I have aphantasia, a neurodiversity (a different way of thinking), whereby I am unable to visualize. Most of you reading this now can easily imagine a sunset, a calm lake, or fluffy white clouds against a crisp, blue sky. I simply cannot conjure images. Having a blind imagination, as it's sometimes called, used to trigger my anxiety insomuch as my inability to visualize used to cause frustration, anger, confusion, shame, and a feeling of failure.

As someone who’s into metal music, one of the things I’ve wanted to do for a while is make a vest covered with patches. I’ve been collecting patches for about four years, so at the beginning of this year, I decided I should stop waiting and just go ahead and make it.

My history with therapy has been, to put it mildly, spotty. I’ve seen a number of therapists since I was a child, but I haven’t had good experiences with most of them – this was due to any number of factors ranging from some being incompatible with my personality to others literally causing me to cry after the session ended. Because of that, my desire to continue with any new therapist has not been strong. But because my mental health has been so unstable for a while now, I decided I needed to make a change. As of the end of last month, I decided to restart therapy, so this post will focus on that.

Therapy can be grueling sometimes. Anybody who tells you differently is either lying or trying to soften the blow. Regardless, they've done you a disservice, in my opinion. In order to reap the benefits of therapy, a commitment to work hard in partnership with your therapist is required. I've engaged in trauma therapy to help with my anxiety. My experience with eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) trauma therapy is hard work that's paying off.

I've suffered from anxiety since I was a child, although I didn't get diagnosed with an anxiety disorder until my late-30s. The often visceral symptoms of anxiety are hard enough for an adult to describe, let alone a child. The episodes I had as a child were scary, and while I tried to explain what was happening to my parents, they simply didn't know enough back then to help me. And so, I began to suffer my anxiety in silence.

They say there's an app for everything. I certainly have dozens of apps on my mobile devices that provide access to whatever I need at my fingertips. I recently started using an app to track my moods as a means by which to map the ups and downs of my anxiety.

I've been on antianxiety medication since 2001 when I was first diagnosed with anxiety and depression. Out of some odd compulsion or perhaps, shame from having to take drugs to manage my mental illness, I weaned off my anxiety medications three times since I began. The first two times, it ended badly. The last time, it ended in disaster.

My anxiety is, thankfully, well managed right now. But six months ago, my anxiety was so bad that I couldn't escape the intrusive thoughts that taunted me to end it all. I had intrusive thoughts of suicide.

A few years ago, I wrote a post talking about how my love of stuffed animals helps me with my anxiety. To this day, I get more positive comments about that post than anything else I’ve written, and I’m glad that it has resonated with those who have read it. In this post, I want to continue talking about stuffed animals because they still play a big part in how I manage my anxiety.

Depending on where you live, the clocks were set forward this past weekend. While the clocks "springing forward" may be a time-honored tradition, the event plays tricks with my anxiety, sometimes setting me back for days.