I refuse to keep feeling this way
Hyper-alert Heroes! Graham here.
I’m making some big changes in my life these past few weeks. Starting with the smallest things.
We’ll get to that, but first, a wee trip down panic memory lane. . .
Delightful.
Memories
When I was 23, I had a panic attack so wild it felt like it reshaped the world.
I was in my bedroom at the time, and I was not in a good space mentally, to say the least. Just a few short weeks earlier, I’d experienced a traumatic, life-altering drug experience, which would end up rearranging my sense of reality for about two years.
Ouch?
But I didn’t know that yet.
At this point all I knew was that I was filled with terror every hour of every day, and kept having impossible-to-explain freakouts like the one that was about to happen.
The shrinking universe
It was 10pm, and the problem was simple. I had become convinced that the universe was too small.
The whole thing was shrinking, and me with it.
The problem wasn’t physical. If I, and everyone else, were all shrinking at the same rate - which thankfully did seem to be the case - then we’d all still fit just fine.
And yet, the feeling of living in a suddenly much-smaller world was deeply distressing. It continued to upset me for some time, until I eventually, somehow, got to sleep.
Back then, this sort of thing was fairly routine for me.
Like the feeling that the world was actually a dream. That I might have been dead or alive, and worse, that there was no longer a firm difference between these two states. These odd sensations would overwhelm me most days, waxing and waning in intensity.
(Here more about that strange time in my life here, if you’re game…)
So what was that all about?
Looking back on the problem of the shrunken universe, it speaks to me now of the contracting power of fear.
When you’re scared, it feels like the fear is all there is. Massive, all-consuming.
And that was very much my experience in that particular panic attack. My body may have been shrinking in-step with the universe, but my feelings remained as big as ever. The terror in my bedroom now filling the cosmos.
This was my life back then. Fears so big I could no longer truly dwell in my body at all, and so I lived in a mind increasingly lost in thought.
When even your body is not a safe place, the world is very strange indeed.
Prone to terrifying feats of abstraction.
A growing universe
I stayed in this terrified (and terrifying) state for about two years.
As if that panic attack was a kind of premonition, my world really did get smaller. Week to week, there were less and less things I could do without freaking out completely.
Things slowly started to shift with one simple decision. One ordinary day, I made a choice to stop avoiding the things that scared me. To do one thing, each day, outside my ever-shrinking comfort zone.
To grow my world again. And most importantly, to allow the fear space in my life, and in my body. To invite it willingly by doing what scared me most.
It started with a trip to the dreaded supermarket. Nine months later, it ended with me jumping out of a plane (with a parachute).
Looking back, I don't know if it was courage or just raw desperation. But I slowly began to feel safe in my body again. And for the rest of my twenties, life was relatively calm.
Familiar fear
It’s almost fifteen years since that strange time, but I find myself now in a similar bind.
The reasons are different. Chronic pain. Life upheaval. My 30s have been anything but calm. I have less mind-bending abstractions to deal with, thankfully. But here it is again these past few years, the hour-by-hour dilemma of tension and fear.
My body is once more a place in which I don’t feel safe.
Like in my twenties, I know things need to change. But this time around, something tells me it’s less about pushing myself to do more. So I’m taking a gentler approach.
My first instinct has been to tease it out with language. I write pages at a time, to give these overwhelming feelings form and shape. I write newsletters. I’m writing a book.
All this makes the whole thing that much less lonely. Something that can be named and shared with others. Something that isn’t just ‘my’ pain but ‘the’ pain — part of the shared experience of a sensitive life.
This has always helped me.
But it’s not enough anymore.
I need to find a way back to my body.
I need to make my body a safe place to live once more.
One short phrase in my journal, that says so much in so few words:
I refuse to keep feeling this way.
I don’t know exactly what this means just yet, but I’m finding some clues.
Here are two recent clues I’ll share:
Clue #1 — I just devoured The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk. A simply astounding book about the imprint of trauma and fear on our bodies and minds, and what we can actually do about it. Simply put, there are good reasons why so many of us struggle to feel safe in our bodies. Even if you don’t know why you’re filled with fear on a regular basis, even if you can’t name any one specific trauma in your life, I recommend reading it all the same. It has opened several doors at once for me, just a crack, which I’m now following through.
Clue #2 — I’ve started doing yoga. As in, I’ve done yoga four days out of the last five, having maybe done it four times in my whole life before that. It's the kind of suggestion I'd usually roll my eyes at ('that's not going to make a dent in what I'm dealing with') but van der Kolk cites good evidence that yoga can help frightened people more feel more at home in their bodies. I’ve started small - just doing the most basic guided yoga on Youtube. Specifically, a video from Yoga With Adriene.
Adriene (a real-life angel sent to guide us all gently back into our bodies?) has a saying:
“Find what feels good.”
Her point is that yoga shouldn’t be about getting the poses right, or being good at yoga. Instead it’s about “having an experience”. It’s about feeling good, in your body.
And when I hear her say that, I realise that, for me, this philosophy - “find what feels good” - it’s exactly what I’ve been trying to do more generally lately, well beyond the yoga mat. Out of sheer desperation.
Listening to my body
When you live in a frightened body, there’s not much that feels good. So I’ve been paying more attention to the few things that do.
I’ve been doing my best to listen to what my body wants, starting with the smallest things.
Checking in with myself on a walk. ‘Do I want to do my usual loop around the creek, or am I ready to turn back early?’ And around the house. ‘Am I too hot to keep this jumper on? Maybe I’ll take it off before I overheat for once, instead of waiting till I’m finished whatever thing I’m in the middle of?’
Getting a glass of water, going to the bathroom, whatever it might be. All the things I’d usually put off until I’m finished whatever I think I’m supposed to be doing.
These sound like trivial things, but they don’t feel trivial. I feel like I’m relearning how to listen to my body’s signals, which I’m so used to suppressing or ignoring (because so often those signals are overwhelming).
Sleeping when I’m tired
The biggest one? I’ve been sleeping when I’m tired.
Or at the very least, I’ve been getting into bed when I’m tired. Which means, this last week or so, I’ve been in bed half the day.
This in particular feels… almost forbidden?
I even ask my therapist, ‘am I allowed to just spend this much time in bed?’
His answer is simple yet reassuring:
‘Well, you’re tired.’
My 'sleep when you're tired' inspo. Bodie gets it.
‘I will believe my body’
I wrote this simple phrase in my journal, which about sums it up:
‘From now on, I will believe my body.’
I’m going to do more of what feels good. And I’m going to do less of what feels bad.
Sounds so simple yes?
The inevitable paradox
Of course there’s a paradox here. What helped in my 20s was to do the very things that scared me, to move through that fear by feeling it.
And I've mostly maintained that 'push through' approach since then. But it feels different now. I’m so tired of feeling afraid.
Years of pushing through that feeling have brought all sorts of valued things into my life. But all that pushing has also worn me out.
As my therapist put it, I am “emotionally fatigued”.
(I underlined that phrase in my journal a few times.)
Maybe for me now it’s not so much ‘feel the fear and do it anyway’. Maybe it’s more like, ‘this fear is telling me something has to change’?
So more changes are coming. I just don’t know what they are yet.
But I do know this. I refuse to keep feeling this way.
Knowing even just that much feels potent to me right now. Writing it down, saying it out loud.
I refuse to keep feeling this way.
I wonder where this knowledge will take me next.
Hey, what do you make of all this?
I love reading your responses to the newsletters. Lately, I’ve found them especially fortifying. So if these words meant something to you today, let me know? (To be honest, I could use the encouragement!)
