So this is a song I wrote with my first husband in mind. It was excrutiatingly frustrating dealing with him. There’s no need to get into details, you’ll get the idea if you listen to the song anyway. This is the only set of my lyrics that’s had music added to it so far as I’m not a musician and cannot compose. My friend, Rowan Ayers, was the composer and I’m looking forward to our next collaboration.

Enjoy!

This was an expression my grandfather used to describe me when I was a child, if only jokingly. My young brain literally pictured a cat with a very long tail trying to navigate her way to the exit of a room full of rocking chairs without getting her tail wound around the rocking parts of the chairs. Anxiety like this can be debilitating and manifest in strange ways.

When I first moved to the Maritimes I refused to drive in my new city for just over a year. I spent an hour on on the bus each way to work whereas my car could have gotten me there in about fifteen minutes. My partner at the time was the designated driver every time we went out. I did eventually start driving and slowly increased my travel ring but I was still nervous and fearful of other drivers. I took the long way to work rather than the much shorter, much more congested route, which added about twenty minutes to my travel time. I didn’t take the shorter route until one day I overslept and it was the only way I’d get to work on time. I gulped air and my hands had a death grip on the steering wheel. I made it but it took me the whole morning to calm down after that experience. From that day on I would take the shorter route if my hours were off peak traffic hours until I finally became comfortable with the shorter route.

I am a very cautious driver, obviously, but I was once pulled over for failing to stop at a stop sign. I had actually stopped before proceeding through the intersection however there was a bush blocking the cop’s view of my complete stop. I didn’t have extra money for a fine I didn’t deserve so I decided to fight it, plus my (then) husband insisted. My day in court came and I hoped against hope the cop wouldn’t show up but he did. His testimony consisted of a weather report and commentary on the spring bloom. The crown prosecutor was clearly getting frustrated with him and turned him over to me (I represented myself). I was shaking like a leaf on a tree as I asked him a couple of questions which he had trouble answering or couldn’t remember certain details. The crown prosecutor leaned over to me and said I didn’t have to keep going she was going to drop the ticket but then the judge interrupted and threw it out anyway. Coming down from that adrenaline rush took the better part of the day. My heart refused to stop pounding, I felt shaky and unsteady and the nervous energy contained within could have powered a small town. If it wasn’t for my (then) husband I would have just paid the $300.00 fine and let them give me demerit points on my lisence for two years.

My anxiety feels like being stuck in fight, flight or freeze all the time. It manifests itself in avoidance of even simple things like making a doctor’s appointment or taking my glasses in for warranty repair; it can make me irritable to the point I yell at the dishes if I can’t find the utensil or dish I need right away; my insides definitely do not match my outsides and by that I mean I may have the appearance of being serene and steady but I shake on a molecular level. Sometimes my anxiety yeilds some pretty funny results like jumping at the sound of an explosion in a movie or a loud vehicle on the street.

So, how have I been able to manage to handle my anxiety and work in customer service, or hospitality or retail? Often out of necessity. I needed to work to survive, we all do; I needed to take the jobs I could get in a lean job market; and I needed to focus on the task immediately in front me. I have learned to remind my body that there is no emergency and there will be plenty of time to freak out later. I will even make an appointment with myself for a convenient date and time to worry. I often miss my appointments but I feel like that means the strategy is working to get me through the really tough moments.

Starting a public blog can be daunting, well, it has been for me. There is so much I have to share, to say, but getting my thoughts organized isn’t as easy as I thought it would be so I just started writing with the hope that it will all make sense.

I grew up feeling unwanted, unloveable, fundamentally flawed, and largely misunderstood. I was bad and nobody wanted me around. My mom seemed to always be cross with me and expressed it with spankings, the belt, the wooden spoon or the fly swatter, whatever was handy. My siblings may have received the same from time to time but I feel like I got it the most and the worst. That brand of discipline may be called abusive now but back then spanking your kids was widely accepted. I don’t remember my dad spanking us so much, he mostly gave me a “talking to”.

In school I really had no friends. I was bullied pretty mercilessly in grade school because I had “accidents”(wet my pants). In junior high, life did not improve for me at all. even though I had mastered my bladder. The boys in my class would follow me around barking and call me dog. It was pretty terrible and although I tried to remedy that by agreeing to go away to boarding school in a few hundred miles away, for some reason the bullying followed me. I couldn’t understand why this was happening. Why were my peers being cruel here? They didn’t know me, they didn’t know my past and there was nobody to tell them of it, nobody at the school had heard about my “accidents” so I started to feel like I must have been telegraphing “I’m a scapegoat” to the world since the day I was born.

At some point during my childhood, I became a tightly wound little ball of sadness, anxiety and rage. I developed Borderline Personality Disorder, Complex PTSD, Chronic Depression and Anxiety Disorder, as I’ve recently discovered through a lot of therapy.

Looking back it’s not hard to see where my younger, more formative years set me up for behavioural challenges, constant negative thinking, and frankly, for a life of tolerating abuse and mistreatment from others. And, if I’m being completely honest, I learned to abuse and mistreat other people as well. It’s not something I’m proud of but I’ve done my fair share of lashing out in a state of rage and have hurt and manipulated people I claimed to love.

Coming to a place where I can heal has been hard. Changing self-destructive patterns, setting boundaries, showing myself love and compassion has been hard. Some days I feel so heavy with guilt, shame, anger, sadness and longing for something I’ll never get that I simply want to stay in bed and forget there is a world out there. There are days when I just want to scream at the top of my lungs, no words, just plain old screaming, other times I want to hit shit, throw shit and break shit. Those days require a lot of brain-labour, reprogramming myself to challenge rather than accept the negative thoughts that creep in and threaten my health and well-being. They require I modify my behaviour so I don’t self-destruct. They require that I breathe.