The Devil You Know

Kids have short memories.  I observed this again with my two young nieces at an indoor children’s fun zone recently.  They came out of the play castle complaining of hurt toes and injured legs.  I listened, cared and comforted, and they skipped happily back into the castle to play some more.

Before we had arrived to the kid’s fun zone my four year old niece, Julia, had asked me what kind of a day it was as we got out of the car.  The sun was bright and warm and the sky was clear blue.  I told her it was a great day and hoped she couldn’t sense the uneasiness that crawled beneath my skin.

That morning I woke with little anxiety.  Physically I felt fine and wasn’t experiencing any of the usual health obsessions and worrisome thoughts that I normally contend with on a day to day basis.  My mind was relatively calm and quiet.  This made me very nervous.

Thoughts bubble up to the surface of consciousness for every human being on the planet.  These thoughts range in subjects from brilliant inventions to paranoid conspiracies.  From musical arrangements to the theory of everything, and from criminal intentions to peaceful interventions. My thoughts have a tendency to revolve around unpleasant anxiety provoking things that I would rather not think of at all.  But I do think of them and all too often I think of them constantly.

At work, at home, when I’m out with my sister’s children, or at the movies, I don’t really get a break.  But as I lay in my bed on that morning, not thinking of those things I sensed a strange kind of emptiness.  Like a disquieting void in my normally busy mind.   And accompanying this unsettling calmness I had a feeling of dread in the pit of my stomach.  I should have gotten out of bed then, but I didn’t.

photo credit: simon.wakefield

What does the silence mean, I wondered.  Am I getting better?  Am I getting worse?  What kind of a day is it going to be?  I really wanted to know because I didn’t know.  And that was only one of the things that scared me.  The other is a little thought process that goes like this: I’m scared of being sick.  I’m scared of being well.  I’m scared of what I know.  I’m scared of what lurks around the corner and what I don’t know. Familiarity, no matter how uncomfortable it may be sometimes, can seem less painful than the unknown.  It’s a horrible trap.  Damned if you are, damned if you’re not.

Last November my anxiety level was so overwhelming that I took myself to the hospital’s emergency triage.  A doctor and a crisis nurse saw me in a little office.  After some questions I began to sob.  I was afraid to admit it, but I had to tell them – I was afraid of getting better.  “Even if there was a magic pill that was guaranteed to cure me for good”, I cried, “I couldn’t take it.”  I thought they would have had me committed on the spot.  Instead the doctor explained that he heard this all the time from people like me who had been coping with anxiety for a long time on their own.  That was a very bad kind of day.

Julia came out of the play castle again to give me a new injury report.  She was crying this time.  A boy had thrown a plastic ball and it hit her in the mouth.  I looked carefully at her lip and told her it wasn’t broken.  “Too bad”, I said.  “I knew a little girl once that got hit in the mouth with a ball and her lips broke.  She had to stay home from school for a week and all she could eat and drink was ice cream and chocolate milk shakes.”  The tears stopped and she laughed.  It was still a good kind of day.

Kids forget so quickly the things they really don’t want to remember.  Grown ups seem to have a much harder time of letting go than kids.  I certainly struggle with it at times.  That morning while I was still in bed all I did was think about the pain of anxiety.  And it scared me not to have it.  I didn’t know it at the time, but I had a choice that morning.  Is it better to stick with the devil you know, rather than the one you don’t?  Anxiety can make you feel like you don’t have many choices.  Maybe because you forgot you could, or because no matter what you choose it will lead to more anxiety.  Or perhaps it’s because we’ve been anxious for so long we don’t feel like we can trust anything – even the good moments.

When we left, Julia asked if it was a summer kind of day or still winter.  She grabbed my hand as we walked across the parking lot to the car.  The sun was still bright and warm and the sky was still blue.  “It’s a spring kind of day”, I told her.  “And it’s a great day because we got to spend it together.”

Hope this helps

Den