Category Archives: anxiety

anxiety, Buddhist life

Dealing with Post-Break Overwhelm + Anxiety

I had friends in town for a few days last week. I worked while they were staying with me but let most everything else slide. Within moments of them leaving, I was overwhelmed with all I had to catch up on. My mind seemed to instantly fill with tasks that felt urgent: vacuum up all the dust bunnies, clean out the fridge, pull the weeds in the sidewalk cracks, read all the texts that came in, reassemble the pull out couch, figure out what the packages are that arrived (WTF did I order?).

Every time I tried to turn my brain off, it just generated more items for my to-do list. I hadn’t done laundry in days or checked my personal email. I needed groceries. A lightbulb needed replacing.

And then my anxiety kicked in. My brain said, “I think I noticed a bit of mold on a lemon in the fridge last night. What if it touches the lettuce and the lettuce gets all moldy? And then what if the mold spreads beyond the lettuce?” Then my mind jumped to the washing machine—it made a scraping sound—what if it’s spinning too fast and catches on fire?

Just like that, the feeling of being behind morphed into fear of a deadly mold infestation and a fire.

In these moments, I know I need to calm down but telling myself to calm down just makes things worse. When I’m upset, if someone tells me to calm down, it has the opposite effect. When I tell myself to calm down, the same thing happens. I want to scream, “How can I calm down when the house is a disaster and about to explode into mold and flames?!”

Decision paralysis takes over. I can’t identify what to do first. Planning a trip to Africa for some future point seems equally important as having to pee right now. It all must get done now!

At some point, I finally remember what works: I tell myself, “Take a deep breath.” Zen Buddhism brings everything back to the breath. All we have is this breath, and then this one, and then this one. The breath is all that really matters. Focusing on my breath calms me. Each deep breath slows my brain down a bit. Sometimes it takes just one breath and sometimes it takes a hundred, but when I let my breath become my focus, all the mental clutter fades away.

I have a tendency to hold my breath when I’m exerting myself, whether mentally, emotionally, or physically. My personal trainer is always cueing me to breathe, reminding me that when I hold my breath, lunges and squats are harder. It’s true for everything: holding my breath makes thinking harder, sleeping harder, conflict harder.

The simple act of breathing with awareness reminds me that none of those things I think need to get done actually need to get done. Life will go on, whether the laundry is done or the email is answered. I can make choices about where to focus my energy.

I remind myself that I will never be caught up. The expected outcome is that I will die with things undone. My husband died with things undone. My mother died with things undone. It’s ok.

Life is not about getting things done. When I remember my husband or my mother, my mind goes to my love for them, the moments we shared, not the things they left undone.

anxiety, grieving

Identifying a New Secondary Loss, Nearly 3 Years Out

The death of a loved one has a ripple effect. There’s the loss of that person and then there are the secondary losses—the shifts in routines that make a day feel off, the friendships that fade because the person who held them together is gone or people are too uncomfortable to maintain them, the end of hobbies that depended on the person who died.

I count my anxiety and panic disorder (APD) as a secondary loss. Although I wasn’t diagnosed with APD until after my husband died, now that I understand what it is, I realize I’ve had panic attacks since I was a teenager.

My late husband had such a calming effect on me that I only had a handful of panic attacks after we met. With them going unrecognized by me as a symptom of APD and then them fading away during my marriage, by the time I was diagnosed after he died, it seemed like a new condition.

Now through the lens of hindsight, I see the reemergence of my panic attacks as both a reaction to his death and a response to the loss of his calming effect on me.

Throughout our relationship, when I felt panic rising in my chest, I knew that a hug from him or hearing his deep unwavering voice would steady me. I came to count on him whenever I was navigating a personal or work situation that felt overwhelming. He seemed to always be in control, which made me feel completely safe.

One time, for example, I was driving in a snowstorm on a busy highway before my vision impairments were diagnosed and it was the phase when my doctors were just telling me I wasn’t “trying hard enough” to see. The light gray of the sky, the white of the snow, the surrounding dirty vehicles, the asphalt all blurred together into a mottled smear. I wanted to pull off the highway, but I couldn’t see where the lanes were. I started hyperventilating in panic and realized I was on the verge of passing out while I was driving.

I called Tom and he talked me through the rest of the drive, settling my breathing so I didn’t pass out. As long as I could hear his steady voice, I knew I would be ok.

Even with the stress of his stroke during the COVID pandemic, holding his hand steadied me. Even when he was asleep, I found comfort in simply being in bed up against his body.

