Anxiety attack…failure…stuck in one’s head
Ugh. I’m sitting with an anxiety attack and it’s unpleasant. My usual tricks seem to be making things worse, BUT I’m not actually losing my shit, so I’m going to try writing through it and read it again later.
Yesterday morning I did well and got a lot done. Ray and I went to the new Spider-Miles movie and enjoyed it quite a bit. Neither one of us had anything critical to say, although I’m nervous about the movie after this one for plot reasons. It’ll probably be great, but the way it’s set up points toward the sort of movie that drives me up the fucking wall. I know the writers won’t do the stupid thing, but I don’t know that they’ll make it as enjoyable as the first two movies.
Everything other than the movie was a struggle against annoyance. We went out to eat and their food was great but the service was rude and they had closed off their dining room, so we had to take it back to the apartment. And then everyone at the movie theater happily tried to walk into one or the other of us. And we stopped for ice cream and the staff just about lost it with this group of teenage girls with zero attention spans and a bad case of entitlement.
It wore me out and I had to tap a bunch of resources to calm down. I was so tired that I thought I’d be able to sleep right away. No luck. Found something that calmed me down. Finally fell asleep. Woke up this morning feeling much better. I often use the phrase “a clean place for a new mess” to describe the process of literal cleaning and not worrying about the fact that nothing really stays clean for long; I’ve used it several times over the last few days for emotions and it really resonated this morning.
Thinking about emotions: Let’s say for the sake of this post that emotions are more or less strong reactions from one’s limbic systems; basic, primal things. Feelings are more complex and mitigated by one’s thoughts and opinions. “I hate this place” = emotion. “I have a bad feeling about this place” = feeling. Terror is emotion; creepiness is a feeling. I don’t know if that’ll make any sense to anyone but me, but I need to break it down this way so I can try to write my way through this.
I’m starting to cope with my own emotions rather than shutting them down constantly, or offloading them onto a partner (as much as the ex would tolerate me doing so, anyway). If they’re not turned off where I can’t feel that I’m feeling them, they seem to be messy and chaotic. I hear people talk about emotions as being messy and chaotic. I have no idea if what I feel is more messy than normal, but they feel much messier than the people around me. Do y’all feel all your emotions and just not show them? Are they mostly turned off? I don’t have a good model for anything healthy emotionally. I mean, I could be surrounded with people who deal with their emotions in a healthy way, but I have no basis for comparison and couldn’t even begin to pick people out.
Well, okay, correction. I do know at least one person that I’d consider having healthy emotions, very much a survivor type who seems very soft but who is resilient as hell. I’m proud to call her a friend, but I won’t namedrop her here. I’ll just smile about it.
Anyway: she seems to have intense emotions and complex feelings; she complains a fair amount about things that discomfort her, she expresses pleasure at good stuff. But she doesn’t overshare either (at least in my opinion). I’m not sure how that’ll go for me, once I have stuff figured out better. Right now I’m okay with what I’m sharing. It makes me uncomfortable to share anything at all (and yet I feel better for having done it, later), but it’s better at this point to overshare than to lock down. I don’t have a sense of balance yet and that’s probably fine, all things considered.
My emotions and feelings seem to work much in the same way my thoughts do, a LOT, quite varied, and ALL THE TIME. I can shut my emotions off but not my thoughts, which leaves my feelings a mess, where I’m convinced I’m fine but I’m clearly not.–I can shut off pain, too, mostly, but my emotions go flat when I do. I’ve been going through a lot of physical pain as I unclench my muscles around the spine so I can move and feel more freely; I have to wonder if the constant emotional shouting I’m feeling is part of the pain I’m feeling.
I was honestly starting to worry that my emotions were somehow broken. They come, shake me around like a terrier with a rat, and then they’re gone. If I dwell on them, they get worse. Weirdly, the more and faster I let go of them, the more complex and subtle and long-lasting they become as feelings. At a guess, the shorter-term emotions usually come and go in three hours; the ones I don’t want to let go of last around three days before I get wiped out and just can’t even. For feelings, the cycle takes longer but it varies greatly, with a pattern of a period of intense feeling that then becomes internalized, almost more of a belief than anything else. They’re really hard to dislodge at that point. Finally disconnecting from my old friend from the other day felt like I was tearing myself apart physically, even though we hadn’t been close for years. I felt a lot of physical pain to go with the emotional pain.
