Tag: anxiety

The Vigil

I hate waiting. It is a character flaw.

I should be a model of patience by now.

I am not.

It is uncertainty that bothers me most.

I don’t trust easily. I am a small “c” control freak. If a job needs to be done well, I need to do it. Etc.

I could analyze ad infinitum how I evolved this way but I think it is pretty textbook. Chaotic childhood. Addicted parents. Chronic upheaval and instability.

To not become something of a control freak in such an environment would be a little crazy in its own right.

So even if waiting for what I expect will be a positive outcome, I dither.

I harbor the anxiety that the proverbial rug will be pulled out from under my proverbial feet.

Op. cit. childhood.

The trick is to manage the anxiety of waiting and not the other way around, letting anxiety manage you.

I sometimes think of the frightened bird hiding in the reeds in a vignette from the classic Disney animated film, Fantasia.

Instead of keeping her head down and staying put, the bird panics. She flies out of her hiding space into a hunter’s clear shot. I had similar metaphorical experiences in my life. Many instances when things might have gone much better had I simply kept my head down and my mouth shut.

But no. Anxiety is a powerful driver. And with a nervous system deeply gouged with life threatening memories of a danger-filled childhood, it is not an easy emotion to quell in emotional heat.

Sometimes the emotional game in my head was akin to playing defense in a basketball game. Feinting. Parrying. Watching for one move or another on someone else’s part. Blocking constantly, frantically, and in this analogy, one’s own emotions to boot. I already need a shower.

Waiting drags at the nerves. It forces you to think or, at the very least, spend time alone with your thoughts. While it might benefit you to think about anything else but what you are waiting on, that is easier said than done.

I remember back to memorable waiting periods in my life. For grades to be posted. For a boyfriend to call. For the outcome of a job interview. For my children to be born. For my father to pick me up. Ordinary life events made tolerable or intolerable in direct relation to the extent of my anxiety and distrust of life.

Let go, the self-help books say. Let go and let god, the 12 step programs say. Let go, the religious tracts say and, if you fall, god will pick you up and you will fly. That is a lot of faith to invest in reassuring platitudes. If, and especially when, life has given you plenty of personal evidence to the contrary.

I have slowly learned positive benefits of cultivating patience. It makes waiting easier. It lessens the gap between triumph and disaster. As Kipling counseled in his poem If, I have learned to “treat those two imposters just the same.” Well, similarly at any rate.

A friend from long ago suffered from a rare and capricious form of cancer. She traveled as far as Sweden to the only clinic in the world that specialized in treatment of her condition. She wrote about waiting. For test results. For updates. For word of developments on her condition. Her writing was full of frustration for what she couldn’t control. She sounded like a lot of us managing much less difficult circumstances.

My friend died. And that was the end of her uncertainty about everything. Everything ends eventually. Death is so final, after all.

It seems that is the trick of life and living. We do what we have to do while we have to do it until one day we don’t. Or can’t. And then really, really can’t.

We can be patient and learn to put up with life’s uncertainties or we can act out along the way like overtired toddlers. The end result is the same. How we handle these inevitable frustrations is what informs the quality of the journey. That is going to be a lot more important to you later than you may realize now. Trust me.

I have been that peevish toddler in the past having a temper tantrum and throwing shade at every person I perceived as an impediment to my goals and wishes. I have also hung back and talked with others in the queue misery bitching about our shared calamity. We often got a laugh out of it and a shared – if temporary – sense of connection. It was the spoonful of sugar that made the line move faster.

So today I wait again. For an uncertain outcome. In a dire situation. I am better at discerning what I can control and what I can’t. The person for whom I am holding vigil is on their own journey. I am simply a fellow traveler.

On that note, I am going to go top up my coffee. Completely within my control.

A chore utterly without frustration.

Unless the coffee is lukewarm.

I hate lukewarm coffee.

Home Safe Home

A common consequence of being raised in an abusive household is an adult survivor’s ambivalent feelings around the concept of ”home.” My feelings about “home” certainly were.

Maybe because of that background, I was determined to create one. I was as ill-prepared to do that as a chef who had never stepped foot in a food market, much less a kitchen. Home was foreign territory.

An abused child is powerless. The only option they have is to adapt and survive the environment they are in. When bad things happen or they see bad things happen, an abused child often believe it happened because they did something “wrong.” Children are notoriously egocentric..

I eventually came to distinguish feelings of “guilt” from feelings of “shame.” Guilt is feeling bad about a mistake you made. Shame comes from the feeling you are a mistake. Major difference.

I only know that I emerged into young adulthood with the twin challenges of navigating life having grown up without the basic blueprint everyone else seemed to have.

A label that sums up my childhood environment might be “bohemian intellectualism.” Or “intellectual bohemianism.” Basically an environment of free thinking adults without many rules and utterly inconsistent.