And then he died—and my entire APD coping arsenal was gone. The thought that he’s gone forever adds to my anxiety and panic. My learning to manage it on my own has been messy.

I’ve had a lot of anxiety lately as the three-year anniversary of his death in June looms on my calendar. One day last week I left to catch the bus to my dance lesson in a hurry and forgot my water bottle. One of my go-to strategies when I’m feeling anxious is to very deliberately drink some water, taking a sip, feeling it in my mouth, swallowing it, and being aware of it moving down my throat. Once I realized the bottle wasn’t in my bag, I could feel the anxiety tightening in my chest—a tell tale sign that a panic attack is rising. That’s when I realized I didn’t have my drugs with me either.

I held it together on the bus, telling myself the fresh air when I got off the bus would help. Once I got off the bus, I knelt on the sidewalk, gulping air. My hands were shaking and it took effort to think. I knew I needed to get some water. There is a water dispenser at the dance studio, but I knew the studio would be buzzing with people and I needed to avoid that. Physical activity helps, so I just started walking and came to a coffee shop a few blocks from the studio, where I bought a bottle of water.

I sat outside the studio, ritualistically taking sips of water between measured breaths. By the time my lesson started, I was on edge but not on the verge of a panic attack.

The dance lesson helped, too. I’m working on tango right now and hearing the familiar music activated my muscle memory and my body started shifting its resources from fight or flight mode to the work of holding my upper body in the tango frame, which is also surprisingly mental. I’m early enough in my work on tango that it takes a tremendous amount of focus for me to maintain the form (shoulders down, elbows up, head up and left, arms strong yet flexible, back arched yet tall).

The secondary losses hurt and nearly three years out, I’m still identifying them.  

anxiety, grieving

Dealing with Overwhelm after a Death

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Along with grief can come overwhelm. There is so much to do and it all feels simultaneously urgent and pointless. I remember staring at the forms I needed to file to take my husband’s estate through the probate process and being unable to comprehend how to complete them. Every blank space on the form seemed impossible to fill. Name? Whose name? Mine or his? Personal representative? Was that me? Date of appointment? What?!  The date I was appointed his personal representative? Would that be when we got married? Or when he died? Or was I supposed to go through another process to get appointed? It was mind boggling.

The form came with instructions, but they were written for someone who understands forms and legal procedures, not for someone with Widow Brain who even under the best of circumstances struggles with bureaucracy.

At the same time that the probate forms needed to be completed, I also needed to make decisions about memorials, my husband’s belongings, the wheelchair ramp his friends had built, how to take care of the dogs, and what to have for dinner. And I had to cancel his insurance but still argue with the company about outstanding bills, find the keys to his vehicles so the people who inherited them could take them, and deal with the angry messages I was getting from the sleep apnea clinic because he didn’t show up for an appointment.

All while coming to terms with the fact that the man I loved to the moon and back was dead.

It all felt equally urgent and impossible. And at the same time, I felt like none of it mattered because even if I did all the things, he would still be dead and I would still be alone.

This overwhelm is why all the people who meant well when they said, “Let me know how I can help” were not nearly as helpful as they thought. (To learn what you should say instead, read this.)

When I am overwhelmed, I feel like I need to move fast, but what I’ve learned is that I need to move slow. Moving fast just encourages my brain to think I’m in danger and it responds by pumping out adrenaline and setting off an anxiety attack. What I need to do instead is to force myself to slow down by

  • Breathing deeply, filling my lungs completely, and slowly letting the breath out,
  • Taking a short nap and then resetting when I wake up, kind of giving myself a do-over, or
  • Sipping a glass of water, ideally while sitting down and taking my time, noticing each swallow.

All of these things slow my brain down and signal my body that there is no need to panic.

And there isn’t. Most things that feel urgent aren’t really. I felt a lot of urgency around every aspect of the probate process, but in fact, there was absolutely no urgency. Yes, there was a deadline, but the penalty for missing it was that I’d have to fill out another form, which was a headache, but not ultimately a big deal.

(I reminded myself regularly that my husband’s estate was small enough that no one would notice late paperwork and I was right. Someone dealing with an estate large enough for missed deadlines to be noticed can probably afford to hire a lawyer to handle it all.)

After slowing my brain down, I could either tackle one of the things that needed to be done or realize none of it truly needed to be done in the moment and free myself to do something else, like cry or go for a walk or look through photos of us together for the six hundredth time, without the nagging feeling that I should be doing something else.

