Dearest Readers,
I’ve had a great week. Last week, I was worried about being home alone for five days. I am proud to say I handled it really well, besides over-indulging in carbs, naps, and (tbh), wine. I spent a lot of time outside, I reconnected with friends for long, lazy dinners. I went to 6 am hot yoga TWICE. I was independent and met my better half with open arms at the airport, instead of feeling needy and clingy.
I ran a half-marathon on Saturday that I didn’t really train for besides keeping with my normal running schedule and eating a lot of pasta. You’ll be happy to hear that I beat my goal time on the hot and hilly course by one full minute and then immediately ate an ice cream sandwich and a breakfast burrito, followed by the sucking down of a bloody mary. Needless to say, this week I need to detox.
On the course, I was reminded of this old piece I wrote for the Medium publication Invisible Illness. I’ve copied it below, because as we emerge from this pandemic with masks off and shots in arms, the transition might be a lot of handle. It might be time to reevaluate the sustainability of our mental health interventions and make sure that we are set up for post-pandemic success. It might be time, as my pastor put it this weekend, to set up some solid boundaries.
So, for this week, take a trip back to 2019 with me. I hope this helps you think about what the next season of your life might hold, and how you can ensure that your cup is full and you have a lot of love and energy to give.
See you in your inboxes next week with some new content.
Take care of yourselves.
xo,
Sarah
It can happen anywhere.
Recently, it happened in the parking lot of a drug store where I was going about life like any other flexible Friday in-between meetings. All I had to do was run into the store, grab a few things and then head back to the office. The sun was shining, there was a cool breeze, and by all accounts there was no reason to be anxious. But I was suddenly seized by this wash of adrenaline. I got clammy. My heart started racing. I braced my hands against the steering wheel, closed my eyes and prepared to handle the wave of nausea that would hit me.
I won’t call what happens in these moments a panic attack, or an anxiety attack. I’ll let the professionals diagnose that. I prefer to call it an intruder — a thing that creeps up and interrupts my day or my thoughts for no reason other than to mess with things. I’ve noticed over the last couple of years that more women around me are confiding that they have these intruders in their life too.
We weren’t always like this, seemingly. I don’t remember having conversations about this when we were in our teens and 20’s, though I’m fairly certain we were dealing with intruders then too. Maybe they came in a different form — intrusive thoughts about our weight, our worth, our capacity to be loved. But I don’t remember the connection between my mind and my body being so strong.
I’ve been asking around my circles lately, trying to understand why so many of my friends in their late 30’s and early-ish 40’s seem to be fighting off these intruders too. One of my women put it so poignantly when she said
“I’ve just been trying to survive until this point, and now that I can relax and enjoy my life, all the feelings come out”
Ice melting. That’s how I see it. I’ve spent the last 15 years having babies, getting degrees, crawling my way through career changes, figuring out what I want to do with my life, divorcing and remarrying. Now our kids are pretty self-sufficient, my career is on the right track, and I can usually pay my bills on time — I have earned the privilege of realizing I get to have emotions. And those emotions are not always pretty.
I love harder than I ever have, which means that I grieve or panic harder than I ever have. A self-awareness cultivated through all the hard work of my adult life so far opens the door to the intruder and says “c’mon in”. I invited the connection between mind and body for good things, but the flip side of that is the kind of thing that can hit ya in the drug store parking lot.
It’s almost as if my body has become so used to worrying over the years — how to pay rent as a struggling young mother and grad student, how to keep a doomed marriage afloat, how to let it go peacefully, how to succeed in male dominated work worlds, how to handle traumas big and small — that now as I’ve reached a really steady place, it creates reasons to worry and mimics the panic I would feel in a real moment of fear.
Regardless of the why (and it’s going to be different for everyone), I had to have a plan for dealing with it. Here’s what I like to call my 4-part SOS plan for scaring away the intruder, curated with the help of my “anxious army”. And please remember, these tricks are not a replacement for long-term attention to your mental health with a qualified provider!
Pick a life preserver. Find someone who you can text or call in the moment who is willing to tell you what you need to hear. What you don’t need at this moment is long-winded advice or a bunch of questions. What you need is acknowledgment, love and maybe a well-timed meme. My recent drug store parking lot intrusion text looked like this:
It most definitely did not look like this:
The key to having a good life preserver is letting them know that is their job, telling them what helps you at that moment, and believing them when they say they want to help you.
2. Visualize the threat. Whether it’s an inner critic or a stealthy intruder, I like to give my unwanted guests a personality, a face, and a body so I can have a conversation with them in my head and tell them to GTFO. I learned this trick on a fabulous series on the app Sanity and Self, and I learned my inner critic is a very perky, put-together blonde super mom named Allison. I prefer to imagine my intruder as a goofy idiot with an old-school all-black cat burglar outfit and ski mask — someone out of a small-town security company commercial. By personalizing these non-people, I started to realize that I could talk them down, reason with them, even yell at them. I also started to realize that, in fact, these inner thoughts and feelings were allowed way too much power over me. I hate being controlled by actual human beings, so why was I ceding so much control over to irrational, intangible things?
3. For F&#$’s sake, BREATHE. That’s all. That’s the tip. Find a way to breathe that works for you. I use “in for 4 counts, hold for 4 counts, out for 6” a la Headspace but to each her own.
4. Be proactive, but make sure it’s legal. If you are anti-weed or CBD stop here and skip ahead. For the rest of you, assuming you can legally get some things, I’ve found a couple of items that are beyond helpful. One time I casually mentioned to a friend, “I wish they made an asthma inhaler for anxiety that wasn’t actual prescription drugs that I could use when the intruder shows up”. Turns out, someone already had that idea and I was super late to the party, per usual. The Bliss pen by Dosist has been a life-changer for me. It is more of a reactive thing, so I was also looking for a more proactive approach to maintaining some calm in my life.
I happened to meet the folks at R+R Medicinals when I was doing some freelance marketing work. While I didn’t end up working with them, I kinda fell in love with their vibe. I was a total CBD cynic, but I decided it couldn’t hurt. I loved that the company was passionate and run by a group of friends — it didn’t strike me as some big ol’ global conglomerate selling things that may or may not be CBD. What I think their products have really helped with is lightening the baseline tension in my body such that it is less prone to these unexpected bouts. I am generally just a more chilled out, glowy person now. The intruders still come, for sure, but they are more likely to be met with a laid back “hey dude, you need to get out” versus a full-blown freakout.
Beating your intruders is a life-long endeavor. Your intruder’s strength and tenacity will ebb and flow and require different battle tactics in different seasons of your life. Whether it is a mild-mannered, dopey cat burglar or a Law and Order SVU style criminal mastermind, the most important element of a winning battle is the awareness that you aren’t in it alone. There are a ton of us right there with you, clinging to our life preservers and fighting our own intruders.
When I beat mine back, I’ll turn and help you fight yours.
From the Anxiety Archives
I’m off to ID my intruder.
Also, YES that sermon was amazing this weekend.