Wishing for a Re-do

Match was here for Labor Day weekend, and it turned out to be a really hard visit.  Usually I'm on Cloud 9 after a weekend with my boy, but this time I was left just feeling kind of exhausted and wishing so badly I was anyone except for me.

He and I are okay, just for the record, we started and ended strongly and the relationship is fine right now.

The issue all weekend was my anxiety.  It was just through the roof, and I got so frustrated and upset about that, which of course just compounded the entire problem.

I don't think the anxiety had much to do with Match.  He was treating me like a princess as usual, we were here at my house, with my usual surroundings: my dog, my food, my gym, etc. We didn't fight, nothing catastrophic happened.  I just have so, so much running through my head right now with PhD planning and thesis writing, and my background level of anxiety, which is always humming, is at a full on blare this semester.

That was going on the first day and a half, and then on Saturday it reached a new level when we went to spend the day with some of his extended family that lives near here.  That meant my only exercise that day was one morning gym session (not going into specifics but it was a fraction of my norm, and less than even the reduced amount I usually get in on visit weekends), and the food at their house was absolutely un-doable for me.  Hence, I was a basketcase internally, and it leaked out a bit.  Or a lot.  Yes, quite a lot.

I held it together while we were around his family, but as soon as we left I had a bit of a meltdown.  We headed home by 8:30 so we'd have time to stop and eat on the way back, since I couldn't have any of what they had for dinner there.  I couldn't decide what I wanted and he ended up pulling into a McDonald's for me to quit crying and tell him where to go.  I couldn't decide, so we just stayed there because it was getting late.

Note: Once I've got this recovery thing nailed, I am NEVER going to eat another grilled chicken salad in my entire life.  It is a perfectly fine meal for most people, but to me it just represents a lot of unhealthy periods. I have eaten them as a a default "just get something in me with protein but as few calories as possible" choice so many times that the sight/taste makes my stomach turn at this point.  

Another issue is that Match and I have entirely different sleep schedules/requirements.  He doesn't sleep very very late, but likes to lay in bed til about 9 or so on weekends.  I am physically incapable of sleeping past 6:30, and after about 7:00 or 7:15 my anxiety is shooting through the roof if my day hasn't started yet. Thus, poor Match wakes up at 8:00 on a Sunday morning and finds his fucking girlfriend sobbing into her pillow because she conjured herself a panic attack in his arms while he was sleeping.  Who the hell puts up with that???

Anyway, there were other of incidents like that, and some periods where the noise in my head was just so overwhelming that I had a hard time being present. I had a hard time choosing what to eat and even picking out what to wear, which happens even in normal circumstances but is way worse when I'm in anxiety mode.

It may not seem like a huge deal, but when you only get 4-5 nights a month with someone, every hour counts.

It wasn't an entirely blown weekend.  We had another special anniversary date--we weren't together on the actual day, so we celebrated it both before and after--and that one went really well.  After the meltdowns Saturday night and Sunday morning, the rest of Sunday was pretty good, and we had half of Monday before he had to fly out.  Although to be honest the main thing keeping my anxiety down on Monday was knowing he was leaving and I could resume my normal exercise/eating by lunchtime.  I *hate* being that person.

So there was this unsettling mix of relief of going back to usual when he left combined with a really sharp regret for not making more of the weekend and wishing I could have him back to redo the whole thing as a normal person, and that I didn't have to give him back at all.

We have been doing these weekend visits for over a year now, and I have no idea why I was just such a freak on this one.  There have been others where I actually got less exercise; I guess it's related to everything else going on in my life as well right now.  But plenty of people deal with those things without becoming a snot-slinging bag of patheticness (patheticity? patheticitude? insert your favorite suffix here). I really can't stand being this way and wish I could just quit being me sometimes.