This started out as a tweet, but I feel like expanding a little while I have a moment of quiet. Today I’ve learned a few things about myself. This new self that I exist in and as. The largest lesson is that it is incredibly easy to fall back into a pit of Panic Brain, and how very hard it is to shake myself loose once I’m there.
It started out simply. Last night my stream of emails stopped around 7pm. Not unusual. Most of the email exchanges I have are during normal-ish business hours, in the evening most people message me on social media instead. This morning I woke up, no email. Continues through my quiet time, which was nice as I was rather tired. Noon hits, which is the magical time that the youngest decides that he cannot bear to not constantly interact with me.
At the same time, twenty time sensitive emails also hit my inbox at once.
Cue panic. That moment of going from fine to OMG OVERWHELMED was like hitting a mental brick wall, then slowly sliding down. Ugh.
Drank water, stepped away from the cause of my overwhelmed for a few minutes, got some center back. Answered the emails, jumped into the mental health twitter chat by PBS, and kept kiddo happily entertained. Usually I’d feel like a Superhero for that, but no. The lingering panic remained.
After so many months of such unfathomable stress, feeling attacked from every angle, my brain just went into that mode and stayed there out of habit. I’m completely functional, you’d have to know me quite well to see the signs of distress, but they linger.
Today I learned that I can fake it through bad mental times again. I can push panic to the side enough to get what needs to be done, done. That’s really impressive. That I when I feel like I have too much on my plate, I can step back and see how to handle things bit by bit. Again, really impressive.
Healing is going to take a very long time. Setbacks happen and will keep happening. There is still a very long way to go.
I’m getting there though. I’ll take it.
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