A few days ago I had a panic attack which involved me saying ridiculous, incoherent things and after a 17-minute phone call (I had to look it up; it felt more like 30 seconds) Rudy had me all like “What just happened?”
In a good way.
Last I left off I thought he was mad at me. (If you don’t remember that story you can find it here.)
I was already in a state and entered panic mode shortly thereafter. There were some missing puzzle pieces for Rudy, as I had been wondering when I should discuss them or if they needed to be mentioned at all.
What he managed to do for me in light of that missing information is nothing short of a miracle in my book.
Here’s what I told him helped me after doing my standard panic attack postmortem:
1. You stayed calm when I called, even though I was a panicky mess.
2. You told me you weren’t Dan and repeated that you weren’t mad at me, bringing me back to the present
3. You didn’t go out for a smoke, metaphorically.
By the end of the call he was laughing a little bit. I don’t remember why. At the time I remember feeling like it wasn’t good, but his laughter is my favorite sound in the world anyway. I just shut up and my mind just shut off. With nothing for my panic to feed on, the episode abruptly stopped.
I still had to deal with the aftermath, but the point is the aftermath started right away.
I’m days past the event and still can’t stop thinking how monumental it was for me.
What if everyone (and by everyone I mean Dan) treated me compassionately? What if everyone had this power over my panic attacks? What if I had this power?
I think I could be a better person with that kind of support, and I want to be better more than I want Oreos.
When I told Mom that Rudy was mad at me, her advice was, “Emily, don’t you dare take care of somebody else before you.”
Today is a little bit better than yesterday. I started virtual EMDR therapy this morning, and it helped. By the end of the 30-minute session, I went from seeing double to seeimg a single dot.
In Nystagmus Land that’s quite a feat actually, and I’m proud of it. Plus I sat up the whole time, which was an extra bonus for my circulatory system.
I ate lunch without choking. When I enter panic mode it’s really hard to swallow sometimes, so an uneventful meal is something to cheer about. The last thing I need is a phobia about eating.
In general I’m steadier on my feet and less likely to tip over. That’s reassuring. These constant changes in my physical abilities are one of the things that makes me so sure this is panic. (It helps that when I had scans done for brain stuff, they turned up nada.)
Still no cathartic cry, but I’m ready for it when it happens. To be honest I’m exhausted always being on the brink. Just wish it would happen already.
Last night was particularly hard on my mom. Things were rough, and she is a sympathetic crier. That’s how I know I should have been crying. I had my relaxation playlist on and “You Can Do This Hard Thing” by Carrie Newcomer played. I think it was the first time she’d heard it. It kind of hits hard for both of us.
It’s warm enough here but very gray and cloudy, which has my spirits down a little more than usual. Going to rest and meditate now and see if that helps.
I’m having an off day. On one hand my mood is a little better. On the other hand it’s a little worse.
There are things I need to do. Mobile deposit a check and do taxes. I just don’t want to do them.
Oh, and it doesn’t look like virtual therapy is going to be covered by my insurance. I think I’m going to go back to virtual EMDR and weed for anxiety.
This is mean spiraling in anger.
I can do EMDR whenever it’s convenient and I can do it more than once a week. And it helped me a little when I tried it before. I just couldn’t afford to stick with it, but this time Mom wants to help. I plan to use the Unwinding Anxiety app too. Wish me luck!
I’m still getting routine updates from Dan and trying not to let them bother me, but it’s hard when you want someone to choke on a bowl. I still have bruises from the last nosedive I took when he was here. And I’m still mad that he wouldn’t respect my boundaries for even 24 hours.
Valentine’s Day was nice. I got chocolate covered strawberries from Rudy, and I sent him a card but I don’t think it arrived on time. Now can we fire Louis DeJoy?
I still struggle with feeling adequate and even just my feeling like myself, but I think I’m making progress. A good cry might be around the corner.
That’s the thing about anxiety; everything feels life threatening. Even being sad. It’s kind of fucked up. And by ‘”kind of” I mean it most assuredly is.
It’s complicated with the overlap: divorcing Dan and falling in love with Rudy. The rejection that I faced with Dan makes me feel guilt and hurt at the same time. Those emotions feel like a betrayal to Rudy. I know it’s just me in the midle of life things, but I think I’ve made clear I have issues.
