In the past on here, I have been open about my PTSD and anxiety that goes with it. This entry about is a little window further into it.

On Christmas I didn’t get any cards but I did get an ‘IOU’ and a gift card to buy cards. Like anyone, I couldn’t wait until the day after when I could cash those in. So on the 26th, I headed to my favorite card shop, Valley Sports Cards.

I rarely ever can afford to buy a box of cards but this time I was able to buy two. Sure I was buying two $50 boxes and not a box that cost $70 to $150 but this was a big deal to me. Even though I ended up spending $110, this was by far my biggest card purchase ever at any retail shop. This combined with buying a chase pack and winning, was enough to make my head spin and trigger my anxiety.
I have covered the chase packs that I buy from Valley Sports Cards before: here. In the past I have said that I have grabbed the thickest pack so I went with the opposite this time; I grabbed the thinnest. I wasn’t expecting to win a prize, and am not sure that I really wanted to. It is when you aren’t expecting to get something that it usually happens. The odds say 1 in 16.6 on the front but I have probably had much better luck than that. When I saw that I won, I was kind of pissed. I didn’t want Alex and Lona to think that I was cheating the system. I know part of this thinking is normal but it is magnified even more with my anxiety. This combined with buying 2 boxes was too much for my head. I picked a Kurt Rambis autograph as my prize by the way.

I drove with my brother. Going back from Tarzana, where the shop is, to Simi Valley, where I live, is a 30 minute drive because they are not freeway close so for 8 miles or so I am on side streets before I hit the 118 freeway. For the first half of that span, you could hear a pin drop in the car. I didn’t turn on the stereo or say a word.

A huge key to getting through is anxiety is getting through destructive thoughts. Destructive might be too grand of a word to explain this as I am functional during this thinking, but you get what I am saying; it was unhealthy. The key is to identify destructive thinking so you can reverse it and put a positive spin on it as fast as possible. After 15 minutes, I apologized to him and told him what was bugging me. For a high school sophomore, who I don’t see all the time, he was cool about it. We talked it out and came to the conclusion that this purchase was a huge anomaly and if I got the boxes yesterday then I wouldn’t be feeling this way; after all this was from 2 people. With regards to the chase pack, I will just have to accept that Alex and Lona know that I am a good person who would never cheat them; plus good things deserve to happen to me: a fact that I need to come around to.

I was going back and forth about whether to share this. Ultimately I decided to share my thoughts because I know that these depression and anxiety is more common than it should be. As a great person on Twitter said, we should break the stigma of mental health issues being a problem. I am not sharing this for people to feel sorry for me, I am sharing this to add to the rhetoric that needs to be growing.

By the way my purchases:

The contents of the chase pack.