Emotion/pain–>Feeling–>Internalized belief.
The “feeling” part feels plagued by doubt for me. I’m either *very* sure about the emotions, or I turn them off. Feelings are intense, conflicted, rich to the point of being overwhelming, filled with doubts, often accompanied by intense self-loathing or intense enjoyment and even joy, often swinging pretty quickly between those two things. The internalized belief phase almost always feels wonderful, perhaps because a long time ago I made my choices with regards to despair. (I’m probably the most cynical hopeful person you’ll ever meet.)
There are plenty of reasons to despair about life and the world in which I live; I realized a long time ago that despair is particularly bad for me, with a line of depression on the one side my family that has ended in suicide but more often the kind of self-destruction that leaves a person an empty shell, like one of the poor drained Podlings from The Dark Crystal. I fear that shit worse than death, and I almost ended up there. Bleah. (My apologies if you’re family and you’re reading this. I’m not saying that death was better. I’m saying I fear it less.)
Where I am right now is trying to figure out what this anxiety is.
I can think of a couple of reasons. They *feel* like they are about other people and therefore completely out of my control. It’s easy to think that, because other people’s behavior IS out of my control, but it’s also misdirection. My feelings are not their problem, not under their control, not their responsibility. I am not in a legit state of fight-or-flight regarding anything in my life right now; I am in no danger. What I’m feeling is a feeling, and not one of the basic, brutal, undeniable, CLEAR emotions. Now, this might be completely different if I were actually generally anxious rather than just dealing with trauma. There’s a joke that goes, “I thought I had anxiety but it turns out it was just your uncle.” I literally had an aunt tell me that, long before it became so commonplace as to become a joke (she survived hellish abuse and brought herself back to become another relatively emotionally healthy person, even if I wanted to shake her about being obliviously bigoted). I might have carried that level of PTSD-like symptoms around for a while, but I think the worst of those are mostly past.
What’s left is trying to learn how to own my own feelings. They come from ME, they are about ME, they are how I’m turning raw emotion into the underlying beliefs I have about the world. They are not caused by someone else, even when they are about someone else.
I say that, but then I get anxious.
Anxiety is a weird feeling right now. I feel safe and secure. I can mentally check up and down my spine and tap into those underlying assumptions about the world. I am safe. I am secure. I won’t fear people who don’t want to hurt me; I won’t push them away before they can push me. I feel like myself and I have access to sweetness. I won’t slip away into nothingness and I won’t go numb and robotic or even slip into unmitigated bitterness. As bad as I feel right now, I still know those things. I feel them.
Where I’m struggling is partly in feeling alone and unsupported and worried about talking about what’s going on or asking for help (I feel tightness in my throat), but mostly in my thoughts.
My anxiety is in my head, not that it’s imaginary (it isn’t) but within my intellect and reason.
At the worst part of being anxious a little bit ago, I got up, walked into the kitchen, and just stood in a corner like a glitched video game character.–One of the games I like, World of Warcraft, has a character class that can “fear” others, causing them to run away from the character for a short amount of time. My anxiety felt like that. My intellectual doubts become so overwhelming that they became irrational feelings, then a burst of primal emotion: RUN AWAY.
It doesn’t help to go, “Oh, here are the intellectual aspects of the real situation that would counter those irrational, but intellectually-based feelings of anxiety.” Not at all. That just seems to make things worse.
What helps is letting go.
I’m worried about X. So I go, “Then X happens, and I live with that.”
My heart clenches up. X will hurt! My mind wants to prevent my heart from hurting (probably because I’m mostly drained of resilience right now), but it can’t; there’s no resolution for the conflict between something I must do yet cannot; I am anxious.
