Choices

I’ve always believed that life is a series of choices, mostly fun and thus, what you’re dealt is, both true to your conscious desires and your unconscious ones and even (as a new GP I saw this week said, here’s some wooh wooh), your existential and outside of your current life’s desires and hopes and curiosities. I do believe this to be true so, when earlier this week I hit an emotional snag and had to choose between which way to go - left or right, stay or move, self or family - I found myself arrested, proper deer in headlights style.

Let me take a few steps back: This post is about being freaked out by myself.

“The fight-or-flight or the fight-flight-freeze-or-fawn (also called hyperarousal or the acute stress response) is a physiological reaction that occurs in response to a perceived harmful event, attack, or threat to survival. It was first described by Walter Bradford Cannon in 1915.”

Of all the reactions to panic or states of shock, I have never responded with fright or fawn!! Except this week I did and it was potentially more traumatic than the trauma itself!! I felt myself enter a state of hyper vigilance, aware of things happening around me but also removed somehow. I found myself feeling like I was under water. I wanted to be heard and helped but all my body could do was cry.

I berated the action of crying…but I was actually under water so my underwater self could not reach my on land self and could not reach my logical self to make any decisions that were sane and ok.

I’ve had a weird 2 years - since the birth of the baby, I feel like things have been in a state of shock, near death but not death days, smile through the shitty day and survive it days, count your marbles by the end of the day days, or morph the day into night days… it’s been highly emotional and traumatic and then sweet and easy and within stride. I feel like those long 40 days continue and I do sometimes wonder when it won’t feel as gruelling. SO I did the only thing I really know how to do - I tried to return to work. By this i don’t only mean I tried to send emails, teach classes, attend meetings and look like I could concentrate through the duration of any of these… oh no, I mean I tried to, many times, write longer form pieces, present at conferences and, I tried to get a new job (to escape the post-capitalist, post-partum haters at my other). In doing so, I manifested abundance but, as these things go, in manifesting my special future, I didn’t really put parameters on what that should look like and so…

I landed a job with relative ease in another city and I was happy about it. (Kind of)

i was happy until I realised that it meant I had to move my entire family.

And then, out of nowhere, another job appeared… and after months of fretting and weighing up the meanings and the pro and cons and the settled vs unsettled and the money vs the money and sanity vs well, whatever this state of life is that I’ve been in for a few years now…

After months of all of that, I had to choose this week and, I froze.

Fight.

Flight.

Freeze.

I’ll never forget the image of watching myself standing in my sparse office with my still new furniture and looking out at the trains, the Shosholoza Meyl (‘so dusty’, I think out loud… ‘no value anymore…no purpose’.) It strikes me that I’m speaking to myself and I worry the admin lady next door will hear me. She’s already been eyeing me funny when I walk in, just waiting, it seems, to want to say something about how late I am, how infrequently I rock up there etc etc…

I just stood there.

A friend says on the phone, knocking me out of the hiccuping that now accompanies the tears… ‘Call your husband. Ask him to fetch the kids today.’ ‘Oh…’, I say and begin to explain why he won’t be able to do this.

I put the phone down and think ‘fuck it, you’re already losing it, what’s left to lose’ and I call him. He hears me and says not to even think about it for another second. ‘I’m on it.. and tomorrow and this whole week’. I slump in my ergonomically perfect office chair with my 10 year old green parka wrapped lovingly over the top of it - it’s almost like i’m hugging myself. I close my eyes. 10 minutes till class.

I remind myself it will all be ok, that there’s no way to choose a perfect outcome (and thus future) for 5 people, that all we can do is try and see where it goes.

But I’m so tired, so tired, so tired and i notice the tears having started up again.

Fight.

Flight.

Fright.

The decision has been made. I’m 4 days away from it and non stop crying Dee… but I’m still struggling to register hunger, I’m struggling to sleep and I still feel jittery. My husband is still watching me like i’m about to break or like I have broken and he’s just making sure I don’t disintegrate.

I’m both fascinated and sad for myself… that I got myself into such an extreme state of distress. I want to hug myself some more… retreat deeper into the green parka and, maybe throw in a blankie and a cup of hot chocolate and a Netflix series. Aaahhh ok… a few days of this kind of while out…

Happy Heritage Day weekend, all!