A few nights ago I noticed that my cat, George, had been licking himself more than any respectable boy kitty should, so I mentioned it to Logic and then went about my business. When I woke up this morning George was doing double-duty. He would go to the litter box, come out and clean his nether regions only to go back into the litter box again. Seeming like a disaster waiting to happen, I called the vet to make an appointment for later that day. When our 2:40 appointment was confirmed I was off to dance and yoga.
Class started off as usual; Dom taught us the first set of 8 counts and then we warmed up before learning the rest of the dance. By the time we started stretching, I felt a little tired. Could it have been the beer I'd had the night before? Was I dehydrated? It's possible. Or it could have been that the routine was grueling and I wasn't listening to my body when it said SLOW DOWN!!!
We finished the dance and were running through it a few times before being broken up into groups for the performance. Everyone was going full-force, trying to tweak some moves here and there to make it their own and I was right along with them. Until I couldn't breathe. My lungs and chest were tight so I decided to take a break and get something to drink. As I walked in circles on the edge of the dance floor, chugging my Gatorade, I thought about how hard the routine was but also how much I liked it. I wanted to get back out there and give it my best. And that's what I did.
By the time class was over I was contemplating skipping yoga. It is my all-time-favorite thing to do but I was pretty beat up from dancing and wasn't sure I'd have the energy. Then I remembered that I had a new yoga mat. Really wanting to test it out, I decided to stay.
My regular instructor wasn't in so there was a sub. As nice as it is to have variety, it's just not the same when Jessie's not there. And this particular instructor had something to prove; class was intense. So intense that I had to revert to child's pose and lie on the floor quite a few times throughout the hour-long session. When it was over I finished off my Gatorade and quickly crossed the street for my 'energizing' smoothie. But even that didn't help. By the time I got home I was weak and shaky. And to make matters worse, the vet had called while I was gone, wanting us to bring George in as soon as possible because she was worried about his symptoms. So Logic did the grunt work of stalking the cat and managing to close the cage without George's crafty escape.
I didn't find out about this until I was driving home when I got a call from Logic saying that the vet wanted to keep George for the afternoon and do some tests to make sure he didn't have a blockage or anything. (He'd already left me a message but I hadn't seen it yet.)
Something about leaving the house that morning, knowing I'd be taking George that afternoon and finding out that he'd already been rushed up there without me threw me off. So between my workout exhaustion and cat-related drama I was not feeling so well.
I tried to eat, I tried to lie down, I drank and drank and drank water. Nothing was helping. My body was starting to act the way it does under anxious circumstances and as much as I tried to distinguish the difference between discomfort and fear*, it wasn't helping. Next, I tried to take a shower thinking the isolation and relaxation would help me to clear my head but I was so tired that I kept shaking, which only induced more anxiety. I finally got out of the shower and had enough time to grab another Gatorade before collapsing on the bed. My mind was swirling and my body was reacting with a knotted stomach and a tingling/burning sensation in my arms that felt as if my veins had just been injected with vinegar.
I'm a stubborn one and I was determined to talk myself down from this panic attack without resorting to my helper pills*. I opened the mental vault to my therapy session notes and skimmed through the pages:
~Focus on breathing - do
ujjayi breathing techniques and listen to my breath.
~Imagine that my thoughts are floating over rocks on a river bed - not stopping or getting stuck anywhere - just floating on by. (this one is usually awesome, but today I had no such luck. Anxiety was on to me. It knew my favorite tricks and came at me with new material.)
~See my body's physical reaction to anxiety as its way of getting the toxins out of my body and leaving me with only the good.
~Try to pinpoint what is upsetting me and remind myself what has helped in the past.
After 90 minutes of trying these techniques and about 10 minutes of sleep I decided to be compassionate with myself* and take a helper pill*. It was a struggle to even get up, find my medicine, cut the pill in half, drink it down and go back to bed. I felt so weak that passing out seemed like a real option. But I managed. And as I laid back down on the bed I started to think about the one 'solution' that I specifically skipped over: prayer.
Prayer and I go way back. Back to the beginning, when I was taught that it would help me in any circumstance:
~Having a bad dream? Pray about it.
~Want to make the dance squad? Pray about it.
~Driving a long distance and want to get there safely? You guessed it...Pray about it.
