I've shared a little bit about my anxiety before, and it's interesting to me is how much I'm still learning about it.

My second full week a small business owner, I opened up a bank account, set up a workspace in my garage and began a few really fun projects for paying clients. All in all, it was a great week.

It was also really stressful. I made it a point to research project-management software (Notion ftw), which is ironically overwhelming at first. Even though I made some progress, it was a huge challenge to balance my time between administrative duties and meaningful work for those aforementioned paying clients. Not to mention, spend time with my family and reap the rewards of working from home.

Having a home garage office can be tough, and I think little things turn into big things quickly when the difference between home and work gets blurry.

For example, I woke up early last Friday morning to exercise and plan this week's agenda. Before I could do anything for myself our 9-month-old woke up crying and since I was awake I felt the responsibility of getting him. As soon as I had him settled down, our 3-year-old woke up early and refused to go back to bed. So what I thought would be a huge head start ended up being a disaster with three crying boys at the breakfast table (yep, you read that right — nope, still only two sons).

<aside> 🥺 Getting up early and not getting any work done is par for the course, but it's still really hard to shift mentality from offense to defense. And not all of parenting is defense, but until I can leave both boys alone in the room for longer than 30 seconds, parenting feels like a super long game of Keep Away.

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In addition to the business, I'm learning to manage myself. More specifically: my expectations.

What I think triggers my anxiety (and could lead to attacks) are when things go horribly different from what I have planned. If I expect to get a lot of work done but very little (or nothing) gets done, I can usually keep a level head and adjust. It's basic "survive and advance" mentality. However, when my expectations consistently miss the mark — usually multiple days in a row, but sometimes just a few hours in a row — that mental perspective shifts. The stress compounds, which leads to feeling overwhelmed. That's what last week felt like.

For every 30 minute block I scheduled in my day, it took me an hour to do something I hadn't anticipated. For every project I kicked off, a couple more sprang up. For every meeting I scheduled, two people didn't show. For every person I gave my full attention (myself), I ignored two or three others (my family).

I think I actually staved off a couple panic attacks early in the week by simply denying they were possible. I can't be having a panic attack, I thought. I quit my job so I wouldn't have to deal with them anymore. But just like little things adding up, those feelings came to a head on Friday.

Without warning, I started crying in the middle of a family meal. I was clearly overwhelmed.

<aside> 😭 This was a new one, by the way. My attacks usually manifest themselves through extreme energy, elevated heart rate, sweating and heightened sense of panic. My emotions are always a little more fragile, but usually I'm so swamped that I don't feel the need to express them. This scared me a little.

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Luckily this isn't new anymore. I was able to step away from everything (and everyone) for a few minutes to catch myself. I took a walk and things got better.

I'm sad that my anxiety didn't magically disappear when I left my job. It's silly to think disorders work that way, but I'm still relatively new at dealing with one.

On the other hand, I'm happy that it's getting easier to anticipate anxiety attacks — to be able to forecast what's happening in the moment and express what I'm going through feels like progress. Even the simple fact that I can give these occurrences a name helps a ton.

No doubt there will be more moments like this, but I'm so much more confident now. Partly because I'm my own boss, and I don't have to pretend that everything is okay. I have far more control over my situation than ever before.

Oh yeah: writing about it helps. Thanks for reading.