Something to Give

The house smells like pizza.  My favorite insulated tumbler is full of sweet tea (I haven’t added the vodka just yet), and I’ve read half a novel today.  I woke up early, showered, made a trip to the dump and then took Lee on a Target run.  We laughed our way through the aisles and then returned home with all the fixings for a bake-a-thon.  I’ve talked to my mom, my dad, and my mother-in-law today, and I’ve spent the morning exchanging texts with my sisters and many of my close friends.  

I’m sitting in front of my computer, focusing on taking deep breaths. I’m prayerful and grateful.  

And I am also just a few breaths away from a panic attack.  

When I was a kid, I felt the panic coming on and then I panicked more.  I would spiral so badly that I couldn’t breathe.  I couldn’t move.  I couldn’t speak.  The tears rolled down my face and I felt certain that I was dying.  

This continued into my twenties and thirties, but as I got older, I learned to recognize the signs before they became paralyzing.  I know that the pain behind my rib cage on my left side is my ‘notice,’ if you would.  It tells me I need to pause and breathe.  I need to listen to my body and stretch and pray and summon a mental list of my blessings.  My body tells me what’s about to happen, and I’ve learned strategies for preventing it.  

But what nobody has ever been able to explain is what causes it.   The doctors called it ‘free-floating’ anxiety when I was a kid.  Which always seemed like a ridiculously cute name for something so terribly crippling.  And if it was so freely able to float, why wouldn’t it just freaking FLOAT AWAY?

I could never point to a cause.  I was never able to identify a particular stressor.  My anxiety would appear at the most unexpected times.  It was never when I was in the middle of a crisis.  It didn’t show up for breakups or finals or first dates.  It reared its ugly head in the middle of a lunch date with a friend, or just before band practice, or in a hotel spa.  I didn’t believe the anxiety diagnosis for a long time, because … well, I just didn’t FEEL anxious.  

I’ve been in and out of therapy since I was a kid.  I recently started seeing someone new.  She’s great.  She’s thoughtful and funny and makes connections that I can’t see until she points them out.  And she’s started to point out all the ways that I twist myself in order to feel liked, or wanted, or needed, or respected.  

She has helped me to see that I don’t let myself feel my own feelings, because I’m too busy anticipating the responses or needs of others.  

And I’m starting to notice it in a million little ways.  I haven’t made my own favorite meal in years, because nobody else really likes it.  I let my husband interrupt me, even though it drives me nuts.  I spend so much time worrying about what my readers might want to read that I stop writing altogether. 

All of this is so deeply ingrained that I don’t even know I’m doing it.  I suppress my desires so intuitively that I don’t even realize what’s happening.  That is, of course, until I explode. Sometimes it looks like tears in the shower. Sometimes it looks like a panic attack in the grocery store.  Sometimes it looks like angry screaming at my kids.  

On Monday morning, as I was getting ready to leave for work, Lee called for me.  “Mom…. I’m so sorry.”  Not a good sign. 

Instead of cleaning his room the day before, what he had actually done was shove everything under his bed… including a gallon container of Elmer’s glue.  The container, poorly closed and lying on its side, had deposited a three-foot wide puddle of glue under his bed.  Resting in the glue puddle was an assortment of art supplies, empty cups, dirty clothes, and random trash.  

To say I lost my temper would be a gross understatement.  There was screaming and swearing and crying.  I could feel my pulse in my temple, and I think I pulled a muscle in my neck.  I lost my mind.  

And it wasn’t until my therapy session, two days later, that I was able to tease out what had happened.  She pushed me to look closer.  How much of that explosion was actually because of the glue?  What else had been going on?  What had I done to take care of myself that week? What was I really feeling? 

In hindsight, it was a straw-that-broke-the-camel’s-back kind of a moment.  I had been just barely maintaining the status quo.  I was treading water, trying to be a good mom and a good teacher and a good wife and a good friend, and none of it was clicking the way I wanted it to.  I was a shaken bottle of emotion, and the inevitable explosion took the form of rage.

 I lost it because I had nothing left to give.

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Over the past week, I’ve been trying to ‘be fine.’ I laugh about the empty toilet paper shelves and wonder if people realize that humans lived for thousands of years without paper specifically designed for butt-wiping.  And then I walk a few feet away and buy cough medicine I don’t currently need.  

I tell my students and my kids to ‘just wash your hands’ while I make lists of ingredients for two weeks of dinners, ‘just in case.’  

I floss my teeth and photocopy vocabulary words like it’s a normal day, and then I spend my lunch period Googling various combinations of “Italy” and “COVID-19” and “CDC” and “pandemic.”  

Yesterday, I left work, picked up Lee from his afterschool club, and went to the store… not because I actually thought I needed something, but because I wanted to look around and make sure there wasn’t something I had forgotten.  

Please don’t take the time to write and tell me how crazy that was. My logical brain KNOWS that.  

But I’ve been so worried about LOOKING crazy, that I’ve been ignoring these feelings.  This anxiety is so repressed that it is beginning to seep out of me in ways that don’t make sense.  And maybe that’s exactly what a panic attack is.  It is the spillage that results from way too much trying to be fine. 

I got the call yesterday afternoon that school would be cancelled today in the district where I work.  Within minutes, I had made the decision to keep my own kids home, even though their schools aren’t closing until Monday.  And in that moment, I breathed a sigh of relief that helped me to see that I had been holding my breath for days.  

Today, as the world grinds to a halt in the face of a pandemic, I’m trying to let myself feel my feelings.  It’s okay to be scared.  It’s okay to feel sad.  It’s okay to be happy for the chance to binge Queer Eye and bake brownies with my kids.  All of it can be there at the same time.  The gratitude and the strength can co-exist with the fear and the worry.  

I’m trying to listen to my body and focus on my feelings and get curious about my emotional state. I’m opening my heart so I can be filled with something bigger than all of this.  And when I can embrace all of those emotions and inhale the grace that has been extended to me, I’ll be able to find my center. That’s where I’ll find my gifts and remember that, with God’s help, I will always have something to give.