Last week I
posted on Facebook that I was not okay. I am grateful for all the friends and
family members who checked in on me—called, sent a text, sent a private
message, sent chocolate…. Okay, no one sent chocolate, but getting those
check-in messages was just as good. Better, actually.
Here’s what
was going on:
I felt
overwhelmed.
When I feel
overwhelmed, it’s because things feel like they are spiraling out of my
control.
When I begin
to lose control over the order of my life—the daily routine, the peace and
quiet of the household, the general welfare of my dog and cat—my anxiety begins
to skyrocket.
When my
anxiety skyrockets, I become paralyzed. I find myself functioning robotically
to take care of the necessary things—pet care, etc—then becoming immobilized
and simply sitting for hours at a time, heart pounding, breath shallow.
This anxiety
is rooted in childhood trauma.
I was an
extremely sensitive child. (I still am that child.) And I was shamed by my
parents for being so. I’m not trying to vilify them here; they thought that
telling me to “stop crying" and "stop being so sensitive” and making fun of me for doing so would help toughen me up to deal with
the real world outside. What it actually did was further isolate me, make me
feel that my being “different” from others was wrong or bad, something
I should be ashamed of choosing for myself. And all of that led me to become quiet and shut down… for which I was further shamed.
I learned to
speak only when I absolutely had to. I learned to hang in the background, not assert
myself. I learned to be invisible.
The more I
controlled these things, the safer I felt. The calmer I felt. In those days,
the calmest I ever felt was on Saturday mornings, leaving the house when
everyone was sleeping, riding my bike around the quiet neighborhood in the hush
of early morning. I was a little girl out alone, and I felt safest there.
(You’re already nodding your head if you know me well—this is me now on a hike;
I feel safest there.)
Until I
started seeing a therapist last year, I was wholly unaware of what caused my
anxiety. I mean, when I was feeling anxious, I could generally track it back to
what triggered it, but I had no idea why it kept resurfacing. I kept confusing
anxiety with fear. It’s the same autonomic response, right? Rapid heart rate.
Shallow breathing. But I am not a fearful person.
One day my
therapist said, “So, as long as you can control things in your life—your
environment, your routine, your interaction with people—you feel safe. Because
when you were a child and a teenager, you were being bombarded with stimuli
that traumatized you, and you had no control over it. You couldn’t advocate for
yourself, and you had no adult advocate. So you lived with trauma. Now, you
keep that trauma at bay by creating an environment in which you are in
control.”
Boy howdy.
Yes, I
understand—as I discussed with my therapist—that we cannot control everything
that happens in our lives. Some weeks are like last week—things breaking,
service people in the house to fix things, financial worries, pet worries,
pressure from others to “just make a decision,” the hopeless desire to never
let anyone down….
Last week was
a perfect storm of unpleasant events happening. So I felt out of control of my
life. So the anxiety swooshed back in hard like a tsunami.
So what did I
do? I rode it out. I saw it coming on the horizon and I ran for higher ground.
I didn’t quite outrun it, but some folks were close by with life preservers and
ropes and that-feeling-you-get-when-you-eat-chocolate, and I survived it.
For a while,
I felt like I couldn’t breathe. But the truth is, I just had to be reminded:
“Breathe, Kay.” I did. I’m back. I’m okay now. If you’re not, you can always
call me. I have time for you. I can find a life preserver. Maybe even some chocolate.