The probate paperwork got done, the insurance argument got resolved, and his belongings got dealt with (mostly—I still have a lot of his things and I feel no rush about getting rid of them).

If you’re feeling overwhelmed in grief, take a deep breath. Slow down. Try a nap. Remember that what seems urgent probably is not.

academic life/work, anxiety, Buddhist life, failure, mental illness

Befriending Overwhelm

I spend a good part of my time at the intersection of Depression, Anxiety, and Grief. When overwhelm hits, which it often does, and a wave of panic rises up in my chest, I take a deep breath.

I find my Buddhist practice very helpful when I feel that panic. Panic makes me feel like I should be hurrying—doing something, anything, and fast! But Buddhists aren’t known for hurrying. When my impulse is to move fast, I consciously slow down. With each deep breath, my panic subsides a bit until it is manageable. Sometimes I have to go through the process of taking a deep breath and letting my panic subside multiple times in a day or even an hour. It’s ok, I tell myself, take your time.

I was at a conference last week that put me into overwhelm. I was surrounded by brilliant, energetic, competent people and I felt dull, slow, and outdated in their company. Each session I attended left me feeling more overwhelmed by the feeling that I could never perform my job the way they perform theirs.

For me, overwhelm is often quite sneaky and I don’t always recognize it for what it is. I often notice that I feel a heaviness I can’t quite identify for hours or even days before I realize, “Oh, I’m feeling overwhelmed!” Once I label the feeling, I say hello to it. Really—I say out loud, “Hello, Overwhelm, my old friend.” That may seem ridiculous, but greeting it as a friend helps me not react to it with fear.

Then I sit down with it as I would with a friend having a tough time. If possible, I do this over coffee or tea, just as I would with a friend. “What’s going on?” I ask it. Here’s how my conversation with Overwhelm went last week at the conference:

Me: What’s going on?

Overwhelm: Everyone here is doing such amazing things! I’m so far behind—how can I do cool things with antiracism and undergraduate research and STEM support and all the other things I need to do?????? And I’m behind on publishing and . . . It’s a hopeless situation.

Me, speaking to Overwhelm as I would to any friend: Hmmm. I wonder if being at an academic conference is kind of like scrolling through Facebook. Presenters are showing their best work, just as most people on Facebook are showing their best moments. Just as the happy family photos don’t tell the whole story of a person’s daily life, a brilliant conference presentation doesn’t tell the whole story of an academic’s work.

Overwhelm: Huh . . .

By that point, Overwhelm started to lose its energy.

Of course, that wasn’t the end of it. The next day I went to a session where I heard about an amazing and elaborate program that I would love to replicate. Afterwards, I was overwhelmed with thoughts that quickly led me to a downward spiral: I will never be able to replicate the program, but I should try, but I can’t ever do it like she did, I will fail, I suck . . . and I’m behind on email and . . .  So I took a deep breath. And another one. I’ve learned I must regulate my breathing before I can regulate my thoughts. Another deep breath.

“Hello again, Overwhelm,” I said in between deep breaths.

Once I was breathing in a non-panicked way, my thoughts were already a little more manageable. I wrote them all down in a list. All the thoughts went on the list: I’m behind on email, I have a report due in November, if I don’t stain the back fence before it gets cold it will rot away this winter, I will never be able to replicate the program I heard about, I suck . . .  Giving each thought its own line on the list gives it some space. It can exist. It is an ok thought. When all the thoughts were on the list, I gave one breath to each thought, taking the length of one complete breath, an inhale and an exhale, to acknowledge the thought and linger on it. Sometimes that lead to more thoughts, which went on the list.

Sometimes all the thoughts want is a little space to be acknowledged and then I can let them go. The thought that whatever I come up with will never be as great as what this other woman came up with was one I could easily let go of once I gave it a breath. No, what I do won’t be as great as what she did. I’m not in competition with this other person, who is at a different institution in a different state. OK. Good bye, thought.

Other thoughts are useful and become items on my to do list or bucket list. The report due in November and staining the back fence went on my to do list.

Thoughts like “I suck” just want space. I give that thought a breath and then cross it off my list. I know it’s not true in any meaningful way. I used to have to fact check those thoughts—do I suck? I’d ask. And then I’d write down the evidence for and against that verdict. There was always more evidence against the verdict. Now I don’t have to do the actual fact-checking, I just have to remind myself that I’ve held this trial many times before and always the verdict has been, no, you don’t really suck.