But if I ride that awful feeling out–and I can, because my heart is strong and can encompass failure, loss, heartbreak, isolation, rejection, refusal, pain, joy, and so on–then there’s a period of intense sweetness, where the feelings about X become richer and get internalized more.
Example: I’m worried about Ray not becoming independent as fast as I had to, when I was her age. So I go, “Then she never really becomes independent, and I live with that.” Telling myself that forcing people to become hyperindependent the way that’s expected in modern society is probably bad for a lot of people, that’s *reasonable* but doesn’t do anything for my feelings. So I don’t tell myself that. I just live with the discomfort of feeling like I’ve failed as a parent. I’ll still do what I think is right, and I’ll still nudge her toward strength, toward taking chances and taking them wisely, toward new experiences that make her life richer, after she gets past the point of resisting them just because they’re new.
But the important part is that I allow myself to just live with what I feel like is an undesirable outcome. I can. I have quite often survived not getting what I want. But by accepting that things may not turn out the way I want, I don’t end up trying to make her something she isn’t. I won’t, because trying to get Ray to do something she doesn’t want to do, or keeping her from doing something she DOES want to do, ends up in her finding *very* creative workarounds.
She’s not going to be anyone different. I don’t want her to be different. I don’t want to kick her out of the apartment and force her to be independent. I’m okay with waiting to find out how she’s going to handle her life. Any reasonably caring parent feels anxiety about whether their kid is going to be okay or not. I love my daughter. I love finding out who she is. I love watching her change and grow. I love messing with her. I love running up against her flaws and knowing I’ve hit the heart of her. I love talking things out with her. I love that we CAN talk things out. I even love being wrong and apologizing to her. Stuff gets better when I say I’m sorry. What a miracle that is.
My anxiety about making her into a mini-me can only keep me from enjoying those things. My anxiety will not better prepare her to face the world. If there comes a time when I need to kick her out of the nest, well, I’ll wait until I can do it from a place that isn’t anxiety. My anxiety will only hurt both of us.
So: I have to fail. I have to lose. It’s all me, my problem, my fault, my thoughts, my anxiety. I have to give up. I *know* what happens when someone tries to force their plans on someone else, tries to force them to succeed: tragedy for everyone involved, mutual destruction. I don’t want to go there. I would rather support Ray for the rest of my life than lose her that way.
When I’m not anxious, I know all this.
In the middle of an anxiety attack, I struggle to know anything other than fear. And the stuff that normally works for anxiety doesn’t really work for me anyway (focusing on one’s senses, for example, or ASMR, which often makes me so anxious I feel like vomiting, and OMG, just being around weed makes me feel panicked and paranoid). I’m just that video game character stuck in a corner, mindlessly.
“What if X happens?”
“What if X happens?”
“What if X happens?”
I’m stuck on it.
The stuff that happened a few days ago still has me spun up. A hundred different scenarios play through my head, none of the pleasant or even remotely neutral. I have a ton of stuff available to worry about, a lot of stuff in my life that I can’t control.
“What if X happens?”
What is working is telling myself:
Then it happens. *All* of it happens. Every last thing I’ve ever feared, it happens. I lose, I fail, I go broke, I live on the streets. I grieve, I mourn, I give up, it hurts, I never figure out how to fix what goes wrong, or make up for it, or get back on track. I look back and realize that everything I have ever tried to accomplish has been a waste of time that brought me nothing of what I hoped. I accept that all now, I swallow the possibility of it.
But whatever bad things that happen in life, I don’t destroy my reasons for living, either by destroying my ability to feel or by destroying the relationships and opportunities around me. I don’t pre-fail by sabotaging myself. I don’t be my worst enemy, by trying to control everything around me, by pressuring other people to become what they are not, by throttling my own actions and feelings and holding myself back.
By submitting to failure, I am defended from despair.
Like I said. Weird.
…
This photo, a selfie taken before going to Spider-Miles, made me go, “I did something exactly right as a parent.” What, I’m not sure. But whatever I did, didn’t make it impossible for Ray to make that transcendent expression.
The last one of the “grief is weird” series, where I’d added the phrase “in sweetness we rise” to the prompts.