Maybe someone out there in scubaboard land has advice that will help after my disaster of a dive today. My husband and I are newly OW certified divers and a few weeks ago we did our first "real" dive by ourselves. It was a shore dive on a fairly shallow (15 - 20 feet) artificial reef and it was amazing! The only hiccup was that we weren't really communicating very well underwater and weren't staying side by side, so there was some frustration there and I surfaced mid-way through. I didn't
have to surface but I felt anxious not being able to talk underwater, so I did anyway. I posted here about it and people gave really good suggestions and encouragement that diver/buddy communication is something that improves with time.
So today we did our second dive, at a local spring. We were both really excited and everything was fine starting out. I admit that I hate the gear hauling part of diving, mainly because I'm a 5'4", 115 pound female and everything is heavy as hell. (No, I don't want any cheese with my whine, thanks anyway. :d) So our dives usually start out with the gear part kinda sucking, but once we're in the water everything is awesome. Today that was not the case.
We got there, geared up, and everything was still okay. I was a little anxious because we had to rent gear from a new place and the quality sucked compared to our usual dive shop. It was usable though so okay, whatever. We get in the water, descend down to about 40 feet to look at a cave entrance, and we're having fun. My husband was trying to work on his buoyancy for a few minutes after this and I thought he was having problems, but after surfacing and asking each other, I figured out he was just working on skills. (Yes, I thumbed the dive just to surface and immediately exclaim, "WHAT'S THE PROBLEM?!" Prooooooobably should have talked through those anxious feelings creeping in at that point in time before going back down, but hindsight is 20/20.) So we go back down and wander around. At one point he signals to share air (just practicing), and I give him my alternate except he can't breathe through it. He immediately shakes his head and switches back to his reg, and now I'm worried. He signals okay to me though and I breathe out of it and everything is fine, so I don't know what happened. I'm now reminded of the uneasy fact that we can't TALK underneath water, and I'm worried about the quality of the gear. After this he signals that he'll follow me, knowing that I want to explore more. Okay, great. The only problem is that I don't know anything about this spring and have no clue where I'm going, so I kind of just wander aimlessly. At one point we end up in 4 feet of water and I'm thinking, "Maybe it gets deeper again? We'll keep going?"

My husband surfaces and frustratingly says, "We're in 4 feet of water. It just stays 4 feet and you can float down it." So now I'm annoyed at everything - not knowing where I'm going, the crappy gear, the tank that's sitting too high on my back and keeps hitting me in the head when I glance up, the brand new wetsuit I'm wearing for the first time that really isn't that great of a fit and feels like it's choking me, the fact that spring diving is now quite boring to me after ocean diving, the fact that I'm super stressed at work right now and diving is supposed to be a FUN outlet but I wasn't having fun, EVERYTHING. In a normal situation I would have been able to talk myself back down but I couldn't today for some reason. Everything just piled on and before I knew it, it was a full-blown anxiety thing. I irritably descended and quickly realized I didn't even have my reg in my mouth, and shot back up sputtering and feeling like I was going to scream. FROM FOUR FEET OF WATER!

We called the dive, headed back home, and now I guess I'm trying to figure out if diving just isn't for me.
I'm trying to nail down my source of anxiety and maybe it comes back to the dive plan, or lack thereof in our case. The past two times we've dove (this time being our second time), we didn't really have a thought-out, vocalized dive plan before we went down. The dive sites were new to us both and we weren't really sure what to expect, so the dive plan consisted of, "Ready? Let's go!" T
hat's about it. I realize now that if we would have talked for 5 minutes and planned to, say, look at the cave entrance for 10 minutes, then work on skills for a few minutes, then map out where we were going to explore to next and who was going to lead, I would have felt better and knew what to expect. I don't know if I would have had the urge to surface to talk and say "where are we going? what are we doing?" if we had had a dive plan. Or hell, I don't know, maybe the lack of a dive plan doesn't bother most people this much and this just isn't for me.
Did anyone else have problems at first with the small little stressors creeping in and causing a really crappy dive? Is it dumb to throw in the towel now and just say "diving isn't for me", or is this not something that happens to people who are made to dive? I feel discouraged and sad because I had a lot of fun on our shore dive, and I
want to be able to do this sport. The idea of never going diving again may or may not be making me cry in frustration on this otherwise beautiful Sunday afternoon. Help!