Buddhism tells me that any time I want to hang on to a thought, hold it in a tight grip, I should instead open my hand and give it space, let it float away if it wants to. It usually wants to float away. Thoughts that float away sometimes come back, but if I again loosen my grip on them, they float away again. Sometimes they float back and I let them float away several times a day for years and years. It’s ok. I can keep letting them float away. Once I learned how to let them float away, I began to trust that they will float away if/when they return.

Letting the thoughts float away doesn’t “cure” me of my grief, depression, or anxiety. All it does is make the overwhelm go away. And I’ll take that.

Accessibility + Dis/ability, anxiety, grieving, mental illness

How to Be Gentle with Yourself

Twice in the last week I’ve told someone I hope they can be gentle* with themselves. They are both dealing with tough situations beyond their control—one’s mother is slowly dying and they are experiencing the heartbreak of anticipatory grief; the other has significant health challenges and just had a second bout with COVID.

It’s easy for me to identify situations where others should be gentle with themselves. It’s a bit more challenging to figure out when I need to be gentle with myself, but it’s something I’ve been working on and getting better at.

I’ve been struggling with a round of depression and anxiety for about a month now, sleeping much more than usual, feeling constantly fatigued and drained. There are days where I get nothing done beyond walking and feeding the dogs and myself and working out (I learned long ago that working out is a basic daily need for me and I almost never skip it, although I do sometimes allow myself to work out for just a few minutes—see #1 below).

For the first week that I felt crappy, I told myself I was wasting my life. I told myself I couldn’t have dessert or a glass of wine with dinner unless I accomplished certain items on my to do list. I told a friend I was being a loser. I asked myself repeatedly, “What the fuck is wrong with you?!” I rolled my eyes at myself in the mirror with the derisive, dismissive, contemptuous air of a teenager.

None of this made my depression and anxiety easier to cope with. It did not motivate me to stop sleeping so much or to fly into action, completing tasks on my to do list. It just made a difficult situation worse.

I wish I could tell you that when I stopped being mean to myself, my depression and anxiety magically disappeared. Alas, that is not the case. But when I stopped being mean to myself, I was dealing only with depression and anxiety rather than depression and anxiety and the cruel torment of a bully. Taking away the bullying made the depression and anxiety relatively easier to bare.

Want to be gentler to yourself? Here’s what I do:

  1. Don’t let perfection be the enemy of good. Working out for 5 minutes is better than not working out at all. I’ve been chipping away at writing projects in 15-minute increments, and while I’d like to be putting in more time, I’m not able to right now.

2. When I catch myself saying something to myself that I would never say to another person, like, “What the fuck is wrong with you?!” I take a step back and apologize. I remind myself that I am a kind person and that I am kind to everyone. Even myself.

3. Refrain from bad-mouthing myself to others. My form of self-deprecating humor can get a little out of hand sometimes and I’m trying to reign it in. When I am about to tell a friend I’m a lazy ass, I remind myself I am depressed.

4. Continue allowing myself dessert, wine, and other treats rather than making them contingent of achievements. Everyone deserves pleasure in their life.

5. Remind myself that depression and anxiety are illnesses, and just as I would cut myself slack about sleeping a lot if I had the flu, allow myself to act like a sick person.

6. Accept what is possible under the current conditions. Although I’ve gotten by with 7.5-8 hours of sleep a night for many years, lately I seem to want more like 10 hours of sleep. It’s very inconvenient. I can’t possibly get done what I normally get done with two hours a day less to do things. This is where guideline #1 really comes in handy. And it turns out that a lot of things I normally do in a day don’t need to happen or don’t need to happen every day. What does need to happen every day is me taking care of myself.

7. Hold space for myself to be depressed or anxious. That means no fixing.

Being depressed and anxious still sucks, but at least now I know I have my own back. I don’t look in the mirror with self-loathing—instead, I look with compassion, as I would for anyone else on the planet.

*I no longer tell people to be strong. I think being gentle is both more difficult and more effective.

anxiety, grieving

Trying to Reason with My Own Brain during a Panic Attack

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Sunday is the 2-year anniversary of making the decision to take my husband off life support and Monday is the anniversary of his death. I call the two back-to-back days “the d-days.” The first d-day is also my birthday, and this year it’s Father’s Day, too, so a real doozy of a day.

I’ve been giving these dates on my calendar the side eye for a while now. A few months ago, I arranged to spend the Friday night and Saturday at my sister’s, both to low-key celebrate my birthday and to not be alone, and I made plans to be with another widow on the evening of my birthday.

