All That Feels

I hate being away from my kids for longer than two days. Given where I am when they are gone, that distance of separation can shorten as well. If I am away on vacation, or I have handed them off to their dad (we are divorced) and I am returning home as opposed to work, I am good for about a full day and night. This sadly, is not about the deep love I have for them or our magic bond. It is almost entirely about me not being very practiced in my ability to feel my own feelings.

Right now we are almost globally ‘sheltering in place’ because of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the story is very similar. Outside of the fact that these are just very uncertain times and there is genuine fear and worry about our safety, finances, and the repercussions this disease will have on the  economy, we are also facing our full humanity. Most of us are doing that at home, alone, or with our family members. No distractions. No place to go to spend money in, no gym to sweat through it in, no people or places to busy yourself into a subtle state of numbness with. For the extrovert (that’s me!) having to have forced time alone can cause great anxiety (note I said forced- chosen time alone is MAGIC), and I am not saying this anxiety comes from the fact that an extrovert can’t connect and feel calm without people (because we can). I’m saying that ANYONE, introvert or extrovert, will go into a state of panic when not prepared to face the fullness of what’s on the inside.

In the book Getting The Love You Want (by Harville Hendrix & Helen Lakelly) they call the distractions we use to avoid the feelings ‘exits.’ These exits are the things we use to refocus our attention on anything else besides the relationship, issue, or feeling that needs the focus. Just like an alcoholic drowns the feelings in booze, or the overeater eats the feelings away with the rush of comfort, I found I use my kids (among other things) to avoid feeling. A few weeks back I was taking my three sons to Florida to hand them off to their father who has spent the last six months there, along with my partner. I was SO excited to get some sand and surf in with my guys, with my love; we even had a family day planned where all three of us adults would hang together for the kids sake. After that I was going to indulge in some much needed R&R with my boyfriend on the beach for a few more days. ALONE. No kids. No house to clean. No rooms to redecorate. No work, no emails, no phone calls. Just me and my love. 

And all the dam feelings. All the feelings I had been running from for the last year. As soon as I woke up the first day the boys were gone I was caught only slightly off guard (I was anticipating this from practice) by the alarming quiet. Sometimes the quiet is like a welcome faux fur blanket from Pottery Barn. But that’s usually at home when after the right amount of quiet has given me time to wade into my emotions, and then I can quickly and efficiently be distracted or numbed to sleep again by the ‘To Do’s’ around the house. This quiet had that edge to it, and there was no wadding in. In the space that is usually taken up by the physical and emotional needs of my children there was just….space. Empty space and like the third baby all of a sudden being acutely aware it is her turn to get all your undivided attention because her older siblings are gone – my feelings rushed in.

There were so many I didn’t even know what to do so I just panicked and put up the best shield possible (and all I had available really) and started day drinking. This was an out of body type of experience for me as well because I was aware of what I was doing. I believed I could not handle whatever it was my feelings were trying to say. All my regular and honorable reasons I avoid messy feelings were not available, and so I watched myself actively choose another way to quiet the loud emotions raging to the surface. I remember thinking at one point ‘this must be what an alcoholic feels like. I get it now.’ Enter empathy. Then I realized what a giant sized piece of pride I wore like a badge because I am not an alcoholic. Nor do I handle avoidance of pain with over eating, under eating, overspending, drugs, Netflix, carbs. I realized I still avoid that shit like anyone else, but I do it in ways I respect. I absorb myself in my kids lives and needs. (To the point I struggled to even be away from them and alone with their father on a date night). I keep a very clean home (that takes so much more work than I could care to admit too with three boys) I work out, hard, five days a week. But, if I am telling the truth, those things I do on the regular I also do to avoid all that feels sometimes too.

I see this playing out right now all over social media during our pandemic. The introverts are feeling some sigh of relief because they no longer need a reason to recharge alone. Those with social anxiety are appearing calm and happy to those that know and love them well, because their is no pressure to perform. So they are winning, but the rest of us are just trying to do the next right thing so we don’t get swallowed whole by our fears, or worse yet the truth about what all those loud feelings might be saying in the first place. We are policing each other and getting down right angry when not everyone is following the rules, and let’s try that honesty thing again here – that is not simply because we care about the Senior citizens or want this over sooner than later – it’s because we have lost control. We don’t get to control this at all, nor other peoples actions that will affect us, and that brings a whole new level of discomfort (that we believe we also can’t control.) We are avoiding the whole idea that we have in fact lost control of this circumstance and to make that alarming thought be quiet, some of us use humor. We make the whole thing a big joke and we become those who need the laughs, hero. In a sense, those of us who use humor use it to be needed, and if we are needed then we have some sort or worth. That feels less bad than just being stuck in the whole mess with no value to add. I mean, God forbid we could all just be human together without needing to prove our worth while we are at it.

Guys. We all do something to avoid feelings. Some of those things are healthier than others arguably, but they are still exits from the real deal. What I am learning is that the more I avoid these pesky emotions the more they rage forward. What we resist, always priests. I am also learning something brand new and very revolutionary; just breathing into what Glennon Doyle calls “the hot loneliness” is actually far less scary than the work it takes to avoid it. In the words of Henry David  Thoreau “Nothing is so much to be feared as fear.” 

I had my first ever legit anxiety attack on the airplane ride home from my beach vacation. I could not breath, I wanted to vomit, I had to use the bathroom more than once, and all the voices were screaming on my insides. Trip was over. A world in chaos, my kids were staying behind with their dad. I spent the last four days drinking down feelings I was horrified to hear from, assuming I knew what they would say. And my heart was all done. No one, not even me was standing up with her to give her a steady hand to feel, so she collapsed and gave into the perplexing anxiety that took over. Thank God for my partner. He comes alive in a crisis and his First Responder care taking kicked into high drive. Between him and the God I plead my very life too, I made it to the other side.

I have always loved the ocean, deeply loved the sea. Water is the most calming, most mystical and powerful life source to me. I am drawn to the water yet I always arrive to it with a little bit of trembling. My really tough and confusing feelings, the ones I try an avoid like loneliness, are much like a set of waves in the ocean. The waves start coming and there’s no stopping them. If you fight them, they can drown you quite literally (this is where anxiety happens for me- the resisting produces the anxt). What I had not really fully grasped and practiced (until this anxiety attack) is that these feelings we all run around trying to avoid are just like that set of waves in the sea. They come, they transform, and then they go. Waves have a purpose. Our feelings won’t kill us, and they too have a purpose.

Real waves feel so powerful that when you look at them, when you take in the ocean you have a still knowing, a reverence of fear and respect for it. Something inside of me knows in that water I am changed, free, but I could die at the same time. My father taught me when I was very little not to resist a wave in the ocean. He told me not to fight it all, but to let go and give into it. He said if you flow with it, it will bring you back up to the surface. I don’t ever want to know what an anxiety attack feels like again. I also don’t ever want to miss the transformation that happens in the wave of my feelings. My kids, my exercise, my clean house, my humor, those never get to be excuses again for not feeling the hard things. I want to let go and let that wave bring me back up to the surface, polished and new by the grinding of the sand. 

Now. For the “How To” of wadding into all that feels……

Next week Bravehearts

xoxox Pinz