Calm Waters Amid Stormy Seas

Several times between my last post and this one I've been seized with the urge to blog about a topic, but after thinking it over decided against making the effort.

Is this a byproduct of anti-anxiety medication kicking in, this "on second thought" life I seem to be living now?

The other day I found myself enjoying memories of living downtown Ottawa in a one bedroom apartment, my three kids and Kasey (sheltie/beagle) coming every weekend to camp out, my new partner eventually moving in to make us a party of five. This is new, too, looking back on this part of my life as "Hey, I did that!" instead of "Oh dear, I did that...".

So 😊 instead of 😟.

It's not nothing, either, this clean living, part... 4? I've been doing, and although some people would suggest it alone is making the difference in how I feel, I believe the medication led to that, too. I'm paying attention to what I can do for my health now, instead of worrying about others, what I've done, what I might do.

Finally I get it: one day at a time, one foot in front of the other, and not AA's accept the things I cannot change, but Toni Morrison's change the things I cannot accept.

It suits me better at this stage of life. Not reactive, proactive. I've read the opposite of indecision (sometimes mistaken for procrastination, which is quite different) is impulsiveness. I can certainly identify with it, decision-making being paralyzing for me, until boom - I'm living downtown Ottawa in a one bedroom apartment.

But that's not what this entry is about because this entry is about not believing everything you read on the internet, and last week deciding to use a bag of frozen pineapple pieces by way of baking a pineapple upside down cake.

I've returned to baking as a pastime. I grew up with Gram's baking and want to become accomplished at it, particularly sandwich cookies of various types. I've watched Paul, one of the judges on the Great British Baking Show, delight in appreciating - so eating - good baking and aspire to get back to it myself.

Anyway, suffice it to say I followed the recipe on the internet - very carefully - and when I turned the cake out onto a plate, brown sugary buttery slime splashed all over it, the counter, the floor.

I'd basically dolloped cake batter (the cake was sublime, by the way, one of the best I've ever made) over 1/2 cup of melted butter, brown sugar, and pineapple pieces. When I checked the recipe later, yup, that's what it said, but really, I should have realized the mistake. Indeed, I did wonder at no butter actually IN the cake batter, but such a trusting soul of Chef Google am I that I forged ahead.

Fortunately I had a carton of whipping cream - expiry date in February, bought in December? - and the pineapple upside down cake was saved as a... trifle!

Also I live with a 6'/180lb man who's been known to eat gas station pepperoni sticks - by choice. Oh and a dog whose nose then tongue found any lingering bits of brown sugary buttery slime not visible to the human eye.

But here's the part where the medication meets an eating/drinking/drug disorder (even a smoking disorder at times!) - when my partner served me up a bowl of "trifle" the next day, I decided immediately, right in front of him, no sparing of feelings, eye contact made, to return 3/4 of it to the pan. So show him what a serving size for a 5'5"/100lb woman with an eating disorder should be. And I thought it was for him but then realized, "Aha!" it was for me, I am now consciously, deliberately, thoughtfully choosing to do what's best for me, which is also what I want to do, never mind externalities.

In other words, the medication is working, which I find hard to believe, the therapist suggesting it's addressing a chemical imbalance, which I find even harder to believe. But why? Why do I find it hard to believe I've been challenged by a chemical imbalance? Clearly I have been. And whether I always had it or developed it along the way, accidentally, consequentially, who cares?

What's with all the blaming anyway? It's everywhere, too. Someone must always be blamed.

Absurd. Guilt, shame, blame. Rinse, repeat.

And speaking of therapy, also guilt, shame, blame, I thought the panic attacks I was having had to do with others, particularly my mother, childhood, young adulthood, middle adulthood, but now I know they just had to do with me, an imbalance in, not the force, my force.

So now when I look back, which I'm only doing to reclaim it from guilt, shame, blame, it's not "Oh dear, I did that..." (to me, to others) - it's "Hey, I did that!" (for me, for others).

