Physicality.

I've been blown away by how much I'm feeling the anxiety and uncertainty of the present moment in my body.  For the first few days after we decided to #StayTheFHome, it was an ever-present companion:  a heaviness in my chest, a shortness of breath, a need to swallow. 

It reminded me of nothing less than the brief stretch of months in my early twenties when, for no reason I could see, I suddenly experienced a flurry of panic attacks.  They came on for no reason; I'd never had them before; they came on randomly, triggered by nothing I could see; and just about the time I started to wonder if I should seek professional help for them, they went away and I've never had one since.

This felt similarly, but less intense: subacute, but lasting longer.   A claustrophobia, a desire to flee somewhere this isn't.  A generalized feeling of un-safety.

After a few days I had a time of blessed relief.  I was still thinking all the same things in my head, but the fog and paralysis in my body had lifted.  Am I better?

It came back again, lasted a whole day; then lifted again.

+ + +

I keep taking a daily walk in my neighborhood, which although fairly densely populated (houses and small apartment buildings, mostly) has little foot traffic, most of it walking leashed dogs.  The daily walk helps.  I can feel my spirits lift.  Yesterday was a day that started with the heaviness in the chest, and it persisted.  I took the walk anyway.  As I walked the long straight stretch of wide and empty sidewalk, on a street that runs uninterrupted from downtown all the way to the southern suburbs and on (not that I was walking that far), I imagined another weight. 

It was not hard, feeling that lump pressing down on my sternum, along with the chin-tickling fluffy scarf wrapped about my neck to keep out the cold, to remember all those walks taken with a baby cinched up tight, in the baby carrier or ring sling, high up and curled like a shell over the chest.  It is warm (I felt flushed with my briskness), it is heavy like the anxiety that seems to press down on me, it is compact and dense.  It is a thing I am carrying, a live-seeming thing, and in many ways it is a thing I am carrying for others and not for myself.

Deep breaths---They seem to meet gentle resistance, like a warm external weight, with a life of its own, burrowing deeper down and seeking warmth and tightness.

+ + +

I have often in the past sixteen years thought back to a time when my second baby was a fairly new newborn.  He was a "lungy" baby, and whenever he had the slightest sign of a cold would wheeze and cough so that he sounded like a pertussis patient.  I guess he was a little bit croupy.  (Later he was prescribed albuterol to help.)

When he was quite small, less than a month old, he had one bad night:  I could not put him down, or he coughed and wheezed.  Held upright, he breathed, a little raggedly, but contentedly.   I spent most of the night sitting up with him in my arms, surfing the internet on a laptop so I wouldn't doze off.   I had some experience with sleepless nights by then, since he wasn't our first child.  What I remember about the experience was that I was astonished to find that, although I could have asked Mark to get up and hold him for a while so that I could rest, there was nothing I wanted more than to sit up with him and to continue sitting up with him.  He slept and breathed comfortably if I was holding him curled on my chest, and the sound of his sleeping and breathing comfortably was a sound so beautiful to me that I did not want to let anyone else take my place.  I sat there in the chair, clicking around and reading different things on the laptop, but my ear tuned to the sound of that breathing, and feeling that constant, heavy, warm, peaceful weight compressing my upper chest, constricting ever slightly my own breathing, which itself matched the double-time rhythm of the wispy baby-breaths at my throat.

+ + +

That's what the weight of the anxiety almost felt like, in its physicality.  As I walked, I tried to put myself mentally into that place, as if this new weight were the weight of that small baby, reassuring me even as it generated that tiny bit of physical difficulty.  And it is not far off from the truth:  part of what I am carrying around is, well, all my children, and all the other people I love, especially the ones who depend on me.

But thinking of it that way was a comfort, while it lasted. 

+ + +

The weight lifted off me by afternoon, after two different teenagers' algebra lessons (from different places in the book), after making dinner.  I expressed wonder to Mark about it:  all the same mix of hopeful and fearful thoughts were in my head, but the heavy weight, the knot in the stomach, the cold fingertips, the deadened appetite, those had just left me.   Without any hint of why, or any soothing event.  Like hiccups, I just noticed after a while that they had been gone for some time.

I guess I just can't sustain the physical manifestation all the time.  It does seem that the periods are shorter when it envelops me, and the physically-normal feelings are lasting longer.  I'm getting used to it.  I'm glad for that.  It gives me hope that I can go on carrying it all (carrying them all) for as long as I have to.

 

Comments

[Jamie]

You blogged about your panic attacks a long time ago, and I was grateful for it last week. I stayed up too late talking to a kid whose distress is spiraling, and went to bed distressed myself and unable to calm down. I found myself with disturbing symptoms: tight chest, burny lungs, shortness of breath, chills, tachycardia, fear of hospitals, fear of dying. "...Oh," I said to myself at some point. "Perhaps this is a panic attack."

It's surprising to me how much the amount of sleep I get determines my ability to manage my anxiety.

[Melanie]

Your image of the weight of the baby on your chest made it into my poem for today. It's such a visceral, immediate sensation.

[Jill]

You might like to read this article: https://hbr.org/2020/03/that-discomfort-youre-feeling-is-grief?fbclid=IwAR0k8QdR3IxWkcsqOpRodI2xtYmYuZ5RMX4MD0xoe8PlZYUUTL_eUxuMb7o

[Meredith]

When you mentioned algebra, that reminded me of a therapy suggestion to do math while experiencing feelings of a panic attack. Supposedly our brains can't do both at the same time? But mostly I am commenting just to commiserate about internalizing the stress in our bodies. Last week I clenched my jaw so tightly that my tooth required a root canal. Fun times.