収束ゾーンでのライフ: Life in the Convergence Zone

I woke up this morning and didn't want to go to work because I was scared. My body was scared, after yesterday.

I am so used to this feeling from previous jobs and stuff: the physical way the anxiety settles into my arms and legs and chest and head, my skin and muscles and eyes and everywhere, it gets everywhere. But I don't remember if I'd ever felt it in this job -- or if I have, it's been in recognition of a high-stakes day (an important person I need to impress, a big deadline) or something unpleasant (a meeting I don't want to chair).

Today looked perfectly innocuous according to my calendar and my to-do list. But then so did yesterday, and that didn't protect me.

When I finally got out of bed, I would've been late for the usual morning meeting, and we were supposed to have a team meeting today too, but luckily my manager was working elsewhere all morning so neither happened. It was such a gift, this nice gentle start to the day and a few hours that were free of the possibility of such scariness.

And I did have a meeting that included my manager this afternoon so we interacted normally. That helped my body and brain a little too.

I had counseling after work, and of course I had lots to talk about. Sometimes I feel like I just talk too much and don't get enough of my counselor's perspective that I'm paying so much for: I am happy to pay for some thoughts that aren't already in my own head, and then I hardly let her get a word in edgewise while I babble about how the struggles in politics, my workplace and even my baseball fandom are all leaving me struggling under hypernormalization.

Anyway, at the end she was able to make the point that my nervous system has been activated a lot, and it shuts down the frontal lobe where stuff like communication happens, leaving you only with fight-or-flight type shit (or freeze or fawn, my usual two). She wasn't surprised that I was unable to speak a few times yesterday. So that was reassuring, because as the world's most talkative person, who doesn't know what I'm thinking/feeling if I can't talk (or write here) about it, it's so rare and uncomfortable to end up unable to speak! It does feel like a goddam Racacoonie situation so I'm also soothed by the fact that the internet seems to call this "amygdala hijack." Hijack is the exactly right word for it!

Anyway my counselor also told me that connection with other people is a great way to address this. I had told her about listening to the old friend telling me about life in one of the cities where Trump has sent the National Guard, the Jewish guy we made friends with on Sunday... She said this is great, and that was a perspective that I wouldn't have otherwise that's useful and good for me now. But of course it's not just about such worthy connections: spending Saturday with some of my favorite people was also good for me, catching them up on the goofy details of my almost-accidental hookup since I hadn't seen them since it happened a couple of months ago -- even reminding myself of that day enough to tell them about how it came about left me in a noticeably better mood for a couple hours after.

These are long-term mitigations of course; in the short term she talked about breathing and how exhaling for longer than you inhale can help. This amused the hell out of me just because it was only last night that D was talking about recognizing the breathing count (one or two beats longer on the exhale than the inhale) from our yoga instructor being present in what he was doing at the time, which was the Guided Meditation event in Fallout 76, of all things.

The next time some well-meaning person asks "Have you tried yoga?" you should ask them "Have you tried the Mothman Cult?"