Second Chances

In the past and a little bit recently, I have sometimes wanted to flush my life down the wormhole and start over. That is not such an unusual thought. We all long for second chances.

When I think back on errors of judgment on my part, I try to imagine what my headspace was at the time. Me and my best bud Anxiety have been to a lot of dark places together. And I mean, a lot. There wasn’t a picture-perfect situation I couldn’t screw up with my negative self-talk. A lovely wedding? “Oh, I’ll never find a husband that will put up with me.”

It was madness, of course, and the lamentations of a girl with pitifully low self-esteem. But I also realized it was a type of control mechanism. If I controlled the narrative of negative self-talk, then I wouldn’t be blindsided or taken advantage of. How I connected the two I have yet to articulate but it went like that.

I took a certain perverse pride in the boards and committees I sat on when I was younger. I would take issue with an issue we were wrestling with. I would bring all of the negatives to the attention of my colleagues. I got off on their perplexed and concerned faces giving serious attention to my opinion.

(That was lame of me – very, very young – but I also think it is not an uncommon element of modern boards and committees. There’s always one whiny “that guy.”)

So as I face another anxiety-producing situation in the present, I weigh my options as I have trained myself to do. I am checking my self-talk. I am checking my emotions. They run from anger to sadness to anxiety (Hey, hi there, old buddy!) to shame. I am ashamed to have let someone pull something over on me.

It triggers all of those feelings of powerlessness that I had in childhood. I had no agency to make bad things stop happening or to make good things happen. It also didn’t stop me from trying.

I remember I made a lot of penuche fudge. That is a brown sugar fudge for the non-fudge inamorato out there. It is a diabetes delivery method in a one-inch square.

But when the caregivers were absent and dinner was hours or days away, I could make penuche. I pulled the ingredients out of the pantry. I pulled the pot out of the cupboard and put it on the stove. At nine years old, I was a fudge-making diva.

The negative self-talk became a total buzzkill as I got older. I came to read about or recognize the classic overthinking of an adult child. Having not been brought up in a stable home environment, overthinking was a form of self-protection. Somewhat akin to planning a number of escape routes in a house in the event of a fire. Forewarned is forearmed and all that.

Just now, we are about to learn whether someone made an honest mistake that they will make good on or we were deliberately misled and duped. For an adult child and trauma survivor, that is pretty much a worst-case scenario. It was the trust and vulnerability I had as a child that led to physical and emotional pain in the first place.

So today I am in self-observation mode. How I am going to handle it this time? Will my hurt and betrayal be addressed? Or will this be another loss I have to accept and grieve? I have done that before.

I do know that if I let enough time go by and fill the picture in with pleasantries and feel sorry for the transgressor, my mood will bounce back to normal.

So one of my responses to anxiety has been routinization to some degree. We all need some of that, too. Especially in times of change and upheaval – a state I am currently in.

So I will smush together all the accumulated wisdom for managing stress and negativity that I have learned in my life. Meditation, exercise, pranic breathing, and patience as I await the results of how the flagged issue will be handled.

As it turns out, there is not another blessed thing – beyond self-care – that I can do in aid of controlling the outcome. The ball, as they say, is in somebody else’s court.

The secret of navigating this difficult issue is to stop reacting to an outcome that has not yet been decided and is out of my hands anyway. That will have to do for now.