Just drop it
Jul. 21st, 2011 12:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cosmolinguistI feel so much better now that I know there's Test Match Special on today. It's helping already and they haven't even started playing yet because of the weather.
I've had a bad week, a really bad week. I started to gradually feel better yesterday but I still had a long way to go. Today I woke up knowing i had to put some work in to keep it going.
My lovely friend (who will read this at some point no doubt; hello!) sent me an e-mail about a week ago, after a bad week he'd just had. He struggles with anxiety too. And he wrote this:
And because it's such an entrenched life-altering condition, you can't fix it with a trick this easy. The drugs and the therapy and the time off work can all be good: the drugs don't fix your problems but ideally take away the crippling anxiety that's keeping you from being able to focus on solving them; the therapy can teach you tricks for better coping mechanisms; the time off work gives you space to breathe and be kind to yourself at what is a much more demanding set of circumstances than it might seem.
But the problem with those things is that they can get entrenched too. it can take so long to get better that you get acclimatized to the recovery process. You can forget what it felt like to feel better. Sometimes it's impossible to be patient about the bad patches you know you just have to wait out, but sometimes it's too easy: sometimes you can find a little too much familiarity and a paradoxical comfort in the misery, in the wait to feel better. Change is hard and change takes time and effort, and sometimes you don't have those things to spare or don't want to spend them on getting better. Indeed sometimes you can spend that energy on nurturing the bad feelings, in coddling your psychosomatic illnesses and working up a good steam of self-pity and really digging your heels in to the doldrums whenever anything comes along that might help drag you out of them. You can get stuck. I've seen it in other people and have caught glimpses of it in myself. That's what my friend is saying here about not wanting the fever to break.
There's no good reason for this, and it's something that can be really frustrating to see in other people. It's bad enough for me and I've been there; I can only imagine what people unaffected by anxiety think and feel when they see a loved one seemingly wallowing. It's a strange thing, but I think it is evidence that this is a real illness, that it isn't just about being selfish or undisciplined or lazy (though, of course, it's not like anxiety never happens to selfish, lazy or undisciplined people, but it's more than that).
And there is worse advice than to just try what my friend is talking about here. It doesn't always work, but I think it's always worth a try as soon as I have the mental and physical energy again. I had never been able to articulate it as well as he does here, so I am delighted to read not only that this is not just a crazy idea of mine, but to see it so well described is as satisfying as having an itch scratched that you can't reach yourself. Just put it down! It's like cartoon characters running fast enough that they can get off the cliff before they notice they shouldn't be running anymore; it's like the Nazi guard tricking the escaping prisoner by speaking to him in his own language and getting an instinctive replly before he remembers his cover story.
It's a double-edged sword: our brains are very stupid and can trick us into anxiety, which is just an unhelpful overreaction of a normal, helpful process...but our brains are stupid so we can trick them too, kickstart them back into more normal function before ill brains have a chance to sabotage us again.
It doesn't always work, and I don't think it ever works perfectly. It always leaves me feeling a little more fragile than I ever am when I'm really "normal." Recovery is still a long process, and not a linear one: it's discouragingly easy to slide back as much as you feel you are progressing forward, sometimes. But still.
Just drop it.
That's what I'm trying to do today.
I've had a bad week, a really bad week. I started to gradually feel better yesterday but I still had a long way to go. Today I woke up knowing i had to put some work in to keep it going.
My lovely friend (who will read this at some point no doubt; hello!) sent me an e-mail about a week ago, after a bad week he'd just had. He struggles with anxiety too. And he wrote this:
The key is to not want to avoid the fever breaking, right? And rather want it to hurry up and get here. Here is a thing I wrote tonight, cannot remember if I passed it along already due to confused mental state of an hour ago? But anyway...I say something like "here are the rules, but of course they're just *my* rules, and I don't expect them to work for other people"...It articulates something that I have long tried to do with my own anxiety: try to just turn away from it, just cut off its food supply. Anxiety feeds on your energy and your love and your concentration and your time; it chews them all up and leaves you nothing left but pain and ugliness and misery and exhaustion.
1. If you can't clearly straight enough to figure out what it is, it's probably anxiety. Because anxiety impairs your ability to think clearly. You think more clearly even when you're drunk as an owl, than you do when you're under the influence of anxiety and otherwise sober as a judge.
2. If you try to get it to go away by ignoring it before you have fully understood what it is, that's called DENIAL and it doesn't work. If you try to get it to go away by ignoring it *after* you have fully understood what it is, that's called COMPLETING THE THERAPEUTIC PROCESS, and it works just fine. Hmm...
