Transformation: How Anxiety Grows
My husband often asks me, "why now? What is going on right now that is causing this stress?"
He is an engineer-artisan man that wants to fix something he sees as broken, and I don't blame him. I feel broken some days. Anxiety has become a stagnate pool in my body somewhere, all the thoughts I try and avoid and push down the drain have backed up in my mind; a cesspool I don't want to deal with. However, when it gets so bad that out of nowhere you are shaking, sick, overwhelmed (meanwhile everyone else is just eating chips outside on a nice day) and you feel chaos brewing at every single inch of your being. "It" comes out of nowhere like a leak, spill, clogged drain pooling in every direction and when you try to wipe it up and clean the mess you end up just spilling over into some other crevice of your mind. You feel guilt, shame, humiliation, sadness, frustration, anger... all at once and are not sure how to channel it without doing further damage.
I literally cried tears of joy when I heard this because it was the first time I felt EMPATHY in the world of anxiety. THIS is how it feels:
It's a spiral, a gnarly wave, a vortex into another place. Yoga, meditation, talking with friends and all sorts of other methods of dealing with stress and self-care have led me to the analogy of child birth and pregnancy. Strange connection? Well, I remember working through hours of natural child birth and thinking that one less contraction was one less contraction until I see my baby. That's how I got through it - I had an ending. Something hopeful to focus on and know I could attain if only I could hold on long enough. I would totally be the last man dangling in Lost Boys. My anxiety has gotten out of control because I don't have that ending. My linear way of coping with stress does not apply to the spilling over of water in my mind. Instead, I have to just let it pour out of me and wait until the source stops and homeostasis can come back to normal. That means of course, a lot of work for the Virgo.
Just hoping enough yoga, enough exercise, enough salt baths will lead me to some place where anxiety cannot sneak up on me. To think if I cry enough, talk enough, let go of my pride and be sick enough until I'm completely empty MAYBE I'll feel better. When anxiety strikes you want nothing more than to NOT BE IN THAT MOMENT and the thoughts immediately escape to worry, fear, stress. My Virgo mind has at least 45 things on it and those start to pulse larger and larger in my mind. "Why can't you get these done, what's wrong with you? Why are you thinking about doing it and not doing it? Why can't you just be humble and suck it up? What is WRONG with you?"
"What is WRONG with you?"
That thought does a lot of damage when it rings in your own ears over and over and doctors don't seem to help. They want to prescribe medications, SSRI's, hormones, suggest birth control but no one really seems to know WHY or WHERE it all comes from. You have to do the work yourself, for yourself, by yourself and hopefully you feel a little better each day. Just like 'adulthood', it's mostly hard because it's so simple and you simply have to hold yourself accountable. You also have to suffer.
I'm finding the best ways to deal with this new demon in my life is to learn the LIFE LESSON.
LET GO.
I'm grieving my mom, finally. I'm starting to do yoga, really... like not just a few poses and then walk over to the fridge. I'm removing dairy, sugar, crap from my diet almost COMPLETELY and trying to either BLOG or JOG every single day.
Who's with me?
He is an engineer-artisan man that wants to fix something he sees as broken, and I don't blame him. I feel broken some days. Anxiety has become a stagnate pool in my body somewhere, all the thoughts I try and avoid and push down the drain have backed up in my mind; a cesspool I don't want to deal with. However, when it gets so bad that out of nowhere you are shaking, sick, overwhelmed (meanwhile everyone else is just eating chips outside on a nice day) and you feel chaos brewing at every single inch of your being. "It" comes out of nowhere like a leak, spill, clogged drain pooling in every direction and when you try to wipe it up and clean the mess you end up just spilling over into some other crevice of your mind. You feel guilt, shame, humiliation, sadness, frustration, anger... all at once and are not sure how to channel it without doing further damage.
I literally cried tears of joy when I heard this because it was the first time I felt EMPATHY in the world of anxiety. THIS is how it feels:
It's a spiral, a gnarly wave, a vortex into another place. Yoga, meditation, talking with friends and all sorts of other methods of dealing with stress and self-care have led me to the analogy of child birth and pregnancy. Strange connection? Well, I remember working through hours of natural child birth and thinking that one less contraction was one less contraction until I see my baby. That's how I got through it - I had an ending. Something hopeful to focus on and know I could attain if only I could hold on long enough. I would totally be the last man dangling in Lost Boys. My anxiety has gotten out of control because I don't have that ending. My linear way of coping with stress does not apply to the spilling over of water in my mind. Instead, I have to just let it pour out of me and wait until the source stops and homeostasis can come back to normal. That means of course, a lot of work for the Virgo.
Just hoping enough yoga, enough exercise, enough salt baths will lead me to some place where anxiety cannot sneak up on me. To think if I cry enough, talk enough, let go of my pride and be sick enough until I'm completely empty MAYBE I'll feel better. When anxiety strikes you want nothing more than to NOT BE IN THAT MOMENT and the thoughts immediately escape to worry, fear, stress. My Virgo mind has at least 45 things on it and those start to pulse larger and larger in my mind. "Why can't you get these done, what's wrong with you? Why are you thinking about doing it and not doing it? Why can't you just be humble and suck it up? What is WRONG with you?"
"What is WRONG with you?"
That thought does a lot of damage when it rings in your own ears over and over and doctors don't seem to help. They want to prescribe medications, SSRI's, hormones, suggest birth control but no one really seems to know WHY or WHERE it all comes from. You have to do the work yourself, for yourself, by yourself and hopefully you feel a little better each day. Just like 'adulthood', it's mostly hard because it's so simple and you simply have to hold yourself accountable. You also have to suffer.
I'm finding the best ways to deal with this new demon in my life is to learn the LIFE LESSON.
LET GO.
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I'm grieving my mom, finally. I'm starting to do yoga, really... like not just a few poses and then walk over to the fridge. I'm removing dairy, sugar, crap from my diet almost COMPLETELY and trying to either BLOG or JOG every single day.
Who's with me?
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