Once I made all those plans, I largely put the dates out of my mind, but I was vaguely aware that they were getting closer. In the meantime, I went about my life as usual, which has been pretty wonderful lately. I’m back at work after a very rewarding sabbatical, I’m surrounded by supportive, generous people, and I’m just generally feeling happy and optimistic.

Yesterday was a particularly lovely day. I spent time with my sister and then later had dinner with my mother-in-law, her husband, and my daughter. I spent most of the day laughing. When I went to bed, I was feeling very loved and connected, so I expected to fall asleep blissfully.

Just as I was about to drift off, right in the middle of a deep breath, there it was—panic. Suddenly I was kicking the blankets off, sweating, unable to catch my breath. My body reacted as if I were being physically threatened in the moment: my hands were in fists, my whole body ready to spring into action to thwart an attacker. Only the attacker was my own thoughts:

My husband is dead and I will never be with him again, I thought. I will be alone for eternity, my brain continued. He’s alone in the dark crevasse of death and eventually, I will be too, my brain told me, delivering the coup de grace.

These are not even thoughts I believe. When I’m not having a panic attack, I feel my husband all around me and I feel deeply connected to him still. I don’t think of myself as being alone and I have (at least for an introvert) a very active social life. I don’t normally feel that death is a lonely place—like many Buddhists, I believe our spirits live on beyond our physical bodies.

I reminded myself of this, but my brain remained convinced that I was in danger. I tried tapping and listening to a meditation. I reminded myself of the Pierre Teilhard de Chardinquote I love: “we are spiritual beings having a human experience.” I reminded myself that everything is temporary and the panic will pass.

My brain wound itself tighter into panic, swatting each of my calm reminders away.

My brain said, “You’ll be alone forever.”

I patiently responded, “Nothing lasts forever.” And “I am not alone.”

But still, my heart pounded, my legs shook, and my breathing remained shallow.

I read recently that the best way to protect yourself in a fall is to relax. This idea aligns with the concept of relaxing into difficult emotions. I tried to relax into my panic. I said out loud, “Hello, panic, my old friend. I know you are trying to protect me. Thank you for looking out for me, but I am ok.”

My panic responded with a snarl and bared teeth, and I took a Lorazepam. I consider Lorazepam a last resort because of its habit-forming properties (my mother was an alcoholic and daughters of alcoholics are more likely to become addicts, so I’ve been on high alert regarding addiction my whole life) but if I wait too long to take it, it doesn’t help me sleep. A classic Catch-22 situation. So I have to declare the situation “a last resort” a little earlier than I would usually like, but once I made that call, my panic eased a bit just from having the decision made.

This was my first panic attack since February, which is the longest I’ve gone between attacks since I started having them.

This week’s to do list now includes being extra kind and patient with myself through the d-days and celebrating the win of going almost four months without a panic attack.

anxiety, grieving, life skills

Cutting Wire and Shifting My Narrative

My late husband was an excellent gardener. I have many memories of him puttering around our yard, doing mysterious things that he didn’t tell me about in detail that resulted in glorious looking plants. I occasionally weeded and one time I ran out to put buckets over the plants during a hail storm, but I couldn’t be trusted to do anything else.

I’ve always been hapless with plants. I get nervous when someone gives me a plant, often apologizing for the carnage I know will inevitably result.

Knowing that my gardening specialty is killing plants (he sometimes joked that when he met me, my front yard had a scorched earth aesthetic), my husband hired a gardener after his stroke to take care of the front yard. He wanted to be able to look out the window and see flowers.

The back yard was completely forgotten about. My husband only got out there a handful of times after his stroke and everything looked dead to me, so I put my energy toward other things.

The past couple of months, I’ve had to walk through the backyard regularly to get to the garage, which I’ve been going through. Last month, I noticed greenery in two tall planters Tom had built under a trellis. I investigated and used my handy plant-identifying app to learn that one planter had salvia and the other silver lace vine. I vaguely remembered him mentioning silver lace vine—he bought it because he liked the name. Both looked surprisingly healthy considering I hadn’t noticed them in nearly three years.

It felt like a bonus connection to Tom making itself known. I am especially attached to the silver lace because I recall him talking about it. I remember him standing on a ladder, weaving the vine tendrils in and out of the trellis to encourage them to climb.

This weekend, I weeded the two planters and did some vine weaving myself. Many of the vines were reluctant to stay in place in the trellis, their own weight pulling them out. I thought, “A good gardener would probably wrap a little wire around the vine and trellis to keep it in place.” And then I sighed because I am not a good gardener, and besides, I didn’t have any wire or wire cutters.

