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.