Chaos To Calm: An Adventure Tale (or: There And Back Again). Plus: New Blog Features!

Hi there!

Moving is coming along nicely, but we have a lot to do between now and next Thursday, when the actual movers come. The Big Day.

So I'm not going to be able to write the second half of last week's post on Saturday. I'll get right back to it once we're in the new place.

Instead, I'll leave you with a couple of new features-- one of which might be of particular interest to my returning readers-- and a short medium-sized update about something Dr. Oz told me the other day that was a huge relief to hear.

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First: I've added a quick-jump link to the very first post of this blog in the upper left corner of the home page, so you can find the beginning of the story without having to wade through the archive lists.

Second: I've added a Follow By Email button in the right sidebar so you can be notified whenever I post! Just enter your email address and hit "send." Your information will not be used for anything other than updates for this blog. Promise.

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I was telling Dr. Oz about The Fog the other day, and how disorienting and frustrating it is to have things completely disappear from my memory as if they never existed, especially when I need to focus on details as I've had to do during this house-buying process.

"It doesn't make any sense," I said. "I was a professional person. I managed a team of people and a huge roster of students and a great deal of detailed information. I have the ability to do this. So it's scary to see this happening to me now. I feel like I'm going crazy, or like there's something wrong with my brain that won't allow me to retain information anymore."

"This is a trauma response," said the wise Dr. Oz. "You're being triggered by the major, life-changing things that are happening right now, and your body is doing what it has trained itself to do when it's triggered: it's going into fight-or-flight mode.

When that happens, the blood leaves the brain and goes to the extremities to facilitate movement, so you can run if you need to. Your thinking brain shuts down and stops processing  information that isn't essential to survival, so that you can focus your energy and attention on eluding the threat.

So you're not remembering these things because your brain is not recording them. It is an actual, physiological, neurological change that happens when your primitive brain is triggered."

Oh.

Well. Holy shit.

That makes perfect sense. I've talked about this before: one of the signs that you've experienced a Capital-T Trauma is that everything happened in slow motion. This is because your brain has shifted from general-processing mode to hyper-vigilant, scan-for-threat-and-safety mode. You are no longer tracking time the way you normally do; your brain is completely focused on biological survival and is seeking only what is essential for escape.

In my case, years and years on, the kinds of threats I experience are not life-and-death, but they do upset my carefully-maintained equilibrium and my primitive brain reacts the same way. It finds a way for me to escape the scene. It isn't a physical escape, but it's an escape all the same: back into the world of disengagement.

Calm, smooth, regulated peace. My body wants that feeling a lot more than it wants stress. So when those stressful moments occur, when I need to keep track of a million things and make phone calls and wire money and pack up a household around two pre-schoolers and step into a new identity as a home-owner and all that it entails, my brain responds to the upset apple cart by shutting down its recording feature and pulling me out of the chaos and into the calm.

It's not entirely unpleasant, if I'm being honest. Being able to compartmentalize as thoroughly as I can is quite an asset during escrow. Smooth sailing! No worries here!

But it's not the same as living, not really. Stress is good, sometimes. Big, positive changes are meant to shake things up, and that can be exciting and motivating and fun.

I'm still straddling that line between my typical reactions and the reactions I'd like, at least theoretically, to have. Meaning that I'm still having the same reactions, but since I'm aware of them and aware of the alternative, I have a bit more influence on my lizard brain and can keep things from going too far. 

I'm staying as engaged as I can, and it's keeping me more in the game than I used to be. I'm not on the field yet. Or on the bench. Or even in the bleachers, some of the time. But I am in the stadium now. Every time I learn something new to help me mitigate the instinctive responses of my lizard brain, I take another step closer to the action.

(I was going to belabor the sports metaphor a bit longer and talk about someday getting a turn at the plate, but I think I'll spare you that. I've done quite enough for one paragraph.) 

The point is, it was a relief to hear that The Fog is a real, physiological response, because that means I can learn to prevent it. 

And also that I'm not losing my mind. So. Yay me.

And now I'm off to look at more paint chips, the mental cataloging of which apparently serves no threat to my lizard brain, because I could tell you a few things about how Pebble Gray, Aged Teak, Sweet Mandarin, and Pot of Cream in various finishes are going to look in my house, with nary a wisp of fog in sight.

Which is good, because it definitely wouldn't match with my color scheme.

It's Elementary, Dear Readers

I've told you guys a lot about myself over the past 18 months. You've heard about my trauma, my dysfunctions, my sex life, my abusive relationship, my misadventures with drugs. But somehow, I'm more nervous about writing this post than I've been about most of the others.

Those were mostly about things that happened to me. This one cuts a little closer to to the bone than that: it's about the person I am, irrespective of all of that. The real me, underneath it all.

I am, at my core, a writer.

I don't mean that in a functional way. Writers don't always function as writers. Lord knows I haven't, for most of my life. I mean it in a "born this way" sort of way. I was born with a writer's sensibility. I'm a natural observer, a collector of anecdotes. I see people's motivations behind their facades. I have a sensitivity to the narrative of things. And my preferred output is words.

It's an orientation to the world, really. It's the way I process information; the way my brain makes order from chaos. I've thought this way all my life.

I'm a natural writer for the same reason I'm a natural teacher, I realized recently. I think of everything in terms of how I would convey it clearly and convincingly to someone else. This idea, this process, this experience: how can I describe it best, in the way most likely to convince, entertain,  illuminate, instruct?

I haven't ever usually had the courage discipline to write or to teach as my main purpose, but when I have (and I have!), I've been pretty good at it. Really good at it, even. 

