The anxiety has boiled over.
Friday I hardly ate.
Saturday I couldn’t stand the dogs. Every little thing they did annoyed me. Poor dogs.
Yesterday was sensory overload. The noise. And smells. And my clothes. And breathing.
Today I woke up tired and spent having had fitful sleep and bad dreams. Then I got in the car and drove that same miserable drive: I70 east to Colorado Blvd to 12th Ave.
Trauma
To my intellectual self, trauma is a fascinating phenomenon. How this drive, 5 years later, is as if it is 5 years ago. How my body and mind and spirit don’t conform to the structure and logic of time and how the physiological experience can feel so much the same even though there are years of separation. How both my rational and primitive brain exists at the same time. How sense can keep me grounded as I know this is not then but how every fiber of my being is in real and ever-present fight/flight/freeze/fawn response because, well, trauma isn’t rational.
The nausea. The saline flush taste. The wintery, leaf-less trees. The claustrophobic lanes on the road. The parking lot. The elevator. The nervous stomach. The chewed-up cuticles. The rowdy silence of a brain trying to make it make sense. The looming vulnerability. The internal shuddering that alerts me to an impending panic attack. The deep breaths in and out to keep myself from puking and/or panicking. The waiting. And waiting. And waiting. The wretched w…a….i..…t.…..i..…..n.….…g.
Part of my brain knew today was a follow up and that I wasn’t actually getting poisoned. Another part of my brain had no idea that today was a follow up and that I wasn’t actually getting poisoned.
Ugh. I just wish I didn’t also feel guilty for being human.
Grief
To my empathic self, grief is an intense, visceral experience. PS, grief doesn’t only accompany death. At my follow up today, I was sharing with my onco how the last 6 months have been…and as I summarized for her (including my long list of chronic daily symptoms), tears pooling in my mask, I noted how very many things I’m grieving.
(It’s been an exceptionally excruciating 6 months and that’s saying something…)
Cancer obliterates everything that is. Shatters it in a million pieces. And sure, some of it can be put back together. Sort of. But not really. And maybe some parts can be mended with gold like Kintsukuroi so it looks all pretty and stuff. But the raw truth, the truth that is hard to look in the eye because its ugly and makes everyone uncomfortable is that cancer brings with it a litany of losses, of “gone-ness-es”. . .it is a destruction that will never be fully restored. And the grief woven into each gone thing is profound.
“A loss like this was a progression of miseries, like steppingstones. Until they reached the other side. The new continent. Where the terrible reality lived, and the sun never fully came out again.”
Louise Penny, A World of Curiosities (ch 5)
So often people will try and platitude someone out of grief thinking that grief is 1. A choice and 2. Something that has an end date. They do this because they, themselves, are uncomfortable with the idea that “the sun never fully comes out again.” They don’t like how that sounds and how that makes them feel. They don’t like that there isn’t a correct way to grieve to an end where grief no longer exists. And sure, they probably don’t like seeing someone they care about grieve.
But there is a big difference between the sun never fully coming out again and the sun never coming out again at all. So let me tell you, from my “new continent” that to love someone who is grieving is to let them grieve. Let them talk about it without your platitudes interrupting them. Let them talk about it without your platitudes distracting you. Let them talk about it because when they do, they get to honor what is gone as what is gone matters, deeply. And then trust that when they talk about it, they are also honoring all the places where the sun still shines.
(It might help to reread that last paragraph with the death of a loved one in mind.)
So, anyways, IYKYK. And if you don’t actually know because you haven’t experienced anything like this, I hope this helps.