I even did that trick the other day of "I don't have to walk Bernie, I get to walk Bernie."

It's January in Ottawa.

I've reference my mother a lot, too much, and not fairly (widows can be a lot) but she always told me "You have to put yourself first" and "You can't care what other people think"

Well I didn't get it then but I get it now.

Beta blockers for the win.😀

From Freaktown To Normville

So to continue the journey I find myself on, I had an intake interview connected to the prescription my doctor gave me to deal with the baseline anxiety behind the panic attacks I've been having.

I'm relieved to say I qualify for therapy.

It was an interesting process. The person doing the interview sounded young which I find reassuring nowadays. I have three Millennials of my own and they're definitely more attuned and empathetic to the effects of life on our psyches than we tail-end Boomers.

Cripes, no sooner did "parenting" become a verb than a Boomer put "helicopter" in front of it.

(Sorry GenXers, I keep forgetting you're there.)

There's resiliency, and then there's a stubborn failure to recognize we're freaks and should avail ourselves of help from others qualified to give it so we can experience life as norms.

(For context, please see Marge Simpson in The Simpsons "Freaks Vs Norms" episode.)

Here's irony for you, I've gone for help before, but it was on behalf of others. Or so I thought. But listening to myself throw in everything I could think of during the intake interview, so desperate am I to get to the bottom of these panic attacks, was eye opening. Hard even for me not to draw a line from purging to be slim, in spite of being vomit-phobic when actually nauseous, in my teenage years, to panic attacks accompanied by nausea requiring I purge to feel better in my 60s.

Yikes, eh? I guess there's a reason I include having had an eating disorder in the story I tell about myself. And yet it only came up as a "by the way" towards the end of the interview, at which point I thought I should probably mention beer and pot use on and off over the decades.

Why? Why would a health nut like me play with the fire of known carcinogens? My father died of cancer when I was four ffs. Carcinogens have been on my wick ever since. I was critiquing the Canada Food Guide in grade school, reading diet books focussed on fibre, doing yoga, jogging, worried sick about my younger sister eating too much sugar, directing Gram to go easy on the white, double up on the brown, more vegetables, less meat, on and on and on I went.

I started making ratatouille, bran muffins (just a bit of honey for sweetener), glass of water with every bite.

Now for the first time in my life I'm on prescription medication that puts a distance, a distance I imagine normal people are born with, feel naturally, between me and everybody and everything else.

Life, as it were. A little distance between me and life. And if a lion jumps out from behind a bush and eats me, well, I suppose it's my own fault my fight or flight response didn't kick in.

But at least I won't have spent hours nauseous and lying on the bathroom floor before I'm eaten.

I won't cite specifics here but suffice it to say a recent situation that would've had my fight or flight response revved up to 11 prior-to-medication (I know this because p-t-m me keeps trying to do it) has been relegated to: "At ease, soldier, situation normal. Also, others are on it, anyway. Your job is actually done here so go have some lunch or something."

Anyway, I'm blogging about this because I realize now I had the same fear of prescription medication to treat my own mental health condition as so many other people in need of it do. Or maybe it was a blindspot. Certainly I had no trouble advocating it for others. But when it came to myself I finally had to make myself go back to the doctor and say it for me: "I need help".

Because I did and I do. Never mind everybody else right now. I have to put my own oxygen mask on first.

Who Am I?

A Facebook friend posted an interesting graphic this morning that connects to my mission to take the story I tell myself about me in a different direction. This has to do, of course, with the panic attacks I've been experiencing since last spring. Although I'm on medication now to treat what the doctor I'm lucky enough to have refers to as the "base level of anxiety", it may be a while before I can access the requisite therapy to cope with the actual attacks.

Having said that, the other night, after receiving a morning call from a sibling involving another sibling and the death of an uncle (the last of my mother's siblings, much younger, and unexpected) I started to feel the now familiar onset of symptoms. Fortunately, I'd only had a small dinner - at home - and knew there was no reason I should have to rid myself of it. So I laid down in bed with a cool cloth on my forehead and breathed my way through the (this time milder) waves of nausea. Eventually I fell asleep to have first one dream and then another that together implied I'd always had the power to get home to Kansas, so to speak.

