Once Apon A Time

Little Princess Georgia was smart, very lovable, with loyal friends and followers. She was talented, driven, ambitious, not to mention she was very beautiful.

To the rest of the kingdom, and the townspeople down below, Princess Georgia seemed to have it all. She was the daughter of the greatest King to ever rule, and was being courted by the most handsome prince you've ever seen.

Though, what outsiders didn't know, Princess Georgia was being stalked, hunted by an evil, angry demon. The Anxiety Monster was visiting Princess Georgia, when she least expected it, and he would attack.....

Hi, My name is Jorja, and I was recently diagnosed with an anxiety disorder, Panic Disorder to be exact. While a diagnosis is always appreciated, it hasn't made anything any easier. My heart still pounds, I still shake and cry and feel like there's a fire under my skin, while I'm spinning like I used to after drinking too many cheap VEX coolers in high school.

People with Panic Disorder, or so I'm learning, experience panic attacks sometimes without warning, for no apparent reason. That's the most frustrating part. The first major attack I remember came after finding my exboyfriend, who'd only smashed my heart 3 days prior, hooking up with some skank at a party he knew I was attending. I remember coming back home and sitting on my basement bed with my little sister and her friend, and my pink (fitting for a princess) puke bucket, crying and shaking, not being able to breathe and just swearing I was going to die.

That seemed like an appropriate time for an attack. I guess. But then there are the 2am wake-ups that lead to INSTANT shakes and spins and tears, with NO fair warning, and they leave you wanting to die, too. That is what makes it Panic Disorder and not just an anxiety disorder.

But I didn't die. You don't die. As long as you fight, you can't die, not at the hands of an Anxiety Disorder anyways. I KNOW that..

But now two years later it still feels like I'm going to die, right in the core of an attack. The spinning and the overheating and shaking and crying never changes. Not yet any ways. Though I have made an effort to recognize and acknowledge that I (and Princess Georgia) have made huge steps towards defeating this problem...I no longer lay on my tiny bathroom floor shaking and crying and asking to be put out of my misery. I have even gotten to the point where (lately, anyways) I don't have to call for King daddy at 3am to come sit in the bathroom with me.

I write a lot. It is the ultimate distraction during an attack, because it focuses your brain on letters and words and grammar, and spacing, instead of dwelling on your heart rate and how tightly something is squeezing your lungs. But releasing my anxious words on to journal pages still seems too close. I want to send it far away! If not in a rocket going to the moon, then at least out into cyber space. (Shoo, anxious words! Shoo!) I also have a love for writing children's stories, which brought me to this idea.

If I can break this disease down into colorful, hopelessly romantic fairytale terms, and can give physicality to the forces that terrorize me..maybe then we can look at it all, as simply as a child would. Anxiety is nothing but a big, dark, red-eyed, yellow-toothed, hard monster who needs slaying.

And that is where Princess Georgia comes in.