How to feel clean again. Im anxiety ridden.

When I first moved in at the beginning of this semester I was very homesick and depressed. Last semester was ok and I got through it without any anxiety or depression, but when I came back I really felt lost and anxious about being back. I have notes in my phone where I would write about how I wanted to see the school psychologist because I really just was uneasy about being here. A few weeks went by and those feelings for the most part subsided and I was able to get in the swing of things. I think I was still depressed, but it wasn’t a great concern. Before I go further I want to mention that I’m gay. I’m not open about it and it’s never been anything that has caused anxiety or depression but it’s something I hide from my family and friends. about mid-February I did something that I regret with all my heart. I met up with someone that I met online and hooked up with them. This person was a guy and was a lot older than me. Writing this is horrible and makes me feel awful but I need to get it out because it has ruined my life. I know that this doesn’t seem like a big deal and I know that it's especially unusual for a man (gay or straight) to admit to such a thing. But to me, it is a big deal. Now, I feel that I lost so much of myself in the process. Even as I sit here now, I feel so full of anxiety over what I have done. I feel dirty, cheap, used, and thrown away. I'm trying everything that I know how to get my self-esteem back, but it seems like a futile, hopeless attempt. I want to feel the sense of personal value that I have felt at fleeting moments in the past. But it feels like a dark cloud hanging over my head that follows me EVERYWHERE I go. I never get a break from it. I sleep with it and wake up with it and go to school with it. (Excuse my frankness here) but sometimes I hate to take a bath, because I feel like it's a futile attempt at trying to wash off something that can't be washed off. It's like I can't take enough baths to clean the person off of me! And the thing is is the person I wasn’t even attracted to. It was done out of impulsiveness...not to mention selfishness--because it was all about me getting a release. At the time when I first did it I didn’t think it was a big deal, but days passed and I began feeling anxious about it. I was trying to ignore it and act as if it was normal but I just couldn’t. I remember being at my friends’ apartment and just going kind of crazy. I left her apartment and called my mom balling my eyes out. I told her that I was depressed and anxious. I told her that I was having a panic attack and I didn’t know what to do. She slightly calmed be down, but it sucked knowing the reason why I was anxious and not being able to tell her. I would never want to tell her but I hated that she could not fully comfort me. The next few weeks were awful. I did not feel normal and I was petrified. I felt dirty, anxious, and depressed. I could not concentrate on school work at all and would sit in the library having full blown panic attacks. I also was not sleeping at all, although my sleep wasn’t great before then. Then something even worse crossed my mind. What if I caught HIV. It was a terrifying thought but stuck with me. Soon enough the anxiety was so bad that I made an appointment at the doctors about sleep problems but brought up to the nurse practitioner that I was scared about HIV. They tested me for HIV and other stds, and everything came back negative. I thought I would have relief from this and finally be able to move on, but I didn’t. The panics only got worse and I began to go crazy. This is when I came to counseling. Something that I found was that I was having serious headaches, bad digestion, etc. I was still scared. My mind became cyclical. I would have hours where I felt ok and confident, but then hours where I felt horribly hopeless, confused, and scared. I was not sleeping at all. I called my doctor and she prescribed me citalopram for general anxiety and I began taking it. This was the time I began to feel the memory loss. I began to think about things such as the weekend before. It felt like 4 years ago. For some reason my perception of time was off. The next few weeks were all about trying to diagnose myself. I was having really bad digestive issues (I still do) in which I researched gluten intolerance. Turns out gluten intolerance can cause anxiety and depression from what I researched. That’s when I began my gluten free diet. Part of me felt relief at that point because I truly was able to pretend that my troubles were due to something else. Being on a gluten free diet made me feel like I was helping myself get better. I was able to go a few more weeks with a constant mental pain. Sometimes it was gone, but for the most part it laid dormant. Now we are getting more recent. The past few weeks were a blur. Last week my anxiety built up again and I began to convince myself I had HIV (symptoms include memory loss and confusion) and I could not get it out of my head. I went and got tested at our health center on campus and the results of course came back negative. But I truly feel like I’m dying. I have horrible memory, confusion, anger, hopelessness. These come in waves. When I am not fully experiencing these thoughts I feel safe and confident that I will overcome this. Those parts of me help give me hope in the bad times. When the bad times hit, I cannot connect at all with life. I cannot connect at all with how I feel when I’m in a good state of mind. I’m petrified because this has gone on for so long. I want my memory back. Its genuinely so scary feeling like you can’t remember what you did in the morning when it’s only three in the afternoon. In the past few days I have also convinced myself that I have lymes disease. Lymes disease can cause memory loss, confusion, muscle twitching, blurry vision, loss of balance, etc, all of which I am experiencing. I am so tired of blaming this on my anxiety even though that seems most reasonable. The reason I have come to the point in saying all this is because the pain has become unbearable. I want to die sometimes when I’m in my bad moments. I want this pain and suffering to go away. I’m truly scared that I’m going to hurt myself if this doesn’t end soon. I am tired and lonely and need help. I feel crazy.

Ok. Thank you for reaching out. This note is actually something that I was writing to print out and give to my therapist tomorrow but I need as much help as I can get so I wanted to post it here too. Ive been seeing him for a few months now but I haven't really gotten anywhere with the sessions because I was trying to figure things out without being honest to him or myself about what the true problem was.