But when I deliberately decided to chuck the ole Catholic Church to the curb a few years back I have been questioning everything I've been taught and filtering out the things that don't make sense. Prayer is one of those things. I didn't believe that God only answers the 'prayers' of the people who believe in him. I didn't agree with the idea of an answered prayer being God's Grace but an unanswered prayer being the Mysterious Ways in which he works. Who is this God and why does he answer some prayers and not others? And why does he insist on being so mysterious?
These questions, among many others are the reason I questioned my faith to begin with. Some of it just didn't add up. And I wasn't willing to just blindly believe in what I was told. So I started questioning everything I'd been taught. My recycle bin filled up quickly and by the end of it, I only had a few things left in my Faith File. One was that I truly did want to believe in something. That there is Something out there (whether we go to him in the afterlife or not). I had a decision to make: either revert back to the faith I was raised with and feel like a fake or traverse the rugged terrain in front of me, hoping that all the hard work would pay off and I would eventually find something that made sense.
Again, being stubborn, I chose the difficult path. And that's where I've been ever since. It's a real bitch this path I've chosen; with narrowly carved roads up winding canyons in the dead of a desert summer. I can go days and days without seeing another person and when I do it is often from a distance - since they have their own path to take. This path is extremely isolating. All the things that I knew are no longer comforting and I find myself delirious with exhaustion in an attempt to find answers that are true to me.
Which brings us back to today. When I am having anxiety, I question my strength because all of my solutions revert me back to the path that I chose to leave. I get upset about something or feel out of control when I've pushed myself too far and I suddenly find myself stuck on a ledge without the proper spelunking equipment. Feeling scared, do I choose to pray or grapple with my fears in the silence of my own, anxiety-ridden head?
Actually, in these situations I typically go for the hand. Instead of praying or trying to think out my problems I pick up my journal and just start writing. Sometimes it takes me a while to have the courage and the strength to find my journal and pour my heart out on the always comforting page. Today was no exception: it took me more than two hours to get to the point where I could write without worrying that I'd lose my balance and only have one available hand to pull me back up onto the ledge. But after those two hours I grabbed my journal and wrote.
I must have written at least five pages, transferring the anxiety from my head to my hand and then to the paper. Once I started to write I felt a sense of relief. Finally I was able to get all of those worries and fears out of my head. It provided me with so much relief but it also surprised me with a little insight as well.
On page four, after spilling out all of my concerns I suddenly asked myself: "Why does the thought of not praying to God make me feel so alone? Do I believe in the concept of prayer? And if so, how do I justify the audacity that it would take to do so and to believe that God is going to help me while so many other prayers go un-answered?"
I went on to write: "Emile Durkheim believed that religion was vital for society to succeed and that it would crumble without its rituals and beliefs. He thought that people needed religion to be socially conscious and without it, no one would care about another and greed and chaos would rule supreme."
Then I countered that with what my hand transcribed from my subconscious. My mind was completely blank as I wrote this next section:
"I'd like to think that people are mostly good, so in thinking about prayer and it's relationship to religion, I'd like to think prayer doesn't need to be tied into religion. It doesn't need to be a part of society to keep it from falling apart. It doesn't even need to be the kind of prayer that I've been taught it to be. If prayer could be whatever I want it to be; whatever I feel it in my heart to be, than I'd like it to be my thoughts for others. Just thoughts; no request for resolution. In my ideal prayer scenario, I would wish something good for someone else and instead of expecting an answer, I would focus all of my energy on that person and hope that they are given some sense of comfort and peace as a result."
I let my anxiety reach epic proportions not because I fear the worst, but because I am searching for a source of comfort and when I look into my heart I find a gaping hole where religion used to be. So the next time I find myself in an anxious situation I would like to try to pray again. But not to the Catholic God or anyone else's God for that matter. I want to pray to the one who will hug me and hold me tight. Yes, I will ask for his help but not in the sense that I expect him to solve my problems for me. I will pray that God can provide me with love, comfort and peace of mind too. I don't need him to solve my problems for me. I just need him to hug and comfort me while I figure them out for myself.
~
Quotations used to signify things that my therapist and I have talked about.P.S. George is home now. As soon as I finished writing in my journal I decided to call the vet and check on him. They prescribed him some medicine and confirmed that he had a urinary tract infection. Poor guy.
