Just breathe

Today is the first day in more then two weeks that I feel I can write, that I actually want to write. And still I am not sure how to go about it, like somewhere along the way I've lost my words or maybe myself. In the last few weeks it has become clear that we are on the verge of change (just to clarify - not pregnant and not moving country) and it has caused what I realised last night to be a mild case of an anxiety attack. For me, anxiety doesn't wash over you in one big wave of cold sweat. It creeps up, slowly, until you feel like you are drowning, like there is no more room to breathe. I didn't even notice it at first because anxiety has become a constant part of daily life these past few years, but then I found myself sitting in my living room just looking at the clock and waiting for the bad news to reach me. In my mind I had no doubt that there are bad news coming my way, that it will happen any minute now. Though nothing really happened I could feel my heart beating faster, I could feel myself getting impatient, I could feel the certainty of my life crumbling before my eyes.

Some of it, I figured out yesterday, is because of the waiting. We are on the verge, and some of the changes will happen in the next few months, while others will need more time to develop but has been set in motion. We have been inching toward those changes for months now, and it has been slowly driving me mad. I don't do slow or waiting very well. I like retrospect and talking about things to death like the next person, but long processes are not really my thing. Waiting is even less, and our lives are going in the way of no more swift changes, no more finding a house in two weeks, no more moving a country in ten days. I have tried doing it gracefully, I have tried embracing the wait, I have tried pushing it to the back of my mind and ignoring it. None of my carefully executed strategies worked. So I did the only thing I could - I baked. I decided to make a cheesecake, because a baked cheesecake is a good lesson in patience - you have to buy the ingredients (because who amongst us really keep in the house about a kilo of Philadelphia?), then you have to prepare it and bake it for almost 2 hours, then cool it, ice it, and put in the fridge for about 7 hours. There are no shortcuts, no way to cheat the system, no way to steal a little piece straight from the oven. It turned out perfect, so maybe patience is a virtue after all.
Some of it was the distance from Denial-Land. I do miss Denial-land so much. The older I get, the more I come to understand the guy in the Matrix who just wanted to go back to not knowing. Sometimes I wish you could un-take the red pill. Most of the time we live our lives in the sense that "it won't happen to me" - I will not be in a car accident, my house won't be burgled, I won't lose my job, I won't wake up one morning and discover my son is half-blind. After enough of these things happen to you, you stop saying "it won't happen to me", you just go with "I wonder which of these will happen next". Sure, you have to get back on the horse and all that, but how can you really stop being afraid you'd fall again?
Some of it was fear. Not the good kind of fear, the one that keeps you alive and unharmed, but the crippling kind of fear that paralyses you and stops you from moving forward. It's the fear of repeating the same past mistakes, it's the fear of the future, it's the fear of everything disappearing in front of your eyes.

I hate the word anxiety, it makes it sound frivolous or silly somehow. It makes me think of fragile victorian women who needed smelling salts. Somehow the word makes it to be something that you should have overcame by yourself, something weak people or childish people or over-dramatic people suffer from.
It might be true, God knows I told myself all these things on many sleepless night, when I couldn't see how morning will ever come. For me, anxiety gets worse in the night. Somehow, deep into the wee hours of the night when the house is eerily quiet, after the fifth time I checked the house is locked and the kids are breathing, that is when I can't control it anymore, when I can't tell myself that it really will be ok, that the voices in my head are just irrational fears that have no relation to my real life.

Anxiety takes everything that is bad, or hard, or uncertain and makes it ten thousand time worse, and when life keeps putting more and more hurdles in front of you it makes it harder to be able to distinguish between real-life problems to tackle and irrational fears. In the last couple of weeks everywhere I looked something was broken and needed me to fix it, or it was stuck and needed me to wait, or it was just soul-suckingily hard. Kids were sick, DLA and forms needed to be filled, money issues reared their ugly head, Ron had trouble in school, jobs were delayed, houses around here were expensive rubbish...
I felt like I was drowning. All I could do was keep my head above water and try to breathe. But I couldn't write, or smile, or see a way out. I lost my way and my blog. All I did for two weeks was played Candy Crush, knitted animals and baked.
Last night I told Hidai all of my fears. I just sat there and told him about the noise, and the anxiety, and the deep dark fears. I let him see inside the darkness of my mind. Hidai gave me hope, my little ray of sunshine and reality. He gave me, like always, his ear and his shoulder and way more love and understanding than I deserve.
And he helped me start to find my way back.