Day 12 - Listening

A month-long writing challenge exploring the theme of "Being Myself"

Hello! This is the day 12 instalment of the 21 day writing challenge I did with Megan Macedo in March, where I wrote a piece in response to a prompt (unseen by the reader) every day. I wasn’t sure which day to post this one - in my mind I was thinking, do people want to read about anxiety on a Sunday? Maybe not, how about a Monday?! Quite a lot of these posts are on this topic, because this challenge is about writing whatever comes up for you when you see the prompt. And this must be where I was/am at. Writing whatever most resonates for you is my jam and is reflected in this Substack. I always feel like this might sound selfish, as if it sounds like I don’t care about people’s response to my writing (which isn’t true). Instead I’ll claim it as an artistic approach to work; the alternative would mean I’d lose interest in writing at all. As always, I hope for resonance or interest from anyone who reads it! Thank you for being here.

My son seems to have inherited my ability to notice everything. He shows me the tiny scratch from the cat on his hand, he tells me his “ay-bow” (elbow) hurts, that his tummy hurts when he needs to go to the loo. When he is tired or poorly, everything hurts: my foot, my head, my knee.

For a parent with health anxiety, these are words with the power and potential of alarm. My work is learning where emergency buttons must be pressed and where experiences are fleeting, leaving me breathing out into the luck of their ephemerality. My son is sometimes noticing pain and sometimes noticing sensation, and still learning to tell the difference, to judge the scale of things, as am I.

Neural pathways are tendencies and repatterning them takes time. The process of catastrophising occurs so quickly in my brain that it often feels out my of control. As the literature on anxiety explains, a thought occurs and then the body reacts, the gut contracting, the heart rate quickening, mouth dry, breathing laboured, and so on. Calming our bodies helps, but if the thoughts keep coming the cycle starts up again, and goes on, and on, and on.

When I first started therapy for health anxiety I hoped I would be able to stop intrusive thoughts occurring entirely. It didn’t take too long before I realised this was ambitious, and that instead I could aim for a different kind of relationship with my thoughts, a new response when they come. This is a process not a fix, one I will be navigating throughout my life.

There is the initial thought but then the tendency to go down that train of thought, or spend a long time imagining all the nuances of catastrophe. How normal or useful it is to really put myself in the shoes of anyone who is experiencing misfortune? Is this radical empathy or indulging my ruminations, trying to control an outcome or my ability to cope with it? There are people around me who automatically shut out difficult thoughts and cannot engage in the work of empathy. I don’t know if that response is useful or normal, either. Where and what must we inhabit?

I thought that “listening to your body” was a competition, becoming the best at noticing every tiny sensation, but look, just look where that got me. I’ve had to learn that living with anxiety is a lot about NOT noticing everything, but trying to get on with the work of living. It’s about compassion - towards myself mainly, of self-recognition of my patterns and bringing a sort of tenderness to the things I tend towards.

If my body is reacting violently to a frightening idea, being kind to that body can be one way of breaking the two-way highway of scary thoughts towards scary sensations and back. Reacting to every bit of information as it occurs in time is hypervigilance. Instead I have to turn away from every bit of data and trust that I read the right signals and go with my gut on something. At first that felt too risky, but I am beginning to understand what it is to believe myself.