Well, kids, I’ve finally made up my feeble mind. I am going to direct my energies to passing the bar. I’ve heard you can now take the bar without going to law school. So I will have to give up all my free time gossiping and turn that energy into studying. Studying is second nature to me. I have always thought of myself as an academic.

But I’m too old, you might say. True. For at least fifteen years, I have felt very old. I also bumbled around like a retard. This began when I started suffering from major anxiety about the year 2015.

I had started taking the antidepressant Zoloft. After a month or two, I was in the stratosphere. I could not relax. I suffered from social anxiety and panic attacks. I dreaded leaving the house. I stopped Zoloft after two or three months, but the anxiety persisted. The only time I was not anxious was when I was sitting or lying down. Even if I got up to move around to do housework or do the dishes, the nervousness would spring out.

The anxiety was so bad that my dog Tori started having anxiety, which also added to my anxiety. Watching her quivering in her chair made me even more nervous.

Even though I changed meds to Prozac, the anxiety was still there. I pushed through it pretty well, so that other people couldn’t tell that my brain was exploding. I was even doing tutoring at the time. So it might have looked like I was keeping it together.

Then my mother died in 2007. I finished tutoring my students to the end of the school year. But to ease this horrendous anxiety, I started taking Xanax.

I took Xanax regularly for about three years. All it did was cover up the nervousness. But it also started to affect my memory. I would watch a movie or TV show and immediately forget what I saw. I drifted around in this state for about three years.

Then I decided to move. My mother had died, and the house we were living in seemed too big for one person. I was driving down the street and I saw a sign for a new building: Condos, starting price $400,000’s. I bought one, sold the house my mother and I had lived in, and moved in Christmas 2010.

A month or two later, I was driving with my friends Betsey and Mark. We were driving to the methadone clinic. And it hit me. I don’t have anxiety anymore! I feel normal. I stopped taking the Xanax with no problem, no withdrawal. The only lingering side effect was that my memory was no good anymore.

A friend I knew was keeping a diary. That sounded like a good idea. I started keeping a factual-type memory diary: what appointments I did that day, what movies I watched, notes on books I read. It was not big on writing emotions and reactions to events.

Now I feel like me memory is back. I attribute that to my diary and to stopping the regular use of Xanax. So now I feel like I’m ready for Act 3 of my life. It’s all just a journey anyway. So I’m going to dive into law.

I plan on taking the LSAT in June, and then studying for the bar via workshops.

Until next time…