More Hope

Thoughts today......As I was pickling beets, dill pickles, and relish, I had a lot of time to ponder about my thoughts. Something I remembered from the class that I took was creative people are the ones most prone to anxiety and depression because of our creative thinking. Our creativity doesn't just flow from our hands, but inwardly our creative energy can dominate our thinking. People with anxiety can conduct an entire orchestra, paint a great painting, or scupt a mountain just in our minds. Our creative thinking can keep us awake for hours and hours. My best creative inspirations always came in the middle of the night after hours of tossing and turning. But there was a flip side, my worst thoughts also would come in the middle of the night. When I was at my absolutely worst, emotionally,I could not sleep more than a few minutes at a time for about two weeks.

Let's talk about sleep. We become so used to the way we do things that we don't think that there can be something better. I never experienced a peaceful night's sleep until about a year ago. 40-some years of not knowing what sleeping peacefully meant. Once I realized how wonderful sleep was, I felt cheated! I was never a good sleeper. The minute I would hit the pillow, my thoughts would start twirling, and I would spend hours trying to go to sleep. When sleep would finally overcome me, it would not be very long until I had to get up and face the day. When I am extremely troubled about something, I will inevitably wake up at 4:00 a.m. This is my cue that there is something bothering me and I need to address it. I've had to learn to listen to the cues that my body is telling me. It takes time to hear what our bodies are telling us because we are not good at listening or slowing down our minds long enough to hear.

My body was screaming at me to slow down, but I didn't understand the language. It was like I was living in a foreign country. In 2000, after my last daughter was born, I battled with the fear that I would wake up in the middle of the night and go to her crib, and she would be dead. Thus began the obsession of checking and rechecking her to make sure that she was breathing. It didn't stop with just her though. I would check her, go to bed, and lay there and wonder if the other girls were breathing. So I would get up and check on them. When I would return to bed, I would then lay my hand on Danny to make sure he was breathing. Then the ritual would start all over again. It would only stop when I would give into the exhaustion. This ritual only lasted a few months, but will flare up now and again when I feel that I am losing control. When the ritual stopped, what happened next was I didn't feel the need to get up and check on my family, but I started waking up each morning feeling like I was choking. I would cough to get rid of the choking feeling for the first two hours upon waking while I was getting ready for school. I always thought I must be allergic to something in the house. What I didn't realize was that when I started dealing with the anxiety and stress in my life, the choking feeling suddenly went away. I realized all of this about two years ago when it dawned on me one morning that I was not coughing anymore. The funny thing was that it took me three months to realize that it had stopped. Now when I start to feel uncontrollable stress and anxiety in my life, that is the first feeling I get in my body is the feeling that someone is choking me. The scary thing is that I feel that way right now as I am writing this because it is so hard for me to put this down on paper.

Healing is a life-long process. I have really missed my group that I was with in Rapid for the past two and a half years. I have really struggled the past month or so because I don't really have anyone who understands what it feels like to be me. Everyone around me wants the quick fix. It is not quick, and it is not easy. I choose to wake up every day and find peace in everyday things. The biggest thing I miss is being able to talk to others about anything without risk of being judged or belittled for the way that I feel. That was the power of the group was that you could talk about anything, I mean anything, and it was ok. When I finally started to put words to how I was feeling, it was the biggest relief to know that the world didn't come crashing down on me. I had the right to feel however I was feeling. It is empowering for me to talk about who I am, what I feel, and how it can be so much better.