In my shame-prone way, I usually manage to convince myself during those times that I'm cheating-- it doesn't count, somehow, because it isn't hard. I haven't earned the right to be proud of it because an orientation to the world isn't anything I can take credit for. It just is.

This usually results in an extraordinary amount of anxiety over what I'm doing, because then it isn't just my work that's on the line, it's me, and then everything actually becomes difficult, and then I feel threatened, and then I get triggered, and then I get paralyzed, and then I get the hell out of there before any more damage is done.

Because that makes sense. Doesn't it? 

<sigh> The things we do to ourselves.

Anyway, this is just me. I'm that girl. During my more socially-connected moments, I've been known as a storyteller. Renowned, even. These days, my Facebook statuses have gained a bit of an enthusiastic following because Facebook is the perfect medium for my particular set of skills and abilities: flair for anecdote, audience to entertain, no need to actually talk to anyone.

PERFECT!

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So... why am I telling you about this?

Well. It's important to establish context for this next thing, so that it makes sense to you why it makes SO much sense for me.

As a person with a writer's orientation to the world, I tend to see things in story form. My imagination just goes that way. I write myself into the constant narrative going on in my head. And when I come across other stories that turn my crank, I write myself into those, too, and entertain myself with them in idle moments. As I've said many times in this blog, I tend to see myself from a third-person perspective-- a player on a stage-- and this, I think, is why. It's just another example of the pre-established frameworks that made it very easy for PTSD to slot itself so deeply into my consciousness.

But it has its up-sides, too. This is one of them.

If you are of this writer's disposition-- and you very well may be, whether you write or not-- you'll know what I mean when I say that everything has the potential to become the next running narrative. Stories are everywhere, waiting to be picked up and continued. 

Maybe it's a story I want to be a part of, so I put myself into it. Or it's a story I want to continue, so I imagine what happens next, or what would happen if. 

I've always been a voracious reader and film-watcher for this reason. The characters and plots and scenery are established; the seeds have been planted and all you have to do is help them grow. And seeing a fellow storyteller's turn of phrase or angle of shot or interpretation of character or nuance of plot is always inspiring (all art is borrowing and re-imagining, after all). And my response to stories and movies I love has always been to make more of it. 

This meant that I was a four-year old who played out scenarios involving the characters from Planet of the Apes and The Wizard of Oz. A six-year old who imagined herself into M*A*S*H episodes. A nine-year old who saw herself running around with the characters from Annie. An 11-year old whose alter-ego was someone's tag-along cousin on Fame, a mischievous orphan character on The A Team and Simon and Simon and Magnum PI.

A 15-year old who filled notebooks with pages of what would happen if about a 15-year old girl in the fictional universes of The Sting and 21 Jump Street.

My tastes were eclectic, what can I say.

(A side-note for my fellow storytellers out there: I've noticed, as I've cataloged the various fictional alter-egos I've had over the years, that all of them were orphaned, displaced, self-contained, escaping a dubious past through extraordinary achievement. It was the Superhero Myth. I was enacting, over and over, the Superhero Myth. OMG.)

Although I didn't know it at the time, there was a word for what I was doing when I was writing piles of 21 Jump Street episodes (which began when I was still so naive, I didn't even consider making my alter-ego Johnny Depp's love interest. A year later, however... well, let's just say I had considered it quite a lot). Back then, before the internet, I had no way of knowing that I was joining a well-established tradition that others of my orientation had been carrying on in relative secret for decades. Centuries, even. 

I was writing fanfiction.

At some point in the 90's, I heard that term used for the first time. It was in an article about the most well-known fanfiction-writing fandom of all time: Trekkies. Star Trek fans, a notoriously obsessed bunch, popularized fanfiction as "an expression of fandom and fan interaction" (quote from the wiki article linked above).

They'd started fanzines in the 60s that contained fan-created Star Trek stories and art. In the later incarnations of the Star Trek TV series, the shows' writers actually accepted ideas for episodes from fans.

Trekkies are also, as you probably know, notorious for their devotion and their conventions and their show-as-lifestyle commitment to Star Fleet principles and Klingon dialects. At the time I was reading this particular article, this kind of fandom seemed unhinged. And I realized, rather shamefully, that I was one of those types, the relative superiority of Johnny Depp to Leonard Nimoy notwithstanding.

My mom was a Trekkie.** My version of teenage rebellion was to eschew all things sci-fi. So fanfiction and Trekkiedom were inextricably linked in my mind, and the connection was not favorable. So I went even further underground with my secret hobby. I never told another living soul about it.

** no children were harmed during the making of this childhood. No Klingon was spoken, either (no filthy cosmic barbarians, we!) But I do admit to knowing that the proper response to the iconic Vulcan farewell, "Live long and prosper," is a raised hand, split into a V between the middle and ring fingers, and the phrase, "Peace and long life." Some things just stick, no matter how hard you try to shake them off.

Not much to report about my fanfiction for many years after that. I was in college, writing my poems and vampire stories (it's all a form of fanfiction, really, isn't it?), and then in grad school, writing my New Yorker-approved general fiction, and then, and then, and then. Not a lot of time for penning 21 Jump Street episodes, although it remained my favorite idle daydream subject for years and years, and the stories continued in my head.

Several years ago, I was poking around online one day and thought of my old fanfiction, and I thought, I wonder if anyone has ever posted fanfiction online?

<google search>

Um.

Yes. As a matter of fact, yes, someone had. Many, many someones. In fact, after seeing the quantity of fanfiction that had been posted, it was difficult to imagine that anyone had the time or bandwidth to post anything else. Ever. I'm serious. I could go on...

