Tomorrow, at are-you-fucking-serious o'clock, Anne and I leave for this year's Star Trek cruise.
I've spent the last week getting ready, and as of about 18 hours ago, we are completely packed and ready to go. We are so ready to go, I've been sort of aimlessly wandering around the house, double checking and triple checking to make sure that we didn't forget something, and are actually so prepared there is no need to scramble.
Where there has ALWAYS been a sensation of anxiety and even panic before I leave for a trip like this, there's just calm.
Wait. Maybe it's a distinction without much of a difference, but it matters to me: there's just Calm where there has always been Fear.
This tells me that all the work I've done with my EMDR therapist is, well, working. I know it's neuroscience and peer-reviewed, and real, but I can't help feeling like it's magic, or maybe not real at all, because this sensation -- or, rather, the lack of sensation -- is totally foreign to me.
It's so weird that, in response to the wonderful absence of anxiety and worry, my brain and body want to create anxiety and worry.
So for the last ... maybe three days ... I've been happily noticing, "hey, I have all this under control, and I'm genuinely excited for this trip and the performances I get to be part of!" And my brain is like, "shouldn't you be freaking out and barely holding it together? Here, let me help..."
So a couple of times a day I visualize my brain as this employee who comes into my office and is like, "Hey, I did all these TPS reports for you to get worried about," and I have to tell him that I didn't ask for the reports, I don't want the reports, he doesn't need to make the reports, and he is dismissed. In fact, I'm going to promote and reassign him to a different campus. The Experience Joy team has an opening, it turns out.
I'm not sure I'm clearly communicating how awesome and also how weird this is, the dichotomy of working so hard to help my body understand the difference between an genuine, external threat, and an imagined what if threat that only exists in my brain. It's so weird to feel anxious about not feeling anxious (before I remind my body that I am safe and it's all good.) It's so awesome to notice that my brain is inventing that anxiety all on its own, and that I don't have to allow it to be real.
I haven't felt this way in a long time, and I'm just incredibly grateful to be here.
Someone reading this wants to start working with a mental health professional, but hasn't made the call, for Reasons.
If you're that person, and you're waiting for A Sign ... maybe this is it.
VIEW 4 of 4 COMMENTS
helainked:
It is not so strange what you feel, anxiety is a state of activation so powerful that it generates a conditioning towards contexts very difficult to extinguish and if this activation does not occur your limbic system is triggered because it creates cognitive dissonance before an internal incongruence by both exogenous and endogenous agents, but it is good that you express that you are aware and peexivo that you have control of your emotions. Do you understand how valuable and important it is for your "self"? You are going on a journey that you want to make so your corticothalamic connections and amygdala do not perceive it as a worry or as an external threat and that awakens that dissonance because you always live under that dichotomy, anxiety/non-anxiety. So don't worry my friend, it's not bad that you don't feel anxiety and you shouldn't feel bad or strange about it, feel strong because you are feeling something called self-control. Have a great trip and enjoy it with the freedom your brain is gaining. 🤗😃😃😃💛💛💛
fredhincanada:
I am glad to read this.