It's funny, I think of myself as an ally to other people claiming their human and civil right to change how they identify themselves from male to female, but what kind of ally am I really if I can't do the same for myself in less essential ways?

One of my favourite stories of reinvention comes from a cousin, a doctor, whose very socially inhibited (at the time) young adult son decided on a beach holiday with his family to make himself talk to a couple of young adult women also on a beach holiday. When nothing other than a brief friendly exchange of pleasantries came of it he realized he could do it again. And again. And again. And so on and so forth and more of the same etc etc.

He reinvented himself as a young man comfortable engaging socially with people he didn't know, and maybe never would beyond a friendly exchange of pleasantries, and realized it was a way of being in the world he enjoyed.

Families are terrible for pigeon-holing us and in early days I was identified as a hypochondriac, anxious, saver for a rainy day. In short, a worry wart. As time went on decision-making became fraught, and whether to do something or not do something, however innocuous, it didn't matter, I'd be paralyzed. Along the way I came across "the flip side of procrastination is impulsivity" and recognized the truth in it. I'd even had a psychologist suggest to me "it's not a good decision or a bad decision, it's just a decision" but by then I was nearing 40 and my story was firmly entrenched.

Panic attacks are powerful calls to action, though, and so I want to change the story I tell myself about me. I have fallen into a pattern and mistaken it for my identity.

I will now step outside of it and allow myself a new way of being in the world.

Welcome to 2023

I don't know about you but this is the year I'm switching it up. No more worrying about money. That's right, I tweeted to the Prime Minister that I'm going to need a guaranteed annual income in 2024. I didn't specify the amount but I assume he knows it should be at least $25K.

I googled the medication I started taking a couple of weeks ago. It's turns out to be prozac. Prozac Nation by Elizabeth Wurtzel (1994) immediately came to mind, of course, and so I googled it. The reviews were mixed but also uniform in that the reviewers all found it "self-absorbed" (i.e. "first world problem") and it occurred to me, well yes, we know. Or, at least, some of us know. Some others of our selves have become so absorbed we're suffocating.

That's how I think of the panic attacks I started having in the spring. I'd have a perfectly nice outing with friends only to barely make it home, the feeling of dread and nausea permeating every last cell of my body on the bus, the only cure a terrifying purging broken up by what seem like interminable stretches of time lying on the cool bathroom floor feeling alienated from everyone and everything, no comfort to be had until it's over.

There are lots of possibilities as to why this is happening, although why it's happening now is a bit of a mystery to me. Not my doctor I'm lucky enough to have, however. They're the result of anxiety, a build up of it. Meanwhile, I was so used to it I actually heard myself claim in his office, "I'm not really an anxious person". Then I immediately corrected the lie "I don't know why I just said that - I'm the most anxious person I know. I've always been anxious. About everything. I'm anxious right now you won't believe I need help and I'm going to die having a panic attack."

They're very debilitating. Even the relief after they're over is just exhaustion striped with worry about when the next one will happen.

So I'm on medication for the first time in my life. Sober as a judge (again) because it suits me best, focused on right now. Never mind tomorrow - it's not real. The same goes for the past. It's not real either, just a made up story I've been telling myself, over and over and over and over and over and over...

I'm in my sixth decade and only just now realize my brain is part of my body. Also, I'm only in my head, I'm not in yours. And for whatever reason in this first world of ours my fight or flight response is way out of whack and I need medication now to treat my hurting brain.

It's early days but I think I may be on to something already. All my life, right up until now, I've thought I had to answer to somebody, so self-absorbed I didn't realize that somebody is me. Interestingly, as soon as I realized it, I could feel my lens starting to turn. Instead of just relentlessly staring in, it took a curious look out.

Again, early days, but here's to a new year and new beginnings anyway.