Healing Isn't Easy

Beyond the Book: The Slow Process of Rebuilding

This weekend I’m away. I’m not far. I’m about 5 miles from my home. I’m trying to get some time alone to focus on my book and the work that I need to do to be done with this first draft. It turns out, sharing a wall with a teenager whose room is overrun with musical instruments isn’t exactly conducive to book writing.

Getting away, staying at a hotel or AirBnB near my home when it’s book crunch time, isn’t new to me. It’s something I’ve done at some point for both of my previous books. But it’s something that I’ve been very reluctant to do this time around.

These last few years I’ve found it increasingly difficult to leave my home without my family. This is a response to various traumatizing events in recent years involving my family: swatting, harassment, house fire, mental health crises and more. I’m not afraid of the outside world in like an agoraphobic way. I’m more afraid of what will happen to my family if I can’t keep my eye on them at all times.

There have been times where going to a movie felt impossible. Where I would annoy my children with check-ins when I’d try to have dinner out with my partner or friends. To be fair to myself, there have been times where I legitimately needed to stay close. Where I really needed to keep an eye on everything, where my responses seemed very reasonable given the circumstances.

But we aren’t in the same circumstances anymore. Even though it feels like just yesterday everything was chaos, it has been over a year of relative peace and calm in our home. But I don’t know how to get my body and brain to know that on a level that I can feel.

When I think about it, it feels like if I were a computer system, all of my pages and pages of code for responding to various events were wiped out by an emergency override, and now this code of “PANIC AND WATCH EVERYTHING AND BE AWARE OF EVERY POSSIBLE DANGER AT ALL TIMES” is all I’ve been left with. And the decades of work I had done prior to build appropriate emotional responses to situations need to be rebuilt step by step. And it’s hard, because any little thing that has any component of my past traumas pushes the emergency override button again and it feels like I’m back at square one.

I’ve been in therapy for this. I have a really amazing therapist and we’ve been making good progress. Everyone close to me can see that my default alert level has been noticeably lowered. We worked for weeks to prepare for the time I spent away at my honeymoon, and it gave me the tools to handle the small crises that occurred during that trip better than I could have imagined a few months earlier.

But when I’m not steadily working on it, something small can set me back a lot.

My therapist has been urging me for months to set up some time alone to work on my book and I’ve resisted it. But last week I finally booked three days on a whim of “THIS BOOK IS SO LATE” panic that had been increased by a recent bout of covid a that took even more precious writing time away. Now, I didn’t tell my therapist I was booking this, so we did no work to prepare. I just booked it and left. I thought that the fact that I was able to book it meant that I was in a place where leaving would be fine.

But the moment I got to my hotel unease seemed to fill my body. And I found myself checking in with my partner and my kiddos, listening for any faint sign that anything might possibly be wrong. Then I had a scare with an alert on our home security camera. It was nothing major, and I was able to confirm within five minutes that all was well. But boy did it set me off.

I suddenly felt sick. I was shivering, nauseous. I was sitting alone in my hotel room feeling like I was falling apart. For a moment I thought I had actually magically gotten instantaneously sick. Should I go to a doctor? Should I go to bed? But then I remembered many a doctor’s visit in the past for similar situations and that they all ended with a strong recommendation to get help for my ptsd. And I had been getting help for that. So I took a breath and looked around me like my therapist said and tried to explain the situation to myself as my logical brain could understand it. At most, it helped me realize that what I was feeling in my body was most likely a trauma response, but it didn’t actually do anything for the trauma response.

Then I got a reminder on my calendar that I had a float appointment in about a half hour.

Ok, so if you’re not familiar with float tanks, they are basically like these isolation tanks filled with heavily salted water at body temperature. You lay in them and float on top in silence and complete darkness. You stretch out your body while you are perfectly supported by the water. You meditate or zone out. I started going a little over a month ago and fell in love. It was hard to know that I was unreachable for an hour, so I usually picked a time when the kiddo was at school and everyone else was safely occupied. Those moments of isolation, once I got into it, reminded me of some of the peace I used to have before…all this.

But last night, I was already in a highly escalated state and then I was supposed to go into isolation - WITH MY THOUGHTS???- for AN HOUR?? I was so tempted to cancel. But I had made the appointment that morning because I knew that I needed it. So I decided to keep the appointment.

When I arrived they said I was the last appointment and asked if I wanted to stay an extra half hour for free. I immediately said yes because apparently a good deal will still override my trauma response?? Anyways. Now I was going to be isolated and unreachable for an hour and a half.

I sat down in the tank and then laid down. As I stretched my body out and was supported by the water, I was immediately aware of how much physical pain I was in. My neck, my shoulders, my upper and lower back - every muscle in them was screaming in pain and it was only when all other stimuli was removed that I was able to feel the physical response to the stress I was under. It was shocking to feel the pain of how compressed my body had felt under stress, at how tensed every muscle in my body had become. And it was shocking to realize how unaware of it I had been. No wonder I felt so sick.

This was one of the most difficult floats I have done. The first half hour or so I fought rising panic that I hadn’t done enough to ensure that everyone at home was safe and sound. My partner was at a gig and so my 15 year old was home alone until late at night. What a horrible mother I was for not checking just one more time. I got out of the tank and sent a text to my mother (who lives literally 10 feet away in our backyard) to ask her to please put the dog to bed and check in on the teenager. Then I put my phone on do not disturb and climbed back in the tank.

I definitely felt like I had “failed” at the whole relaxation thing, but I reminded myself that I was doing the best I could. I laid back down and after another 15 minutes or so of squirming, I was able to get some peace. My mind was able to relax and just wander for the first time in days. The pain in my body faded away. It felt so lovely. Everything felt okay in my body for the first time in a few weeks.

When the time was up, I showered and got dressed, grabbed a cup of tea, and then called my kiddo to wish him a good night. He was in a lovely mood for a teenager. Friendly enough to tell me about the school basketball game he had watched, and teenager enough to want to get off the phone and enjoy his time at home without parents.

So now it’s the next day and I’m trying to remind myself that everything really is okay, and I can spend the day writing without having to care for anyone but myself. I have a beautiful, strong support system that is keeping the show going at home while I’m away. The people I love so dearly are amazing, competent people who are doing a great job at taking care of themselves and each other. The people I love value my work and want me to be able to get it out to the world. And I’m sure they’d love if I was able to place a little more faith in that. So that’s what I’m trying to do today.