Then I remembered the garage. I’ve gone through all the big items in there, but there are still many drawers and cabinets full of all the mysterious tools and supplies a good gardener (and carpenter) would have. Surely there had to be wire and wire cutters in there!

But I’ve been so intimidated by the drawers and cabinets. Part of it is the overwhelm of looking at a drawer full of things I can’t identify . . . am I looking at materials related to electrical work? Drywalling? The sprinkler system? Between my poor vision and my general ignorance, I don’t know. What I do know is that these things meant something to Tom, and that’s sometimes enough to send me into a meltdown.

But this weekend I had a mission: I needed wire and wire cutters for Tom’s vines. I opened the first drawer gingerly and felt flooded with the usual feelings: too much to look at and try to understand, memories of Tom in the garage, the voice in my head saying, “You idiot. You can’t garden and you don’t even know what wire cutters look like.”

Instead of turning around and leaving the garage like I normally do when those feelings hit, I reminded myself that the vines needed me to persevere.

“Hey, Siri,” I said to my phone. “What do wire cutters look like?”

Drawer number nine had wire. Drawer number ten had both pliers and wire cutters, and I was able to tell the difference thanks to Siri.

Armed with wire and wire cutters, my vine training improved immediately, and as I secured vines, I even found a few bits of wire Tom had placed on the trellis. It was proof that I was doing something a good gardener would do.

Tom always looked so peaceful when he worked in the garden. While I tried to hurry up and get it over with, he relaxed into it. This weekend, for the first time ever, I felt competent in the garden.

Actually, that’s an understatement. I felt like a total badass. Not only had I gardened competently, but I had found and used a tool! When I saw my daughter later that day, I couldn’t wait to tell her what I’d done, and being familiar with my tool ignorance, she was impressed. “You’re a girl boss!” she told me.

That might be a stretch, but I can train a vine and cut wire, which the Elizabeth of a few years ago would be mighty impressed with.  It’s a bittersweet victory. I’m proud of myself and feel connected to Tom when I use his wire cutters to tend his vines, and I wish so hard he was here to do it himself.

anxiety, grieving, normalizing what should be normal

Recognizing My Own Toxic Positivity

How could being positive ever be toxic? Well, when it makes you feel pressure to squelch any emotions that could be seen as “negative,” like sadness, grief, or fear.

I’ve had my own struggles with toxic positivity. A student commented in an anonymous teaching evaluation fifteen or so years ago that I was “aggressively positive.” I was used to being noticed for my optimism, but the word “aggressively” caught my attention. While the rest of the student’s comments were positive or neutral, that one stuck with me and I turned it over in my mind for a long time. Being “aggressively positive” didn’t feel like a compliment.

I prided myself on not complaining, and over time my definition of complaining became so broad that it encompassed even neutral observations. I began to recognize in myself resistance to sadness and other emotions I saw as negative. When friends and students shared hard news with me, I noticed a strong impulse to reframe what they told me in a more positive way. Sometimes the reframings were productive, like when I helped a student who was fired from their job recognize it as an opportunity to find a job that was a better fit.

But other times, my reframing was a denial of the gravity of a situation; a student who was broken up with by their partner wasn’t helped by my reframing of it as a chance to explore what they wanted. What that student needed in the moment was for me to acknowledge their pain. It took me a long time to get comfortable with acknowledging pain.

I think my “aggressive positivity” grew out of a fear that people wouldn’t like me if I was negative, coupled with an inability to deal with my own complicated emotions. Dismissing all things negative—either by reframing them or simply ignoring them—allowed me to come across as ceaselessly positive and to deny that I ever felt anything upsetting. I used to laugh about my ability to put a positive spin on anything, but now I see it as a defense mechanism.

What I’ve learned is that reframing pain, sadness, and other emotions I used to see as negative into things I saw as positive—opportunities was my favorite—was just a way to avoid the difficulty of the “negative emotion.” I still felt pain and sadness, I just didn’t talk about it . . . and the less I talked about it, the harder it was to talk about it. My vocabulary around emotions became very limited.

Since my husband’s stroke, I’ve taken a different tact. I’ve chosen to embrace the hard parts of life with the same energy I bring to the easy parts. I’ve learned what it means to turn toward the emotions that used to frighten me.  I’m expanding my vocabulary around emotions. When I have a challenging day, I can say I was sad, sorrowful, anxious, caught up in memories, reflective, grief stricken, heavy hearted, and more—and each of those choices means something distinct to me. None of those terms is bad or even negative—they are simply descriptions of normal emotional states.