Which is pretty scary for children. If there is anyone on the planet who needs structure and boundaries, it is children. They need limits for many reasons. First, they cannot impose them on themselves. Their judgment isn’t all that. Children don’t always realize “when is enough.”

I have come to understand that setting boundaries and limits on children allows them to safely test the parameters of their lives. Life is overwhelming enough for adults to say nothing of small children. It is why parents try to protect children from life’s harsher realities before they are mature enough to handle them.

Trauma teachers frequently reference the resiliency and survival skills of abused children. All children are known to have some innate ability to “bounce back” from loss and disappointments. I believe I had that characteristic. But as a child, I remember wishing there was someone or something to guide and protect me. I concluded early that my parents weren’t capable of doing that.

Not for a lack of trying on my parents’ part, to be fair. Neither of them had healthy coping skills themselves and very poor judgment when it came to hiring babysitters and caregivers. My memories are mostly neutral or unhappy looking back on the dozen or so housekeepers we had come and go when we were children.

Caregivers infractions ranged from the benign irresponsibility of a babysitter having her boyfriend over while she cared for us. Greater violations came from imbuing trust in troubled adults to take care of vulnerable little girls. It seemed there were so many of these defectives who came into our life.

Home was never a place of safety for me. Those final few steps before arriving home from school often churned up a mixture of apprehension or anxiety. Maybe Mom was passed out on the couch, or in her bedroom. People might be sitting around drinking. Well before the sun went over the yardarm.

Those were just the daytime anxieties. On many nights, especially after guests’ drinking heavily, the anxiety got worse. One night I went into my bedroom and found a man I didn’t know passed out in my bed. I’m not all together sure where I slept that night. Maybe the couch in the basement rec room.

The work of keeping myself calm internally – both in my heart and in my mind – still requires effort. Like any “practice,” remaining calm and centered and focussed especially in the face of severe overwhelm and stress, takes commitment and repetition.

Life guided me to a healing path. I’ve figured out that the home and safety we crave is ultimately found within us. It took a long time to learn that. It is a process of building trust and belief – in the world around us and in ourselves. I don’t know which of those was harder for me to achieve.

When I compare how I am now to how I used to be, I drolly remind myself and those who witnessed me struggle, “I am much better now.”

It has taken a long time and much personal work to shake off that desperate and dogged insecurity. I have read that a loving and happy marriage can heal emotional wounds if the partners are truly there for one another.

I appreciate the safe harbor I’ve landed in. It might never have been. I look at this loving relationship with the same degree of wonder as I look back on what it took to me to survive.

Mine has not been a “normal” path. But I learned to keep myself safe and that I was worthy to have it. The evidence being that I am here now.

I can write down heartfelt words of gratitude for what is and, most especially, for what no longer is.

A Friend Indeed

Thank you, Gary Stairs.

“Piglet?” said Pooh.

“Yes?” said Piglet.

“I’m scared,” said Pooh.

For a moment, there was silence.

“Would you like to talk about it?” asked Piglet, when Pooh didn’t appear to be saying anything further.

“I’m just so scared,” blurted out Pooh.

“So anxious. Because I don’t feel like things are getting any better. If anything, I feel like they might be getting worse.

People are angry, because they’re so scared, and they’re turning on one another, and there seems to be no clear plan out of here, and I worry about my friends and the people I love, and I wish SO much that I could give them all a hug, and oh, Piglet! I am so scared, and I cannot tell you how much I wish it wasn’t so.”

Piglet was thoughtful, as he looked out at the blue of the skies, peeping between the branches of the trees in the Hundred Acre Wood, and listened to his friend.

“I’m here,” he said, simply. “I hear you, Pooh. And I’m here.”

For a moment, Pooh was perplexed.

“But… aren’t you going to tell me not to be so silly? That I should stop getting myself into a state and pull myself together? That it’s hard for everyone right now?”

“No,” said Piglet, quite decisively. “No, I am very much not going to do any of those things.”

“But – ” said Pooh.

“I can’t change the world right now,” continued Piglet. “And I am not going to patronise you with platitudes about how everything will be okay, because I don’t know that.

“What I can do, though, Pooh, is that I can make sure that you know that I am here. And that I will always be here, to listen; and to support you; and for you to know that you are heard.

“I can’t make those Anxious Feelings go away, not really.

“But I can promise you that, all the time I have breath left in my body…you won’t ever need to feel those Anxious Feelings alone.”

And it was a strange thing, because even as Piglet said that, Pooh could feel some of those Anxious Feelings start to loosen their grip on him and could feel one or two of them start to slither away into the forest, cowed by his friend, who sat there stolidly next to him.

Pooh thought he had never been more grateful to have Piglet in his life.

Oliviral.com

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.