The Goldenrod Chronicles, New Things

Not scary anymore?

Driving to the Beloit Garden Club plant swap last Saturday morning - an event I’d never been to before with a group I have never participated in before - I realized I wasn’t anxious. Like, not even the tiniest bit. Like not even the slightest worry or even thinking in the slightest about it. No anxiety about where to park or what the setup was going to be or that I wouldn’t know anyone.¹ No worries about looking like I didn’t know what I was doing. Absolutely nothing.

I realized all of this, like felt it in my bones, alone in the car on the drive there. And maybe it’s less that I realized it, but more like I realized the absence of anxiety.

If you’ve been a person accompanied by anxiety or rumination or worry or a very talkative brain for a very long time - and then your brain and body have stopped doing the anxiety thing maybe you understand what I mean.

It’s less that the anxiety has ‘stopped’. Stopped implies something like an allergy attack. You feel normal and healthy - then your allergies come and you feel rotten - and then the allergies and the sniffles and the swollen eyes and post-nasal drip go away and you feel normal again.

But this absence of anxiety is something else. It’s not the same as feeling well and then getting an ailment that goes away. It’s like feeling well for the first time ever. An unfamiliar absence, an absence that only becomes familiar over a very, very long time.

It was a very real realization for me in the car last Saturday, the feeling of being without. New things, especially social settings and new environments², (and also very regular things) coated me an a shaky coat of anxiety. More like, roiled my belly in an almost constant churn of anxiety. Almost my whole life. Forty out of forty-four years. 90.9090% of my time here on this planet. So much time feeling (I mean really feeling) the anxiety sprint through my gut and limbs and brain. In my body. Like a constant companion. A unwelcome guest, except for not knowing anything other than the fellowship of anxiety.

Nerves, constant nerves. On end.

I am not sure how to describe living with (IN) a condition for most of your life, and then have it go away. It’s a completely new landscape, a calm and content one. A feeling nothing one. An empty one, but in a good way.

This may just be a if you know, you know situation.

Yoga. Meditation. Therapy. They all helped (even though I didn’t exactly know what I was trying to get help with), but not like my escitalopram rx did (read: Lexapro). Do you know what it’s like to go from feeling like your insides are on fire and rumbling like tectonic plates bristling against each other to feeling . . . nothing?

Let’s just say I’ve never felt so glad to feel nothing before. It’s like magic. It’s like floating. And no, it’s not like being some sort of headless zombie. It’s like being fully in your body and able to just . . . be.

Four years on escitalopram got me through a lot. As in, it helped me manage a lot of new things with no anxiety. It’s amazing what it’s like to go take a major professional exam with no horrible worry and the physical sensation of having your insides be eaten by a colony of ants. To start a new job (twice). To do all the new things without feeling overly invaded by an invasive crawling vine strangling anxiety.

And more than getting through a bunch of new stuff, it was enough time for my body to know and understand that it can do new and scary things and not be overtaken by anxiety - or at least that all encompassing feeling of it in my body and constant ruminations in my head. Feeling that non-anxiety (aka, nothing) became normal. Became my baseline.

And knowing what it felt like to not feel anxiety in my body, to be in a body that was not swamped with anxious feelings - made it possible for me to access that non-anxious feeling when I needed it. As I need it now.

Last last year my (new, amazing) doctor and therapist and I decided to switch up the meds. With a new ADHD diagnosis and the recognition that maybe escitalopram was causing some other side effects - this team of geniuses decided to mix up the meds and try something new.

I, a very good patient who very much likes rules, did a perfect job tapering off the Lexapro and starting my new meds (Wellbutrin, for anyone wondering). And I noticed things change - and fast.

I felt something new, and familiar - the roiling feeling that’s half-energy and half cold-shivers running through my body and wrapping around and squeezing my heart - the feelings of anxiety. It was so weird to feel those sensations in my body again, after so long away.

BUT…with four years of knowing what my calm body can feel like…I could accept this long-lost friend, and also summon the feelings of a calm body. I could say hello, and then goodbye, to the feelings of anxiety. (Are feelings of anxiety and anxiety the same thing? I don’t know.) It was a switch I could flip.

So there I was, driving south to a new event with a new group of people - 💡 realizing there was no anxiety in my body and also that if it returned I could relax it away.

So here we are. Do I love it that the feelings of anxiety (and also some hard core anxiety thank you work situation and national landscape) are back in my sphere of experience? No, no I do not. Do I love being in the world as a woman with a much better sense of how to monitor and manage the feelings in her body? Yes. Yes I do.

So, there you go. New things are not scary anymore because 1) I am older and know more precisely what things to actually be afraid of and 2) I now know what it actually feels like to live inside a body that’s not anxious all the time and I can help this dear, sweet body of mine calm down when I need to.

Thanks science & aging,
💊vanessa

P.S. No proofies
P.P.S NEW PLAYLIST TOMORROW!

1. Except Rick. I met Rick and his wife last Monday - when M and I (theme there) went to an annual meeting for a new-to-us group as we try to get more woven into the cities nearest us (instead of being grounded in the big city to the north). Rick invited me to the plant swap.

2. During high school, I got really interested to try yoga. I drove to a studio in South Pasadena, not too far from home. But the first time I arrived on the street out front I got so nervous about where to park and worried about where to go and what to do and how to be in a place I had never been before that I sat in the car for a few minutes, and then pulled back onto the street and drove home because I was too nervous. (I did end up going to a class - finally - eventually).