The internet, as it turns out, was MADE for dorks people like me.

So I read a bit of 21 Jump Street fanfic, found it interesting but not particularly noteworthy, and moved on.

Fast forward to about two years ago. I was puttering around one day while my daughters were napping, and decided to finally try watching that BBC Sherlock show that had come out a few months before. I'd had it sitting on my Tivo forever and never got around to it-- I was never a Sherlock Holmes fan-- and had eventually deleted it from lack of interest.

But I saw it on Netflix, and had nothing better to do, so I queued it up and hit play.

Five minutes later, I was riveted. By the time the first episode was over, I knew I'd found something special. It was the best thing I'd ever seen on TV. The writing was gloriously smart and current and funny, the characters were perfect, the acting: amazing. 

I found myself officially obsessed.

It didn't take long before I wondered if anyone had written any Sherlock fanfiction. So one day, I went to FanFiction.net, the largest archive of fanfiction on the internet (at the time, at least), and looked it up.

And what I found was... wonderful!

First of all, there were stories. Two thousand or so. Some of them were great. Some of them were not-so-great. 

And some of them were SPECTACULAR. 

I'll talk a bit more about why I read fanfiction in a bit, but the upshot of this part of the story is this: I read some stories, and then I read some more, and then I thought I might try to read ALL of them, and while I was doing that, more stories kept getting posted, and pretty soon there were five thousand, then eight, then ten.**

**as of this writing, there are somewhere in the neighborhood of 30,000. Daaaamn.

A lot of the writing I was seeing there-- a disproportionate amount, really, considering the milieu-- was so incredibly good that I just couldn't believe my good fortune. It was like finding your new all-time-favorite novel, and never, ever, ever getting to the end of it. 

So much of the writing was of such high caliber, I began to feel compelled to leave comments for the authors. So I opened an account and joined the community of writers and readers who support each others' work by leaving reviews on stories they like.

Shortly after that, I realized that I was qualified to give high-caliber reviews as well, and that the writing I was reading deserved my best efforts in response. So I put my MFA to good use and dialed up my rhetoric a bit, and started leaving comments worthy of the writing that inspired them. 

Instead of the ubiquitous "Loved this piece! Can't wait to see more from you," I started talking shop, writer to writer. "Here's how you're using language to develop character/ create tension/ control pacing/ convey atmosphere/ shock/ soothe /convince/ provoke/  entertain/ titillate. Here's what I see you doing, here's how I see it working, here's the impact it's having on me as a reader. Here's how you're being successful. Here's how you're making me a fan. Here's how you're awesome."

And somewhere in there, though I didn't know it yet, something inside me woke up.

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Sorry for the cliffhanger! I didn't intend it to happen this way, but this post has become a lot longer than I expected and my move is consuming a lot more of my time than I'd hoped, and I didn't want to miss any more deadlines! So here you go. To be continued. In the meantime: LOOK! FANFICTION!**

**both links are to general fanfic archives, which contain fanfiction written about just about anything you can think, from TV shows to books to paintings to rock bands to the Bible. Pick yer poison. I dare you.

Real Life is Real: A Fairy Tale

SO! I've been hinting for the past couple of weeks that something was in the works in my real life, and since all the puzzle pieces appear to have come together and the deal is, as they say, done, I can now share my news!

(Some of you may be more excited about this than others. Those with the highest potential for excitement include anyone who has come to visit us over the past 7 years and had to sleep on an air mattress in our living room or shell out for a hotel just to spare yourself the indignity.)

We bought a house!

It's our first home. We've spent our adult lives in the Bay Area, surrounded by one of the most ridiculously expensive, recession-resistant housing markets in the country, so this is something we a) had to work very hard for and b) weren't entirely sure we'd be able to achieve. And yet here we are. It all happened very suddenly-- we weren't expecting the opportunity to arise right now and hadn't yet realized we were ready to jump-- and then the universe just aligned and it all came together. 

It feels a bit like destiny!

So we've been signing papers and getting inspections and collecting moving boxes and blowing up our Pinterest boards with pictures of back yard landscaping and kitchen restorations and home decor tips and paint colors. It's pretty heavenly, actually.

The house is a classic 1925 California Bungalow, just what I wanted, with beautiful inlaid wood floors and built-ins, and it's spacious and interesting and has lots of potential for fun improvements. The kitchen and bathrooms have been modernized a bit more than we'd like, so we'll be restoring them back to period over the next few years (hex tile, how I love you!).

But for now, we'll be looking for the projects that will give us the most bang for the least buck, and that means painting rooms and going nuts on the back yard, where we are determined that creativity and elbow grease will work magic.

It should be noted that neither of us is particularly plantsy (plantsy? Plant-positive? Plant-capable? Plantsy should be a word and that's what it should mean. So it is written and so it shall be). And we've never done much yard/landscaping work. 

And by "not much" I mean "none."

But that's what the internet is for, right? I mean, we're not idiots--we can follow instructions-- and we can certainly lift a shovel. I've been known to get dirty. And I long for an awesome back yard with fragrant flowers and soft grass and butterflies and a place for my girls to play and a place for us to lounge and entertain friends and a place for our dog (which we now get to have!) to frolic.

So we have incentive. And time. And a growing, surreal excitement over the fact that this is actually happening, we have our own place, and we get to do whatever we want.

I never realized how profoundly I'd be affected by that. I feel, for the first time, I think, like I can allow myself to get as excited as I want to about... well, everything, really. Having our own place gives a special purpose to so many things-- the money and time and creativity we dedicate to our living space is now an investment, not a temporary facade or something not worth the effort since the space isn't actually ours. 

