So, reading Furiously Happy opened me up to reading more books about anxiety.
I decided to acknowledge anxiety as the uncool friend who never leaves you alone when I had my third kid. My first inkling that I was the nervous type was a day in my high school cafeteria when a guy friend suggested I was a little too uptight (*shrug* I probably was). But until now, besides the general work I’ve been doing to better understand what makes me tick and how I can cope better with my life, I had never done any reading specific to anxiety.
In typical over-achiever fashion, before I’d even finished Furiously Happy, I chose three MORE anxiety titles, for a total of four, and planned an anxiety book-reading binge. This whole time, I had a nagging feeling that an anxiety book binge was a bad idea.
“So, depression and anxiety are like two sides of the same coin?” The Chaplain asked.
We were standing in the kitchen one morning. I’d just walked in the door after a night shift. It had been a busy night, partly because I had floated to another floor. I didn’t know where anything was (including my patients’ rooms), and had more patients in my assignment than we have on my own floor. I didn’t have the entry code for the supply room. It was like a field trip where all the doors were locked and there wasn’t a map. I didn’t mind it.
As usual, though, I was exhausted, and hadn’t had time for a real break. Instead, it had been five minutes here, five minutes there. On one of those five minute breaks, I’d come across a research article entitled “Get Excited: Reappraising Pre-Performance Anxiety as Excitement,” by Alison Wood Brooks, published in Journal of Experimental Psychology in 2014. Sometimes journal articles bogs me down, but overall, I’m a fan of reading about research studies. (If you didn’t already know I was a nerd, there you are.)
When this publishes, I’ll be on a train to New York, but as I write, my trip is a little less than two weeks away.
But the way I feel today is exactly what set me on the path towards this trip in the first place. In hopes that things are different when I come back, I wanted to save the feels from today, the ones I would like to be able to approach with a little more aplomb and a little less rigidity.
I’m feeling stuck.
Halloween and I have a difficult past. I lived next door to a church growing up. We were regularly subjected to smashed pumpkins, raw eggs, and sometimes toilet paper.
The year I was seven was the last year I was allowed to Trick or Treat. After that, we didn’t “celebrate” Halloween anymore. We would close all our blinds and hunker down that night. We watched old musicals and ate candy. It became a tradition, and two other families joined us. We’d rotate houses, eventually ending up at the house of the family who lived furthest out in the country, and therefore got the fewest Trick-or-Treaters.
I grew up and had kids. I didn’t think much about Halloween, and my kids were too little to care.
Except One was in Pre-K at a Catholic school. And they did all kinds of seasonal activities. At the time, I was kind of shocked. Why were Christians celebrating Halloween? By then, I thought we didn’t. Among Evangelicals, it had kind of become a thing.
My kid learned what vampires were from that school, and I was pissed. I remember having an uncomfortable conversation with his teacher about it.
We started our own tradition of take-out pizza by candlelight on Halloween. I would watch the Trick-or-Treaters go by. There were lights on up and down the block. It was the only night most of our neighbors came out and talked to each other. I found myself wondering why we were staying out of it.
This is me at 13, just before this whole saga began.
Endocrinology and I first got to know each other when I was 13. When I hit puberty, my thyroid went completely nuts. While I ate loads of food, I remained a featherweight and my period started, then stopped. My eyes started to bug a little, a classic sign of hyperthyroidism, and on a visit to my grandma’s house that summer, she realized something was off and suggested my parents take me to the doctor.
This began a really difficult phase of my life.