All the time I find the topics I think and write about—disability, caregiving, death, and grief—to involve elements of both sadness and joy. In my “aggressively positive” days I would have acknowledged only the joy. Now I acknowledge the sadness, too. Ironically, what kept me from acknowledging the sadness in the past was fear of the sadness, but acknowledging it actually makes it feel less scary.

Going through the experience of my husband’s stroke, becoming his caregiver, and then being widowed has given me a new appreciation for the acknowledgment that sometimes life just sucks. And that’s normal.

I was telling a new acquaintance recently about my husband’s stroke and they said, “That sounds like it must have been intense. What was that like?” I appreciated their response because it both acknowledged the complexity of the situation and invited me to say more about it. They didn’t try to change the subject, lighten the mood, or put a positive spin on things.

I was with another new acquaintance recently when I unexpectedly began crying. Their response was perfect—they asked me what I needed. They didn’t seem shocked by my tears or act like there was anything wrong with me.

These two people demonstrate how simple it can be to normalize events and emotions that are, in fact, normal, but that we often shy away from.

Accessibility + Dis/ability, anxiety, grieving

Recognizing Internalized Ableism on My Anniversary

Today would have been my anniversary with Tom. Today IS my anniversary with Tom. My inclination is to write the first sentence because I am no longer his wife, but I realize that whether he’s dead or alive, today IS the date we got married in 2011. There is much that was and much that still is. My love for him and the life we had together is just as strong as it was when he was here to celebrate with me. But that life is a memory now, and as much as I love the life I am living now, it is not a life with Tom.

I was at a conference last week and knew my anniversary was coming up, but lost track of which day it was. My return flight yesterday got significantly delayed and I ended up not getting home until after midnight. After crawling into bed, I was almost asleep when suddenly I realized that because it was after midnight, it was my anniversary.

That realization, on the heels of a long travel day, kicked off my anxiety and big tears. My mind kept going back to our last anniversary together, after his stroke and just a few months before he died. We went to one of our favorite restaurants and they were woefully unprepared to greet a guest using a wheelchair. The next morning over brunch, Tom took my hand and apologized for not having understood the challenges of my being disabled.

It was an incredible acknowledgment. The last few years, he had been incredibly supportive but when I first started mentioning that my vision didn’t seem right, he was skeptical. Like many people in my life, he wondered if I was exaggerating things or just not trying hard enough to see. Especially when my disability inconvenienced him, he would ask me if I was really trying. It was maddening for both of us.

I finally understood at some point that he hadn’t not believed me but that he hadn’t been ready to accept that I was going to have to deal with the challenges of a disability for the rest of my life. I noticed a similar resistance in myself when Tom’s doctor told me there was a high likelihood that Tom would never walk again. My immediate response was that of course Tom would walk again because I knew he would work hard in physical therapy.

But no matter how hard he worked, walking unassisted was out of his reach. I kept thinking he just had to work a little harder, but even as I had that thought, I knew it wasn’t accurate. All of his physical therapists were astounded at how much progress he made and how hard he did work. It wasn’t about hard work—it was about the stroke having knocked offline the part of his brain that handled his left side. I saw the MRI images and the massive infarct, the technical term for the brain tissue killed by the stroke. Two-thirds of one hemisphere of his brain just didn’t exist anymore.

Even knowing it wasn’t about how hard he worked, my own brain kept grasping at the idea that if he just worked a little harder, maybe, maybe, he would walk again. I realize now that that’s the line of thinking he followed when he wondered if I was trying hard enough to see.

This is what internalized ableism looks like: me wishing my husband would work hard enough to walk again, him wishing I would try hard enough to see what he saw. The line of thinking might originate with optimism and hoping for a “positive” outcome, but there are at least two big problems with that rationalization. First, it attributes the desired outcome with hard work and less than the desired outcome with not enough work, and second, it assumes that walking, in my husband’s case, and what is considered normal vision, in my case, are the only outcomes that can be judged successful.

On this anniversary, I miss everything about that man who used a wheelchair, including his wheelchair. His physical and occupational therapy sessions were often team efforts, with both of us working together to get him somewhere or accomplish a task together. It helped us realize in a concrete way that we were always on the same team. We hated the stroke and the pain it caused Tom, but it opened up some opportunities for us to communicate better and become closer.