I think I'd gotten so used to renting that I didn't realize that undercurrent was there. I didn't realize I'd felt so temporarily placed until this week, when I suddenly found myself planted here, in this little town I love, with my amazing husband and my sweet little girls (and our future dog-- have I mentioned the dog?). I also didn't realize how foreign and strange it would feel to be able to let my dreams run rampant.

I didn't know I wasn't letting them do so, before. But it makes sense that I wasn't, when I think about it. Enthusiasm is scary. Wanting is scary. It's a vulnerability that triggers me, somehow. 

I'm sure it's got a lot to do with T and the residuals of that whole thing, but maybe also with the fact that I never launched, back when I should have, because of the accident and all that followed, and so I've always had a sense of waiting for my life to start that has kept me, in a very real way, from actually... you know... starting.

I'm honestly surprised by how deeply it's affecting me, this house. I thought it would feel like the culmination of a dream, not the beginning of one. But that's exactly what it feels like: the dawn of a whole new day.  My husband and I have been marveling at the freedom we suddenly feel. I don't think either of us realized how much we'd been holding back.

Well, we're not holding back anymore. And it is exhilarating!

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It feels appropriate to talk about this home-owning experience here, because the deep level of excitement I feel is one I haven't felt often over the last 20 years. I was excited to get married. I was excited to get pregnant and to have my daughters. But as far as experiences that cross my narrow emotional boundaries without triggering my PTSR in hugely negative ways, that's about it.

So here I am, with the super-trifecta of awesome grown-up life events finally complete, and I'm feeling a level of exhilaration that I'm not sure I've felt since before that drunk driver made dreaming of the future feel like a dangerous threat.

It's striking me suddenly that it didn't feel safe to dream about those three things in particular: husband, children, a deeply-rooted home. They feel so... necessary to my life, so essential to my character, that not having them someday was too terrifying to contemplate, so allowing myself to consciously desire them was skirting dangerous territory.

In order to fully embrace your longing for something, you have to acknowledge the not-having, and that, I see now, was too painful for me to do.

Instead, in true PTSR fashion, I ignored the longing so I wouldn't have to risk sorrow or disappointment or deep, unrequited desire.

Keep it level. Keep it smooth. Keep everything-- every thought, every feeling, every dream-- at a constant, monotonous medium.

Thank god for the Wise Adult within, who knew I was afraid to hope and yet managed to fulfill that longing anyway. Husband: perfect. Children: amazing. 

And now, at long last: home, sweet home.

It was a piece I didn't know was missing. Now that it's filled, I feel, strangely, much bigger than the sum of my parts. I've beaten a demon this week. A secret one. One I didn't realize had been menacing me for a very long time. It feels like one of the single biggest steps I've take on this journey out of the darkness of PTSR.

I didn't know a house could have such power. I guess because it isn't really the house that has it. It's the dream. 

More than that: it's the ability to dream. The permission. I have the most visceral feeling, right now, of easing my foot off the brakes, more than I ever have before. It feels like I'm finally, finally, beginning to pick up speed. Like the momentum that has been building since this work began has suddenly been allowed to fulfill its promise and push me forward, back into the world.

I saw an unattributed quote today: "Life holds special magic for those who dare to dream." I guess I'll find out. 

Dreaming sounds pretty good to me. I'm ready for a bit of magic.

And also a dog. Have I mentioned the dog?


As you might imagine, posting anything of length will probably be difficult over the next few weeks as we pack up our stuff and move into our new home. But I plan to keep my schedule, so you can expect to hear from me every week anyway. I just might be talking about paint chips a little more often than usual. I'm sure, if I think about it long enough, I can find a connection between PTSR and wall-color choices. I wonder if research has been done?

Procrastination: A Concept I Should Probably Get Around To Discussing Someday

I've been thinking about procrastination a lot lately. 

(Before I go any further, I should say that I typed that sentence above about 20 minutes ago, and since then, I have gone to the bathroom, checked my email, fiddled around with my phone, stared off into space, and a few other things. Correlation or causation? You be the judge.)

I do it, of course. Most people do, at some point in their lives. Long before my car accident, I was quite adept at putting things off to egregious extents. I mean, why do now what you can do in a panic at the last minute?

There's been a lot of scholarship on the topic over the last few decades. Everybody wants to get underneath the behavior and discover the cause. Like we do with many behavioral patterns, it seems that our culture vacillates between blaming the victim ("Procrastinators are lazy, impulsive losers!") and cultivating victimhood ("I can't help it-- my prefrontal cortex has a mind of its own!").

As you may remember, I used to coach college students toward academic success, and procrastination came up all the time. We mostly talked about it as a symptom of perfectionism, where people unwilling to allow themselves to make mistakes tend to avoid starting difficult tasks to postpone feelings of helplessness or failure.

That makes sense. I think it's true, a lot of the time.

It also makes sense, then, that perfectionism of this type is just as much a product of anxiety as perfectionism-- which are pretty closely related, themselves. We feel anxious about our performance, so we try to put it off as long as we can, even though putting it off usually causes even more anxiety. We'd rather face the devil we know than the devil we don't, apparently.

A more recent theory suggests-- rightly, I think-- that since anxiety is just as likely to cause people to start a task early than late (ever done something unpleasant first, just to "get it out of the way?"), procrastination is more strongly linked with impulsiveness. If we have less control over the areas of our brains that filter out distractions and aid us in impulse-control-- the pre-frontal cortex, which affects premotor functions-- we're a lot more likely to let things come between us and a successfully-completed task.

