I have blogged more than once about my anxiety and how it can and has prevented me from leaving the house on a frequent basis.  For example, today my husband had to work, and my daughter wanted me to take her to youth group, but the time of day we needed to go and where we were going caused my anxiety levels to increase dramatically.  In the end I had to tell her “No”.  She was very disappointed with me, and I was very sad because I had disappointed her.  So you can see how the anxiety I have can really get in the way of life, and not just mine.

There is another aspect to my anxiety that I have not blogged about.  It is not bad enough that I have horrible anxiety and panic attacks that prevent me from leaving the house often, but I also have a similar reaction when people come to my house.  Now isn’t that a kicker?

If I know someone is coming to my house a day or two before they are due to come, I start feeling anxious.  Even though the house is clean, I will go through and reclean it and turn into a horrible, mean, nag towards my husband and daughter so they will help and make things my image of  “perfect”.   We all know how easy it is to reach perfection. By the time my husband convinces me the house cannot get any cleaner, I am so stressed that I am miserable and have made everyone around me just as miserable.

If someone just shows up to my house, well then “it ain’t purty”.  As soon as they leave, I have to go to bed.  I stay in bed until the next day and hope that the stress of an unexpected visit will go away. 

I know why I have such a reaction when people come over.  My house is my safety zone.  It is and also represents the one place where I am “free to be me”.  I do not have to act like I am comfortable, because I already am.  I do not have to pretend like I want to talk to people, because I do not have to here.  I do not have to wear makeup and if it is a bad mental health day, I can stay in my pajamas all day.  Or I can have naked laundry day.  Having to leave it sometimes is bad, but to have people invade, and it feels like an invasion to me, my safety zone it is almost more than I can bear.

When I first started seeing my counselor, she did some kind of assessment on me to see what sort of services I qualified for from their practice.  I qualified for everything.  I am considered a high risk patient because of the suicide attempts.  One of the things I qualified for was some kind of extra service where these social workers would come to my house on the weekends or during the week, basically whenever I did not have an appointment and sort of provide me with extra support.  I liked the idea until my counselor let me know about the whole having to come to my house thing.  Then I had sort of melt down in her office.  I had not been seeing her long, so she did not know about the whole panic attack when people come over to my house thing.  She decided, after witnessing my panic attack, that it would do more harm than good to have the social workers show up to my house. 

I look at this and I can see how dramatically it affects me and my life, the unfortunate thing is that it affects my husband and daughter as well.  She cannot have friends spend the night over because of me not being able to handle people in the house and the noise they make (that is a story for another day).  My husband cannot have his guy friends over.  Depression and anxiety are diseases that take a toll on the whole family.

My hope is that one day I can feel less anxious about going places and way less anxious about my house being invaded by other people.  Sometimes it seems like this whole recovery process is taking so long.  I often have to remind myself that it does take a long time, and I have not been in treatment all that long.