...You know, maybe those rules *would* work for other people?
I told Rachelle that sometimes, as odd as it sounds, you can sort of just "turn from" anxiety, starve it instantly of attention, remove it from the picture. This is something I've found to be true, but it occurs to me now to notice that it probably works because I've already gone through YEARS of putting my chin in my hand and trying to dope the thing out, and thus have ended up with a pretty good understanding of it. So for me, shorting its circuit can be effective almost *because* it's so counterintuitive. Like a band-aid: right off! It's about as counterintuitive as it comes, and it does actually take a bit of mental *exertion* to do it because of that...and I always laugh, you know, because (although I don't quite know how to explain this) there is something absurd in it. It sort of *shouldn't work*... yet because it does, it's not my *problem* that it "shouldn't", and that's sort of funny because where does anxiety even come from *anyway*, right? Well, I make it right on the premises, obviously. In a way, it's just about ceasing to make it. Put the anxiety down! Just put it down! But who wants to be told to "just put it down", who can "just" do anything for heaven's sake, I mean it's a little bit trickier than it sounds! And I guess that's what's so funny about it, so I guess maybe if it isn't funny then it isn't working? "Just put it down, just drop it", that's such a non-reasonable demand for anybody to make of anybody, even to make of oneself, so if it actually *does work* then what on earth could be funnier than *that*?
You have to know what's it's doing first though, eh Holly?
And because it's such an entrenched life-altering condition, you can't fix it with a trick this easy. The drugs and the therapy and the time off work can all be good: the drugs don't fix your problems but ideally take away the crippling anxiety that's keeping you from being able to focus on solving them; the therapy can teach you tricks for better coping mechanisms; the time off work gives you space to breathe and be kind to yourself at what is a much more demanding set of circumstances than it might seem.
But the problem with those things is that they can get entrenched too. it can take so long to get better that you get acclimatized to the recovery process. You can forget what it felt like to feel better. Sometimes it's impossible to be patient about the bad patches you know you just have to wait out, but sometimes it's too easy: sometimes you can find a little too much familiarity and a paradoxical comfort in the misery, in the wait to feel better. Change is hard and change takes time and effort, and sometimes you don't have those things to spare or don't want to spend them on getting better. Indeed sometimes you can spend that energy on nurturing the bad feelings, in coddling your psychosomatic illnesses and working up a good steam of self-pity and really digging your heels in to the doldrums whenever anything comes along that might help drag you out of them. You can get stuck. I've seen it in other people and have caught glimpses of it in myself. That's what my friend is saying here about not wanting the fever to break.
There's no good reason for this, and it's something that can be really frustrating to see in other people. It's bad enough for me and I've been there; I can only imagine what people unaffected by anxiety think and feel when they see a loved one seemingly wallowing. It's a strange thing, but I think it is evidence that this is a real illness, that it isn't just about being selfish or undisciplined or lazy (though, of course, it's not like anxiety never happens to selfish, lazy or undisciplined people, but it's more than that).
And there is worse advice than to just try what my friend is talking about here. It doesn't always work, but I think it's always worth a try as soon as I have the mental and physical energy again. I had never been able to articulate it as well as he does here, so I am delighted to read not only that this is not just a crazy idea of mine, but to see it so well described is as satisfying as having an itch scratched that you can't reach yourself. Just put it down! It's like cartoon characters running fast enough that they can get off the cliff before they notice they shouldn't be running anymore; it's like the Nazi guard tricking the escaping prisoner by speaking to him in his own language and getting an instinctive replly before he remembers his cover story.
It's a double-edged sword: our brains are very stupid and can trick us into anxiety, which is just an unhelpful overreaction of a normal, helpful process...but our brains are stupid so we can trick them too, kickstart them back into more normal function before ill brains have a chance to sabotage us again.
It doesn't always work, and I don't think it ever works perfectly. It always leaves me feeling a little more fragile than I ever am when I'm really "normal." Recovery is still a long process, and not a linear one: it's discouragingly easy to slide back as much as you feel you are progressing forward, sometimes. But still.
Just drop it.
That's what I'm trying to do today.
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Date: 2011-07-21 01:17 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-07-21 05:36 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-07-21 05:42 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-07-21 01:57 pm (UTC)off to the doctors in a minute undecided if i'm going to let him prod at me, but i get to talk about depression/anxiety stuff and ask for yet more meds, fun!
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Date: 2011-07-22 08:02 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-07-21 07:15 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-07-22 08:04 am (UTC)