The thing about procrastination, though, is that it looks (and feels) a lot like laziness, or lack of ambition or willpower. Of course it does. Motivations aside, in effect, it's often indistinguishable.  This one rings a familiar bell for me: shame. There is shame associated with this behavior.   

Oh, hello. 

All of a sudden, I'm seeing some really weird, interesting connections between procrastination and PTSR.

Or my PTSR, at least.

Here's why I'm talking about this: as I indicated last week, I notice The Fog coming in all the time now, and I've begun to realize that The Fog has been a key factor in what has basically amounted to procrastination, on my part. Anything that threatens my narrow little boundaries of tolerable experience (most things, in other words) causes overwhelm, and then gets swallowed or at least shrouded by The Fog.

From a distance, this looks like procrastination. It is procrastination, conscious or not. Something causes me anxiety, so I push it away and don't do it. It fits that criteria perfectly. 

What I notice, though, when I look at all the theories together, is that there are more parallels to my particular state of being than I expected to find:

• I have always been a perfectionist, an avoider, a procrastinator. I have always been shame-prone. The PTSR has only increased those tendencies. As I've mentioned before, there is evidence that PTSR occurs more strongly in some people than in others precisely because of those tendencies. It fits more easily into a pre-established framework.
• Procrastination, like PTSR, is also associated with depression. And depression is a stigmatized condition. And stigma = shame.
• Procrastination is strongly linked to impulse control, which is linked to the premotor  cortex, which-- as I understand it from my limited research-- projects directly to the spinal cord and is involved in instinctive, pre-cognitive movement. Not quite the lizard brain, but close. 

And get this: my pre-frontal cortex, where the premotor cortex is located, was the part of my brain that suffered the TBI in the accident.

Basically, what I'm seeing is a pretty strong connection between my increasingly unconscious procrastination behavior and the PTSR.

Because, here's the thing: I was actually, for a long time, one of those people for whom anxiety triggered the desire to get things done early, rather than late. I picked up that habit in grad school, where I realized that the torture of having something hanging over my head was worse than the torture of confronting my performance anxiety. I learned to spare myself additional stress by getting the difficult stuff out of the way as soon as possible.

The Fog has become increasingly aggressive only in the past few years, as my PTSR has become more severe in general. I went from having mild, normal bouts of procrastination-- the kind everyone tends to have from time to time-- to losing whole conversations, whole days to The Fog, and becoming a person who hardly ever did anything because everything seemed like too much to bear.

I'm implying a few things here. One is that I think my brain and body have compelled me to new heights of procrastination without my permission or conscious involvement as a symptom and side effect of PTSR. I'm not beyond accepting a bit of victim status, there.

But also, as with everything PTSR-related, I think I have the power to to regain control over the psychosomatic effects and take the power back. A victim no longer. That's my plan.

_____

Once again, I have discovered this week that awareness of my previously-unconscious behavior a) makes the behavior seem much worse, and b) feels like a very positive first step toward getting control of it.

As I hinted last week, there are some things going on in my real life that are a bit monumental and stressful (but positive!), so I've had the chance to observe my PTSR in action.

(I still can't tell you about what's happening, but I may be able to by next week. Fun, exciting stuff!)

I already told you about The Fog. It's been keeping me floating above it all, really. I've managed to avoid the panic and anxiety that would--and should-- otherwise be making me a bit uncomfortable throughout the experience. Which is its job, of course.

Well done, Lizard Brain! Now lay off a little, will you?

Because Fog aside, there are things that need to get done, and I need to be the one to do them, and I've had to be very, very deliberate about keeping my head in the game and not letting the fog sweep everything away from me before I am able to act.

It's so hard to describe this feeling. Things slip away from me, and it's not because of a lack of attention or care, or because I'm absent-minded, or because I'm irresponsible, or lazy, or unmotivated, or even because I don't consciously want to keep track of them and get them done (although I have accused myself-- and likely been accused-- of these things in the past). 

It's like a physical inaccessibility. It's like a door that shouldn't be there gets closed. Sometimes, I can feel it-- feel it-- happening, and can't stop it. Like the words are written in sand, and as I am trying to read them, the waves come in and wash them away before my eyes.

So for the past two weeks, I've been really conscious about taking notes, making lists, repeating facts and plans back to my husband over and over, to be sure I've got everything in my head that belongs there.

It's been working, for the most part. Even as The Fog has been keeping me emotionally detached, I've been counteracting the other stuff by keeping hard records.

So far, so good.

But this week, it also became really clear to me that The Fog is a response to a trigger-- the threat of overwhelming emotions-- and that this trigger is still getting pulled, even though I've learned some ways to avoid its typical effect.

So the ol' Lizard Brain is relying on other tricks. 

One of those tricks, usually encompassed by The Fog but apparently not exclusive to it, is procrastination. Despite my lists, despite what I knew, without really realizing it, I was still avoiding a whole lot of action.

It makes perfect sense to me that this would be a response to the trigger. Avoiding the phone calls, the conversations, the checklist items = avoiding acknowledging the thing that necessitates those actions, which is the thing that is threatening my equilibrium and triggering the protective response.

OMG, obvious: procrastination is a defense mechanism of the Lizard Brain, pushing those triggering events away so that the body can restore its boundaries and its safety. It's not only a conscious coping mechanism. In my case, it's also an instinctive response.

____

So yesterday, I grabbed that particular bull by the horns and knocked a bunch of items off my  action list. Ran errands, had meetings, made phone calls, engaged services, got shit done.