I celebrated this anniversary by sleeping in, being gentle with myself, and sharing memories with my daughter. I went to Tom’s bench and talked to him for a bit. I got a few emails and texts from loved ones, acknowledging the anniversary, which I appreciated. I felt lucky to have had such a great love and proud of the life I am living now, which was shaped in so many ways by my relationship with Tom.  

anxiety, grieving

Scattering Ashes, Forgetting He’s Dead, and Intense Anxiety at 18 Months Out

I have been traveling for the past month. One stop in my travels was to Ushuaia, Argentina, where I scattered some of my late husband’s ashes. Ushuaia is the southern-most point of the Pan-American Highway. My husband loved riding motorcycles and read a lot of online forum postings by people who had ridden the Pan-American Highway from Alaska to Ushuaia. He wanted to do the ride when he retired. He didn’t get to retire or do the ride, so for me, scattering some of his ashes in Ushuaia was a way to symbolically honor those wishes of his.

The night before scattering his ashes, my anxiety kicked in hard. I’ve been able to manage it pretty well for several months, but I wondered if it would show up on my trip. The first part of the trip went smoothly, but as the ash-scattering day got closer and closer, I could feel the restlessness building up inside me, especially at night when I went to bed. I started dreaming about my husband being unhappy with where I scattered the ashes or not being able to find a suitable spot.

I wasn’t too worried about the anxiety because I have a good list on my phone of strategies to use to help me when it gets bad. I figured if it got very intense, I would just methodically work my way through the list until I found a strategy that helped.

The night it really hit me, my first go-to strategy, walking or working out, wasn’t available to me because of where I was in my travels, so I moved on to my second strategy: tapping. Tapping uses the same principles as acupuncture to channel energy to the body’s meridian points. I think it also helps by bringing my awareness out of my mind and into my body. Unfortunately, that night, tapping didn’t seem to have any effect. No problem, I thought, I’ll listen to some meditations on Insight Timer.

That night I was in a remote part of the world and didn’t have internet access. I had planned ahead for that possibility by downloading several of my favorite Insight Timer meditations within the app, but when I tried to find them, they weren’t there. That’s when my anxiety really started to escalate. My hands were shaking as I tried to navigate my phone. I checked and rechecked the app. I closed the app and re-opened it. I turned my phone off and back on. None of it helped. The downloads weren’t there. I could only listen to meditations if I had an internet connection and that wasn’t possible. My mind went blank and I could no longer even find my list of strategies.

I finally took a Lorazepam, which is kind of my last resort option. It felt like admitting defeat, which made my anxiety even more intense. By then, my hands were shaking so much that I spilled the pills all over my bed, leading to the kind of low-contrast situation in which I’m pretty much functionally blind: white pills on white sheets. I had to use my shaky hands to find all the little pills strewn about in the sheets. Even after I swallowed a pill, there was no relief. By that time, I had gotten too worked up for it to have a noticeable effect.

At that point, I went to a strategy I’m surprised I remembered without my list: reminding myself that everything is temporary. That the anxiety will eventually pass. That I will eventually fall asleep. That the world will carry on. And I did eventually fall asleep for a couple of hours.

I ended up finding an excellent place to scatter the ashes: at the base of a gorgeous and regal tree in the forest off the Pan-American Highway. The tree had lichens on it that only grow in places where the air is exceptionally pure.

My anxiety continued through my husband’s birthday, a few days later. but after a few days I at least had Internet access again and re-downloaded my meditations. Until then, I took a Lorazepam each night when I went to bed (it seems to work best when I take it before my anxiety kicks in, which becomes a mind-bending prediction game in itself). Once I was able to listen to my meditations again, the anxiety became much easier to deal with, although it still lingered for a few more nights.

My lack of sleep probably contributed to a mind blip while in Chile. I saw a sculptural door made out of old metal farm implements and said to my friend, “I need to take a picture of that for Tom.” It’s the first time in a year that I forgot he was dead. Somehow, for a moment my brain thought he wasn’t with me in Chile because he was back home, waiting for me. For that moment, I wasn’t a widow. For that moment, I was excited to share stories and pictures from my epic trip with him. I could see the look of wonder and appreciation he would have on his face, feel his hand on the small of my back, hear him saying, “That’s amazing, Babe.”

As soon as the words were out of my mouth, I had the crushing memory that he was dead. It felt like all the heartbreak I’ve experienced since he died was compressed into a single massive wave that flattened me. Luckily, I was with a dear friend who knew to immediately pull me into a hug and didn’t mind that I got snot all over her shoulder.

It was a tough time, and it was temporary.