Tag: emetophobia

Today I actually explained out loud to Sparkly how I ended up emetophobic. Ey asked me to try to explain why it would scare me, beyond that it’s physically unpleasant.

It was hard to talk about, still, at this late date. I’m glad I did, though.

I really just need a copy of the DSM I guess

Colloquially, “social anxiety” is just when you have anxiety or a phobia-type issue about social interaction, and that’s all, right? I’m beginning to think I need a more specific definition than that.

So, I have a phobia of vomiting. Not only does the immediate prospect of anyone vomiting send me into a panic (like, heart beating fast, shaking violently), I worry about it a lot. This has been a lot better recently, but for a while I worried about vomiting in some form whenever I ate anything. Not only did I go around with a higher baseline level of anxiety than usual, I was consciously worrying a lot of the time, about things like “Did I wash my hands well enough?” and “Is this food cooked thoroughly enough?” and “What if so-and-so has the stomach flu and I catch it?”

I could say that I have social anxiety. But I literally almost never have conscious worrying thoughts about social situations. I’m not afraid of messing them up. I don’t just know intellectually that I don’t need to worry, I’m not consciously worrying at all, about any particular thing that could happen, or even about the potential for me to be put on the spot in a social situation.

Being on the spot in a social situation just puts my body into stress mode. No thought required.

I’ve been going through my “read this fic later” bookmarks (most of the recent additions are Avengers/Captain America-related.) Right now I’m on “New Tricks” by OddityBoddity.

I have a nice little tangle of feelings about the first chapter, because I relate to Bucky, but… the thing that I have that kind of anxiety about is my phobia of vomiting. So at the same time as I’m like “Oh poor Bucky, I know that feeling, at least a little,” I’m also going “Fuck you, stop talking about throwing up, fuck you, no, no you do not have that feeling in the back of your throat stop it never make me think about that feeling again.”

So yeah. Sometimes I try to drown out unplesant thoughts with profanity.

I keep thinking…

“I’m doing so much better with my anxiety!”

And then anything related to a food goes less than perfectly, and I’m reminded how much trouble I still have.

Seriously though, I am doing better. Outside of times when a specific thing goes wrong, I’m spending a lot less time being anxious about this stuff. And I’m eating things that I wouldn’t have six months ago. Part of the reason I’m still feeling bad is that I’m pushing myself to do more things that make me uncomfortable. And sometimes it isn’t even pushing, it just feels natural, which is a very good sign. I’ve been able to step down a lot of my carefulness about “contamination”.

Progress.

I turned off my Tumblr blacklist a few weeks ago. It hasn’t caused me any trouble. I’ve read fic recently with mildly explicit gross things in it and that didn’t bother me, either.

I’m on a pretty good streak of eating regularly and doing useful household stuff, too.

Ugh, brain.

I made it more than TWO YEARS but now apparently I finally have anxiety directly related to the thing that started all this. Which is: sandwiches with cheddar cheese on them.

Fuck.

I had a Thing like a month ago where specifically I wasn’t sure if the cheese we had was still good, and that was hard. But now it’s also showing  up as a generic minor anxiety thought, too.

——

Yes, I will get back to the kink thing eventually. I had a busy week.