Meet the Queen

Holler for a dollar it's been about eight years since I've written on this thing and I make zero promises of being consistent. I'm just currently at a coffee shop while it's raining and I'm like, "OMG I feel so hip, I should write a blog post to coincide!"

I feel, therefore, I am.
-Rene Descarte/Dylan Lowe

So here I am. Sippin' on a Soy Chai listening to "Indie Brunch" on Spotify at 5pm.

It's casual.

But I promise to make your time spent reading worth it.

Correction: I will try to make your time spent reading this worth it.

And so begins what I actually want to talk about.

Drum roll please...

I am the Queen of Panic Attacks!

Me! Dylan Lowe!

I know, I know, some of you may have heard of me, The Queen, but I figured now was as good a time as any to go completely public about it. I hope none of your are in too severe shock like when I found out Hannah Montana was actually just a regular girl named Miley Cyrus, or when I learned"Brunch" was a combination of "Breakfast" and "Lunch" but more on that later.

How did I get my title?

Lemme tell you. I get nervous over legitimately the most ridiculous things you can think of, including things that should be FUN. FUN I TELL YOU!

Let me quickly provide you with a few examples to back it up:

Being late to lunch dates, work, and class aka: just being late in general, getting stuck in traffic, finishing an assignment before my classmates, being the last of my classmates to finish an assignment, my hair not drying, my nails not being perfectly even, feeling weird in the outfit I chose to wear, wether or not I should have said "Hi" to the stranger I walked past, wether or not my awkward eye contact with said stranger made them uncomfortable, seeing people I know in grocery stores, skipping songs on playlists people make me, learning photoshop, making time to write, driving too much, and then the list of random symptoms from Crohn's.

And that's the short list.

WOO!

I hear the first step of therapy is recognizing you have a problem, but um, yeah I've recognized I've had a problem since seventh grade. I think the difference now is that I am twenty-two and should be able to figure out ways to handle said stress like a semi-functioning adult.

Does saying it out loud over internet qualify as admitting to it?

MY NAME IS DYLAN AND I AM A SEMI-FUNCTIONING STRESS CASE.

Feels real enough.

I am slowly but surely making leaps and bounds in being less stress-y, but yeah emphasis on the slowly part because it's taking freaking decades.

I'm not going to call it "admitting" because I feel like that involves doing something wrong, rather I am going to tell you, as a cute and sassy gal-pal, that I have been seeing someone to help me deal with my anxiety because feeling isolated from it has been not so hot for my mental well-being.

HOLY COW has it done wonders. (Shoutout to maboi Nick!)

I'm now able to recognize that I need to stop and breathe for approximately one-two minutes when my mind starts going into overdrive like a possessed she-blender, that omg, everything isn't my fault?!, and that I'm doing my best and I'm still a good person even if it doesn't turn out how I thought it would.

Can we all take a huge sigh of relief in honor of the weight I have been lifting off of my own shoulders the past few weeks?

Maybe I'm the only one dealing with this, and hey that's cool. I'm fine sharing this weird part of my brain with you because hi, my name is Dylan and it's a part of who I am. And who knows, maybe there are more of my friends out there who are dealing with the same weird stuff (if so can we please discuss our stresses and stress relief techniques over coffee sometime and be real-life friends because that would be totes fab.) My hope is that this small mental-barf that just occurred all over this page will contribute to the discussion that has been happening lately about depression and anxiety. It's a subject I feel we need to bring up more often so we can help each other out, because to me, that's what life is about.

Hashtag rhyme.

Hashtag mic drop.

Y'all are peaches.

Dyl