Mostly I just want to be held. So naturally the person I want to do that is in another state.
I’ve endured some pretty shitty things on my way to this place. (So has Rudy, but this ain’t called Emily’s Blog for nothing.)
There was some drama a couple of nights ago that ended up with me falling, my head bleeding because it hit the toilet, and my mom calling 911. I’m fine, but shaken. I always fall in the bathroom because that’s where I was traumatized the most. I can feel the panic attack set in the instant I put my foot on the cold tile.
I’m mad that I pay Dan’s nsurance premiums, which easily and conveniently pay for his therapy while I struggle to find someone who takes my insurance. It feels so unfair. Sometimes I can accept that, and sometimes I can’t.
It’s like I was telling Mom on the bathroom floor the other night, everything I do is a fight and I’m so tired I can’t even cry right.
Meanwhile I’m getting texts from him that he’s two weeks smoke-free, and feeling sorry for myself because he wasn’t willing to quit to lessen my financial burden. I’m happy for him, but sorry for myself.
I get worried that I’m the problem, and spiral. This is hard.
The day after I posted publicly about Dan not asking how I was when he contacted me, I got an email from him asking how I was. Color me dubious.
Like the cancer, the generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) isn’t something I asked for. Though someone is always eager to assume we psychos bring this on ourselves. That’s total bullshit. Nobody chooses this crap.
I’m sure some part of my lingering anxiety has to do with Dan coming back next month to get his things and whether or not he will make my life difficult again when he does that.
It’s not that I care, it’s that he is a trigger now—in the truest sense of its therapeutic meaning. Thoughts of him coming back give me all the physical symptoms of anxiety and a looming panic attack. That familiar tension in my neck and shoulders that leads to paralysis on my right side and numbness in my hands and feet.
It’s not something I want, but it is something I need to deal with in order to function as a whole person.
In my experience pain isn’t weakness leaving the body, relaxation is. So I deep breathe and remind myself that I can do this hard thing. Besides, it’s a couple of weeks off and not worth worrying about right now.
Tuesday was a good day and productive day, but it’s night time as I write this, and I am starting to overthink because my brain is going on autopilot. I’m tired.
There’s a lot of space between “Please don’t reject me” and “If you want to leave, go. You’re doing me a favor,” but I’m on my way to the latter. I promise you that.
It’s taken me almost 46 years, but I think I’m finally figuring out this relationship stuff. I just don’t have energy for doing all the emotional labor, and I will not even entertain the idea of pulling along someone who expects me to be the only emotional giver.
Absolutely. Will. Not.
And that’s why I am where I am, wrapping up another divorce and wild about a guy who is capable of introspection.
I am very sensitive to everything. Panic, anxiety, and depression have done quite the number on my self-confidence. If I’m going to be with anyone, it’s someone who can take care of their own shit. Taking care of mine from time to time is icing on the cupcake.
I remember when I had my first panic attack I didn’t know what it was at the time, but in retrospect it’s obvious. The paralysis, the slurred speech, the weird vision, the sense that I was dying.
I went to the ER totally thinking I was having a stroke. The triage nurse thought so too, so they implemented a code stroke and it was this whole choreographed thing with me lying flat on the hospital bed being flung from machine to machine while the doctor leaned over me and asked me questions like “What was the last thing you had to eat?”
I remember telling the doctor “I have a brain tumor” and him not immediately giving me some diagnostic medicine or something because it could potentially cause a brain bleed at the sight of the cancer.
I was discharged with a shoulder shrug and a diagnosis of a complex migraine when the paralysis passed, but I don’t think it was a migraine anymore. There was no visual aura like usual.
That was August 2021, a few months after my Dad died. Dan dropped me off, and drove the 2.5 hours back home, because he was obstensibly sick. If he genuinely was sick, I don’t know. I was grieving and doubt my memory, but I don’t recall feeling cared for now.
Point is: that’s a long time to be dealing with panic attacks without help reducing their frequency. I remain a badass.
The biggest difference I see in my goals versus Dan’s goal (singular) is that he wanted to pick me up off the floor in a hurry so he could reward himself with another cigarette, and I wanted to not have panic attacks again and take up more space instead of making myself small.
Eventually, I gave up on him ever trying to see things from my perspective. Never mind him trying to meet me halfway. The panic was perpetuated in my brain because I couldn’t convince him that I knew how to fix it.
