a back up just in case you know. So I pull out of my drive way and up onto Belmont Road, and manage to get about half way down Meadowlands Road (not even half way to my Mum’s) and am feeling so distressed about being behind the wheel that I had to get out and let Yale drive. 🙁 I feel like I am totally out of control – rising sensation of panic, inability to breathe properly (which is something we tend to place quite a bit of importance on whether one is driving or not), gripping the steering wheel for grim death and that horrible feeling of being aware of your own heartbeat. The car feels like it’s moving to me even when it’s not…. like if I brake going down hill, I feel as though the whole car is floating all over the road and isn’t reacting in a measured and predictable manner. Even when I’m in the passenger seat, whenever anything comes towards us from my peripheral vision, I am instantly shying away from it and fighting the urge to simultaneously cover my eyes, scream out and cry.
It’s positively ridiculous and it’s driving me crazy… or maybe it’s the being crazy that is causing the not driving… or perhaps I always was crazy and it’s only now I’m sane that I can’t drive. Whatever the fuck it is … I AM GETTING TOTALLY FRUSTRATED WITH THIS SHIT. I am singularly unhappy with my wash and I know not what to do about it. I feel like I’ve lost my independence having to rely on others to ferry me around. What on earth happened to that Borys who went prancing off to Pakistan on her own last year?!?!? Where the hell has she gone 🙁
At the risk of making a sweeping generalization – this sort of nonsensical phobia is for the weak willed and feeble minded in my book – so what gives? why is it happening to me? And why now after accident number four? Why not after accident number 2 which was high speed, higher impact and more damage? And while I am on the subject of traffic phobia… isn’t the definition of a phobia a ‘persistent irrational fear of something’…. and is it irrational (given my history) that I’m increasingly alarmed in traffic? Seems perfectly logical to me. If someone had been bitten by snakes four times and then became exceedingly frightened and wary of them would we call that a phobia?
I’ve been thinking about all this too much, and way too often and it’s consuming a far too much of my mental energy right now. But I don’t know what to do from here. The EMDR experiment was pointless, the distraction exercises that the psychologist gave me don’t appear to be overly effective either…. so what next?
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