Last night, I was jumping-out-of-my-skin triggered by it all, for a while, and then I was just-ran-headlong-into-a-brick-wall exhausted after spending the day with various parts of my brain literally at war with each other (which consumes so much more energy than I could possibly have imagined).

Taking a step back and looking at yesterday objectively, I'd say that it probably approached about a "2" on what I would once have considered a normal 1-10 scale of busy days, where 10 = "busy as fuck." It was practically nothing, really, what I did, especially compared to what I see my husband accomplishing in his professional life on a daily basis. But I was completely done in by it, and am currently fighting the migraine to prove it.

But the way I see it, most of what I did yesterday wasn't about the phone calls or the meetings or the items on the checklist. It was about digging in my heels and refusing to let the path in front of me get swept away.

Nothing I did was difficult or challenging. Even in the aggregate. But the impact of having fought off The Fog and the procrastination is still unfolding, if this migraine is any evidence, and the more physical it feels, the more I think I'm getting at the true heart of it. The emotional stuff all still needs to be worked on, of course, but the physical stuff seems most connected to my unconscious self, to my Lizard Brain, and it has always been true that the road to recovery needs to go through that place first.

It sucks the most, this part, this physical, visceral response, because it seems-- and probably is-- most beyond my conscious control. 

But that's the whole point, I guess.

I'm not sure if this post has made much sense-- I've come to most of these conclusions while typing them out on the screen-- but I feel like I'm on to something, here. And I feel like these battles, now that I've finally gotten around to having them, will get easier and easier. 

I think that if I keep working on it, I'll be able to replace one instinct with another. I think action will eventually replace inaction as the most natural way to relieve stress. I think moving will eventually feel better than standing still.

I think doing and knowing won't always seem so separate and distinct, so mutually exclusive; even as I implied last week that they were. 

That belief, above all, makes me feel like my faith in myself has not been misplaced.


I'm hoping to be able to share some cool news next week. Until then, I'm going to try to keep doing what I need to do--proactively!-- to help make it happen. Wish me luck!

Everything Is Illuminated

I've been going through some major stress over the past week-- good stress (or at least normal, healthy stress over huge but positive life changes which I will discuss at a point in the very near future because OMG), not distress. And once again, I find myself in the indescribably weird position of being caught between my instinctive reaction and my newly-learned alternative reaction, and once again, I am perplexed and uncomfortable noticing the very wide gap between them.

Yep, still watching the (sadly, quite boring) movie that is my life. From the balcony.

As you may remember, I (and other PTSR sufferers like me) tend to respond to high-stress or high-emotion (or, let's be honest, even relatively low-stress and low-emotion) events by retreating, mentally, emotionally, and even physically when possible. Flight! Run away! Go go go!

This isn't the same thing as denial, although denial is certainly a component. It's more than a cognitive response; it's a physiological, neurological response that takes place on the instinctive level, and it is actually beyond cognitive control if your lizard and intellectual brains are not on speaking terms. As, as has been established, mine are not.

I call it The Fog. I described it in this post, after the first time I actually stood back and watched it happen. The Fog comes in when I get triggered and swallows everything up and insulates me from the anxiety. It's the Way Out. 

In theory, it was the way my lizard brain learned to calm the waters and regain equilibrium after being triggered by a threat, no matter how minor that threat may actually be, sending me into soothing oblivion. 

In practice, it has only very recently occurred to me that the triggers are not the enemy. It's what happens when the trigger gets pulled that is the problem. 

It's not the gun at all; it's the bullet that'll kill ya. (although, while we're on the subject...)

That fog has kept me from feeling a lot of painful things. It has kept me from remembering them, even. It has allowed me to skip over some terrible moments of sadness, pain, frustration, disappointment, and fear over the last 20 years. It came here for a purpose and has served that purpose admirably. In many ways, it made it possible for me to survive.

But as you know, triggers don't just happen during the painful moments. "High emotion" is high emotion, negative or positive. The lizard brain interprets any imbalance as threat; the trigger gets pulled; the fog rolls in and everything gets socked in, swallowed up, hidden from view.

Disappeared.

It turns out that it's the fog that's the real danger, not the things it obscures. Despite a carefully-constructed set of personal habits and coping mechanisms that depend very heavily on the opposite.

Well. Shit.

I'm sure this seems very obvious to you, and while I can't exactly say it's a surprise to me, after that experience last year, it hasn't been obvious for very long, and on top of that, there's a very big difference between knowing something and doing something about it. Especially when it comes to stuff that scares the living shit out of you.

And especially when it isn't something that merely seems difficult-and-uncomfortable-but-possible, like climbing a long  staircase instead of using the escalator, or eating a huge bowl of broccoli; but rather, insane, counter-intuitive, and impossible, like walking on water or flapping your arms and flying to the grocery store. 

Or eating a huge bowl of broccoli. I used that example incorrectly the first time. 

It requires a switcheroo of your whole orientation to reality. ATTENTION: WHAT YOU HAVE HERETOFORE CONSIDERED "DANGER" ISN'T DANGEROUS! WHAT YOU HAVE IDENTIFIED AS "SAFETY" ISN'T SAFE! PLEASE MAKE A NOTE OF IT!

You know, no big deal. :/

So I find myself in a constant one-step-forward-two-steps-back situation, where I'm trying and failing and trying and failing to manage this stuff without freaking out or being a jerk to people or retreating into silence and depression or whatever else it is that I do when I'm feeling completely out of control of my head.

Which is NOT, as you might imagine, my favorite state of being. 

