I’ve been struggling with anxiety for a little while now. I wake up with my fists clenched, and my jaw tight, and a deep belly dread for what the day might bring when I get out of bed. I spend most of the day fighting back feelings of suffocation. Why can’t I take a deep breath? Why do I feel like if I exhale everything will fall apart?
Depression and anxiety aren’t unfamiliar companions in my life, but I find more and more they are taking up too much space. They’re crowding out the other parts of me. Maybe the other parts of me are struggling for air?
After the birth of my daughter, embracing a heightened sense of alertness felt like a good survival tactic while I learned how to be fully present to this new life: a little girl fully dependent on my body and heart and mind for nourishment. But, as the months marched on that alertness morphed into a more demanding energy - something with the increasing potential to actually stand in the way of my ability to fulfill my role as a mother.
My mental and emotional reserves were already depleted by the time I thought I might try to take action against how I was feeling and address the enduring effects of poor sleep, an overactive mind, and a weary body. In retrospect I could see I’d already accomplished the full cycle of my poor coping skills: disconnect, hide, obscure, stay silent, lather, rinse, repeat. Why is it that our hurt and worry tells us to keep quiet? What is it about sharing our burden that makes us feel guilty and ashamed?
By early December of last year I was frayed, and it was the silence that was weighing on me the most. When I considered the right supports in my life, I couldn’t sort out how to start telling a story that started months and months ago with non-sequiturs that always felt out of place “Do you remember when you planted flowers for me? That made me feel unloved.” or “Remember when you said you were moving for a new job? That made me feel lonely and lost.” In my silence, I placed my anxiety as the main character of everyone else’s story, and lost sight of how to talk about my own.
And then, as it does every year, Advent entered my life quietly, without too much intrusion, and asked me to consider what it means to hope.
Around this time I texted my husband:
“I think Christians got the end of the world thing all wrong. I think it’s hubris and wishful thinking that lead us to the idea that everything is going to be obliterated in one global catastrophe. I think what’s more likely is what we are already experiencing: small losses that are forcing us to grieve and are teaching us how to live differently in service of some larger transformation and evolution. Maybe the whole point of Christianity is to teach us to grieve in order to evolve.”
And then, a few weeks later I wrote in my Notes App:
“I cannot threaten my psyche with the spiritual temptations to catastrophize and aggrandize by giving into the indulgence of total apocalypse.”
These notes were fueled in part by the war and genocide in Gaza, the deeply intimate and difficult partner work of building a future together as a family, and a number of other challenging events that took hold in my community last fall, but also I think a real internal desire to make peace with a longstanding propensity of mine to take the quiet, fearful way out.
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As a mother, I’m constantly evaluating what about me is taking root in my daughter. When children are small and still learning to communicate for themselves it is easy to miss that everything, everything, everything we do is visible to the children watching us. The smallest gestures are seen and filed away for future evaluation and experimentation. I know that how I handle my anxiety and depression has already imprinted, at least in part, onto my daughter. I don’t feel guilty about this. The way I dance in the kitchen while I cook for her has also imprinted. The way I give her kisses has imprinted. The way I sing to her while she does something necessary, but uncomfortable and scary, has imprinted. Feeling shame about any part of me will plant the seed of shame in her, so I embolden myself to take it all instride. I trust that who she is, and who I am in her, will find their way in time and trial. In her own time, I know she will have to discern between the conceit of despair and the reality of hope, just as I am trying to do now.
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I am a stubborn student, but an attentive mother, so in the weeks that bled into the winter holidays, and the New Year, and now Lent, I’ve been taking opportunities to consider the following questions: What if it’s good? What if it’s easy? What if it feels good? I’ve been making my best effort to stay aware of these questions, these moments of in-breaking light, because that is all I have found the energy for. It is a learning experience for me to admit that I don’t have enough energy to do more than simply notice the small incremental shifts my mind is making from believing that total catastrophe is inevitable to believing that healing is happening and is possible.
I wish I had the energy and insight to know what to do to heal from what hurts me, and others, but I don’t. I imagine healing has something to do with finding the right ways to break through silence; to speak when we need to; to offload our burdens when it’s necessary; to trust in the selflessness of others; and to know that hope is not aspirational, it is in fact a promise.
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