Instead he kept telling me what I should be doing. In his mind all of my problems were physical, none of them were mental. To him, all he ever did was help while all I ever did was nothing. I wasn’t surprised when his tough love approach didn’t work, but I was powerless. Or felt powerless anyway.
I was continually told what I should be doing and was never listened to when I said what I needed. This reminded me of another time when I wasn’t listened to—when the Rheumatologist from Hell diagnosed me with fibromyalgia while I had a brain tumor.
I don’t fault myself for that trauma causing some panic and leading to GAD and me going on Lexapro. I’m not convinced I have no responsibility for this divorce, but I am convinced that I did the best I could and harmed myself in the process of trying to salvage the unsalvageable.
Since he has gone to Las Vegas, he has contacted me many times. Not one of those times was to ask me how I’m doing, just to gloat. I know he sees me as the villain here. However, I don’t. In fact I am practicing great restraint by not putting our story on r/AmItheAsshole.
One of the things that I am realizing is that Dan was always in a rush to get me up off the floor when what I needed was for it to be okay that I was on the floor.
The bed became my safe space because if I was in bed, then maybe he would leave me alone. I thought letting him do things his way meant that his anxiety wouldn’t become my anxiety, but I was wrong. He’d come in and prod me raising my angst and priming me for another panic attack. He never had a good thing to say, and it hurt.
I know caregiving isn’t easy, but neither is being a patient. I told him we just weren’t compatible anymore. But even that was a fight I didn’t have energy for.
Living my life in bed all the time to avoid needing his help made me more anxious. I was taking up such a small space in my own home, and it was profoundly damaging to my physical and mental health.
What I wish I knew sooner was that I was making things harder for myself trying to appease him. As they say, I should have been putting the oxygen mask on myself first.
It feels foreign to me to be listened to now by my family. I would ask Dan for passive help like telling me “it’s going to be okay” or just listening to the way I wanted to handle things. But I was never given that agency and it did a lot of damage. Everyone now seems to be listening. It feels remarkably safe.
My panic attacks are so bad now though that they are stroke-like. But I’m getting better, and it is empowering to see how quickly I am getting better. I already feel like I’ve made huge progress and it’s only been a couple of days since Dan left for Las Vegas.
I can do hard things. As Carrie Newcomer sings “Impossible just takes a little more time.”
In November I wrote an email professing my love for Rudy. I don’t know what came over me. I just know that my feelings were strong enough to override the Feelings Kill Switch that my brain thought it needed to rely on to protect me. So my fondness was intense.
I’d already told Dan I wanted him to leave, and he promised he would, but he never followed through. I found myself thinking constantly “I don’t want to live the rest of my life like this. Whatever time I have left.”
***
Cancer made me bolder. Plus I’d spent a lot of time learning to reflect on my feelings while trying to cope with GAD.
Something that sticks with me from Tara Brach’s podcast is the self-reflective question “What am I unwilling to feel?”
I was unwilling to feel a lot of things, but mostly I was unwilling to feel happy. It seemed like as good a time as any to stop the self-destructive bullshit. To my surprise, Rudy’s response to my confession wasn’t “You’re cool and all, but…”
***
Rudy and I had been casual online friends for years because the Brain Tumor Fairies sprinkled us with similar dust. We started talking everyday, though, when the cancer went all in for another round of “What could possibly suck worse than this?”
When I did a thought experiment considering how I would feel if I never spoke to him again, I knew for certain how I felt about Rudy. And although things are messy, I think they’re beautifully messy.
***
Anyway I want the world to know that a new main character dropped.
On Saturday Dan left for Vegas. He is staying with family, has quit smoking, and has started therapy. Call me conceited, but I think I saved him. He said as much, but I don’t have a lot of confidence in him meaning it. I, however, whole heatedly believe it.
The last month has been hard but it could have been harder, so I’m just counting my blessings. Mom is taking care of me and my brother and sister-in-law are taking care of the cats. Dan will come back in about a month to pick up his things and do whatever he’s going to do next.
I’m going to get better.
I’m too tired to write much more than that at this point. I’m not feeling angry or bitter. I’m just taking care of myself the best way I know how, and that’s to rest during tumultuous times. Which means if you want to stay updated watch this space, because I don’t have it in me to repeat myself.