Trial and error is anathema to a perfectionist. We of the "do it right the first time or don't do it at all" disposition aren't into "try and try again" platitudes. Pssh. As if.

(This may or may not contribute in some way to our tendency to end up in a fetal position under the coffee table on a regular basis. I mean, I'm not a doctor or anything, so don't quote me on this. I'm just postulating. From down here amongst the dust bunnies.)

One of the weirdest things about standing in the gap between instinct and conditioning, right now, is that I have perspective on myself that I didn't have for years and years. I can see that fog from above now, and see how I succumbed to it so unquestioningly in the past. 

I remember knowing it would happen-- I'd be in a state of anxiety over something and know that in a moment, I'd be transported somewhere else and wouldn't have to deal with it anymore. Didn't know how or why, didn't bother to wonder about it, just waited for the escape and took it gladly when it came.

I think that back then, and maybe until this week, I thought that this was a way of gaining control. I suppose it was, by the part of my brain that saw threat only in the anxiety and not its cause, and eradicated it by shutting down the feeling instead of acting on, with, through, or because of it to change my circumstances or whatever else would have helped and eventually made the feeling dissipate the healthy way.

Sure, it was a form of control, but only an immediate, limited, false one.

What it looks like now, from the great divide between reality and traumatic response, is the exact opposite. Not control, but resignation. There was nothing active about that response. Not really. It was really me, giving up. Ceding control to an unknown force, without wondering how that was possible or why it was happening.

It didn't occur to me to wonder. I didn't know there was anything unusual going on. It seems impossible now, looking back, but I just didn't know. It's frightening to think of my unexamined willingness to just give over like that. I don't think I ever really saw the depth of self-delusion that required until now.

Anyway, despite all of this, I had a conversation with Dr. Oz the other night that put it all into a new perspective that I found very helpful and encouraging:

There's been, I think, a lingering fear or doubt in my mind that I was never going to beat this thing. That I would someday slide back into the grip of PTSR and recovery would never come.

What is abundantly clear to me now, maybe for the first time, for real, is that even if I stopped all progress right now, even if I lapsed back into some former habits, even if I never had another epiphany again, it's impossible for me to go back to the state of not knowing what is happening to me.

Whether I do anything about it or not, it's impossible not to be aware, now that I've seen the man behind the curtain. I can never unsee it again.

I can see how this might, for some, be an uncomfortable knowledge. I wondered, as I articulated it for the first time to Dr. Oz, if it might be hard to come to terms with it. But it isn't. Somewhat to my surprise, I find it a relief.

I'm an academic at heart, and I'm much more comfortable knowing than not knowing. The conscious awareness that I was acting without understanding my motivations is much more frightening to me, intellectually, than the instinct-level fears that caused that oblivion. I'd rather know than not. I'd rather learn than ignore.

The fact that I feel this with 100% conviction on a 100% intellectual level and emotions don't really come into it tells me that I still haven't figured out how to make those two parts of my brain play nicely together, but that's okay. I know that the two parts are there, and that communication between them is the goal. I can resist the fog-- at least, to some extent-- when it comes, and try to take my emotions for a trial run instead, as uncomfortable as that may be.

It's not perfect yet, not even close, but it's far preferable to oblivion, so I can't see it as anything but progress. And not just tenuous progress, but a lasting, permanent change. 

The light has been turned on, and everything has been illuminated, and if I don't quite know what  I'm looking at yet, the mistakes I make won't because I couldn't see, anymore, and the inexhaustible learner inside of me, after realizing this, is calmly reassuring all the other parts: we're heading in the right direction. It's impossible to get lost from here. Every move is a step forward; every trial, regardless of result, is a success. The fog may come and go, but the road is sure beneath our feet whether we can see it or not.

_____

I keep thinking of that Robert H. Schuller quote: "What would you do if you knew you could not fail?"

I've never taken it seriously before, mostly because I've always felt like that state of mind wasn't rationally possible. That kind of "knowing" isn't knowledge, my inner skeptic insists. It's faith. 

But it seems to me, suddenly, that I've stumbled into it somehow, that knowing, when it comes to this journey I'm on. I sort of think I've reached that state with this work, as far as I feel, sometimes, from true resolution. 

And just this moment, I think I understand the real point of question: it's not the "knowing" that is important, but the "doing." Once again, it's not the trigger, but what happens afterward that makes all the difference in the world.

What would I do if I knew I couldn't fail in this quest to reclaim my life?

I'd give it an honest try. I'd see where it led. I'd do my very best not to ignore the answers that come, no matter what form they take, and I'd try to embrace them with courage and humor. I would believe that redemption is possible. I would dare to hope that my work could make a real difference, not just in my life, but in the lives of others.

And then I'd go sit in a coffee shop every Saturday with my laptop and a cafe au lait, and I'd write about it.


  

Sigh.

Well, I've got another migraine today.

It's my usual, right on schedule. It's not responding as quickly to the meds I took earlier, either, so I'm probably not going to write a big post today. I've been waiting for them to kick in so I could focus and get some work done, and it's not happening. 

Not cool, migraine. Not cool. 

If I can, though, I will write more later in the week, so check back. I have some extra time on Tuesday and Thursday and may be able to get something written then.

Flashback to flashbacks

Last week, I told you I was going to dip back into some older posts and reexamine them and see what's changed since they were written.

Rather than allow myself to get all hung up on where to start and how to structure it and all the weird OCD things I tend to get hung up on, I just grabbed the first one that came up when I clicked on the "2011" link.

