April 14, 2013

Hey Everyone- sorry its been a few days. I have been giving great thought into what I want my first official post to be like. I am just going to describe the onset of some of my early problems.

I was always an anxious kid growing up. One time in particular stands out. I was probably around 8 years old and we were visiting my grandparents in Atlanta Georgia. We went to the Coca-Cola museum in Atlanta, and of course me being the 8 year old spunky kid I had to try every flavor of soda there possibly was. And there are like 100 different kinds of Coco-Cola brand soda flavors from all over the world to sample in the museum. Even today I have to admit its pretty spectacular. By the time I was trying to go to bed that night, my little 8 year old body had ingested so much sugar and caffeine, that I just could not fall asleep for the life of me. And that was abnormal for me because I usually fell asleep no problem. And it didn't help that we were in a different house. Also, at the time my Grandma had like 6 cats and 2 dogs and I would just see their beady little eyes staring at me from the hallway. The worst part about it was I just kept thinking about that fact that I wasn't asleep and that just made everything worse. That event started something that lasted the next 2-3 years. I would lay in bed and if I didn' fall asleep right away I would start to get panicked. I would go in my parents room and tell them I couldn't sleep and they would eventually get annoyed with my little situation. To this day I don't really understand what prompted that event, all I can think of was that I had some very underlying anxiety.

Alright now time for some background information. My dad is in the military and during my younger days we moved around a bit. I was born in Boston Massachusetts, when I was 3 we moved to Camp Pendleton which is about 30 minutes from San Diego California, and right around my seventh birthday we moved to a small military base in Puerto Rico (which is where there not sleeping anxiety thing started). I am going to fast forward to 2001. Now I know this is a touchy subject for some people but I must explain how it affected me at the time. September 11, 2001. I was living in Puerto Rico and I was in 2nd grade being home schooled. A friend from across the street started pounding on our door and told us to turn on the TV. We did, and I watched as my mothers face turned to absolute horror. I didn't even know what I was looking at, at the time. The reason I am bringing this event up is because I was living on a military base outside the continental United States. The security status went all the way up the maximum on all U.S. Military bases. I watched as the base went from a nice quiet little Caribbean sanctuary to a state of defense. Everyone started carrying automatic rifles, there we Humvee with giant arching guns. Up until that day I mostly thought people were by nature usually good people, maybe it was just because I was young. On that day forward I realized there was shear and utter evil in this world.

***okay stay tuned for my next entry and please give me feed back about how I am doing or what I could do differently :).