A while back Jesse asked me to give him a running commentary on what was going on in my head at any given time. He did not ask me this because he is such an attentive husband that he needed to know my feelings about everything. He asked because, he loves me, and well, I'm just going to explain. It's a lot longer of a story then usual. This is one GIANT thought I'm about to drop off...
I have been an anxious person my whole life. When I was young, under seven, this manifested itself in absolute terror, night terrors to be exact. I would feel wide awake but would be in the throws of a horrible nightmare. Bugs and nighttime creatures would be in my bedroom, literally attacking me. My poor parents would have to rush in to save me only to find me thrashing out of fear that the small men were going to hit me again with their frying pans (that really happened). Sometimes they would carry me into their beds in hopes it would comfort me, only to be awakened by me pushing them off the bed to save them from the hundreds of bugs creeping towards me. Not fun.
The night terrors went away as I got older, which I is normal. A lot of little kids have night terrors, some have been known to have them as adults, but I've been lucky. However, my anxiety didn't go away, it just changed. I was a funny little kid, I worried about what to wear, I worried about death, I worried about adults looking stupid or being embarrassed. Puberty was a great equalizer for me, everyone was crazy and stressed out and worried all the time. It was great, I mean it was awful, but not anymore than any other teenager had to deal with. My early college years were the same way. Everyone was searching, grasping to anything that resembled the adulthood we all thought we were a part of. Like ants, us new adults scurried around doing what we thought we should be doing until we hit a wall, and then we would scurry off into other directions. Teenagers and college students are nuts. All of them.
It was when the honest to goodness panic attacks starting occurring that I began to worry again. I had always been a stressed out kid, an emotional teenager, and a lost college kid. I would maybe get more anxious than necessary right before a school dance, tears may have been shed. I may have had an irrational fear of heights my whole life. But nothing, but the night terrors, felt so awful and real as the panic attacks. They started after a tiny bit of trauma in my life in my early 20's and continued fairly regularly up until last year. They were textbook panic attacks: racing heartbeat, sweats, numb fingertips, and the awesome feeling of doom, I was going to die right then and there. They started fairly irregularly, enough to keep me worried but not enough to keep me away from things. And then it was every night, and then sometimes during the day. And then the triggers changed, certain foods would cause one. Driving on anything but a straight, flat, under 35 mph road. Heights, for sure. Bumping into something. Hitting my head, on anything, which was a real bummer for a klutz like me. Temperature change. Rain, sun, life.
I don't know if you know that a panic attack is an actual physiological occurrence. Your heart skips a beat and my (and maybe yours) mind would think it was the big one, because my mind thinks this my body reacts by pumping more adrenaline into my system. This causes my heart to race faster, the sweats, and the numbing. And at this point my brain will go into panic mode and so on and so on. When I learned this it was easier to deal, I would take walks, I would breathe. It got better, they occurred less regularly, the number of triggers dwindled. After about a year of really awful attacks things started to get better. Still not awesome though, especially for my lovely, patient, and kind husband who would be woken up in the middle of the night to me pacing our tiny apartment for hours.
And this is when Jesse decided to ask me to tell him what it was like. What it was like to have all of this fear built up inside of me. He wanted me to tell him when I got scared, when a situation would come up where I might get a panic attack. Basically he wanted to know what the hell was going on inside my silly head.
So I started to tell him.
Driving down a two lane road with a small shoulder, "He is going to lose control of the car and it will go over the shoulder, hit the gravel, swerve out into oncoming traffic and a semi will hit us head on." Swimming in the ocean, "A riptide is going to come and snag my foot and I will be dragged underwater and I will drown." Sledding, "I will hit a bump and go flying off the sled hit my head on a rock and everyone will think I am ok and tomorrow I will have a hemorrhage in my brain and I will die." The common cold, "It is really cancer". Petting a dog, "it has some strange unknown disease that will seep into my skin and we won't know about it for months and then I will be very sick." Getting any painkillers or Novocaine, "I am one of the rare cases they don't even know about yet that is allergic to this stuff and it's going to make my brain die." Eating anything, "I wonder if I am deathly allergic to this but we just don't know it yet and we are going to find out right now because my throat is swelling shut."Cleaning out our storage unit, "The mice poop is going to kill me."
So, after awhile it got really funny. Jesse would try not to giggle, but a lot of times it was impossible. Does anyone really think that the tofu in their Pad Thai came from a chemically contaminated tofu plant in China? The more and more I said out loud the irrational things that were going on in my head the more and more I realized how irrational they were. I was not and am not crazy, I am just very, very, creative. And my creativity manifested itself in the wrong direction, it went to loony town. I find myself voicing my irrational fears to people I barely know now, granted the fears are so tiny compared to what they were, and now I even find myself elaborating on their silliness. If I am simply thinking "we are going to fall off this cliff" I will tell someone that in my head "we are about to have a dance party right now and we are going to forget we are standing on this cliff and one of us is going to leap right off and die." And both thoughts will sort of be really what I'm thinking, but one will make me and everyone around me laugh and that will remind me that this reality, the one that is actually happening, is a lot more fun than the scary one that lived inside my head. I know it's a cheesy adage, laughter being the best medicine and all. But boy, I sure prefer laughing over the alternative.
I better stop typing now or my carpal tunnel may act up and cause my arm to cramp and fly up and hit me in the head, and the impact might make my brain swell up and I might just pass out right here while Jesse is asleep and nobody will find me until tomorrow and by then it will be too late...
1 comment:
I enjoyed this.
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