So today, we're going to talk about this post, in which I was naked. And which, coincidentally, I'm sure, was quite a popular post on this here blog. Until I posted that adorable video of my 3-year old twins trying to break dance, and then went viral with the Patch article, it had been viewed more often than any other post

Perverts, all of you!

_____

In case you're feeling a little tl:dr about going back to that post, "In Which I Share Too Much Information," I'll sum it up here. It's about the time I had my first and only hallucination-style, honest-to-goodness flashback to the scene of my accident, and it was brought on by a moment of sexual abandon with a college boyfriend.

Ahem. So.

I talk about why that stuff happens to people with PTSR: our brains are stuck in trauma loops, frozen at whatever point we landed in the fight-flight-freeze response during our trauma. When we're in that state, we can be triggered back into that response by anything that pushes the boundaries we've set up to protect ourselves from it.

I'd been avoiding heavily emotional experiences since the accident, because they disrupted my carefully-maintained sense of equilibrium. That night, I upset the balance, and what resulted was a very visceral, scary, sudden recollection of something I hadn't remembered before: my first moment of consciousness after I'd been hit, waking up to the voice of an EMT telling me to "Sit tight. We'll get you out."

After that happened, I pretty much locked down any future transmissions from my reptilian brain, and I never had another flashback. It was just too frightening. I cut myself off from those emotions and devoted my internal energies to keeping things under control.

That, my friends, is what PTSR is: turning parts of your own brain against each other in order to keep things under control.

After that time, there were a few-- very few-- moments where I wondered if I might get triggered again (although I didn't know about triggers or trauma loops then; I just thought of them as "moments where something reminded me too much of the accident and I freaked out"). The anniversary date of the accident was difficult for a long time. Occasionally, I'd pass by a car accident on the freeway and get a little anxious and nauseated and struggle to keep my eyes--and thoughts-- away. But nothing ever approached the level of that hallucinatory flashback again.

After a few more years, in fact, even my old triggers stopped triggering. I've stopped to help at car accidents and performed First Aid without losing my shit (you can take the girl out of the Girl Scouts, but you'll never take the Girl Scout out of the girl). These days, I even forget about the anniversary date of the crash and don't realize it until months later. 

Oh, wow, like right now. It was last month. February 11th. Even with it being much more present in my consciousness now as I write this blog, I still forgot until just this moment. I even wrote a post 2 days before, on the 9th. Huh.

Well. Anyway. Those things lost their hold, which seemed like progress, before I knew what progress actually looked like. It seemed like I was leaving them behind me. What I was actually doing was burying them ever deeper in the closet of my subconscious. Which is really the opposite of leaving something behind you and escaping its clutches for good. 

It's more like this:

And as anyone who has ever seen a cartoon knows, eventually, that door is going to burst open and all that stuff is going to come tumbling down.

So where am I now, with all of this?

Well, I still forget the anniversary date, which seems rather reasonable and healthy, actually. But I have noticed in the last couple of months that I am a LOT closer to a "freak out" than I've been in years. I'm hyper-aware of other cars when I'm driving; I'm having panic attacks over emotional highs and lows; I'm feeling a lot more fear than I've allowed myself to feel in years.

Things are starting to remind me uncomfortably strongly of the accident again, and my body is reacting. The other night, we were watching a TV show where a character had been in a car accident and he woke up to a voice coming from off-camera, saying, "Don't worry, just hang on, we'll get you out."

My palms are sweating just typing that out. It was a jolt, to say the least.

So, yeah. Stuff is a LOT closer to the surface now, which means I'm having frequent, unpleasant reminders that I'm still braced against that closet door to keep the teetering tower of junk inside from bursting out all over the place. The tower is smaller now, I'd like to think, but the closet is still too full.

How ironic that THIS is now what feels like progress. Not the insulated hum of equilibrium, but the sturm und drang and constant (to me, at least) discomfort of, you know, being a more emotional person.

Well, irony might not be the right word. It feels like progress because it is progress. There is no longer any comfort to be found in the lack of difficult feelings.

Despite all of this scary-sounding stuff, the biggest difference of all is my awareness of exactly what is happening in my brain when these moments occur. 

And that difference is everything. 

Because now, when I catch myself going into a trauma loop, I no longer feel victimized by it. It doesn't have the power over me that it once had, because I know what it is now, and how and why it's happening, and even if I can't stop it-- and I shouldn't, really, not if I want to work through these feelings instead of around or in spite of them-- I can keep a balanced perspective about it.

As Dr. Oz would say, I get the chance to let my Wise Adult come in and help me through it, and remind my lizard brain that Yes, that was scary, and Yes, you did the right thing at the time, and Yes, it's really over now, and Yes, you survived. You made it. You lived, you lived, you lived.

So now I am at once closer to the fears and further from them, as I can feel them and not be controlled by them, instead of not feeling and being controlled, which is how I've lived the last 20 years.

That feels true. I think I can say that. I can feel fear and not be controlled by it. Or not completely, anyway. And that's something. That's a very big Something, in fact.

It seems like once that particular penny drops, the rest is just a matter of "acting as if," and slowly but surely figuring out more "as if's" to act, and working through the scary feelings instead of around them, and letting the triggers fade because they don't actually trigger you anymore...

...and not because you've wrapped them in old newspaper and bubble wrap and  opened the closet door a tiny crack and shoved them inside and slammed the door again before you are buried under a pile of old skis and tennis rackets and broken lamps and Christmas decorations and moth-eaten, unfashionable coats you haven't worn in 12 years. 

You know. The easy stuff. Once you get here, all that's left is the easy stuff.

Piece of cake, she says. 

As if.