i forgot that summer ends
and a glimpse into healing complex PTSD
greetings, greetings to you, dear reader.
the evening dusk has fallen quicker with each moonrise. i am in mourning for the daylight, as it fades further from my front door. i want to hold onto it for as long as i can, yet the seasons are changing and the length of day tells me so.
i failed to appreciate this part of the summer most: that the days are long and the sun is up before i rise and falls after i rest each day. i forgot that this changes and assumed that it would stay static through the months that followed. the sun returning to the top of the sky feels like a hyperbaric chamber each year. the season change, and the fading daylight, feels like returning to the real world after living in such an oxygen rich environment. this grief is an annual one. and i remind myself that somehow i have made it through another year full of seasons, full of changes.
it’s easy to feel alone in this feeling — that i’m the only person in the world who feels grief for passing seasons. the ego is a funny concept. it isolates us. tries to make us believe that our pain is only ours, that our fear is only ours, with a fierce belief that, as joan didion put it: “nothing like this, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, has ever happened before.”
what happens when i’m brave enough to feel what i don’t want to feel? what happens when i let go of the fear-based beliefs that got me to today, that protected all of the younger versions of sara? what if this season will pass, like it always does, and another season emerges?
i’ve begun to chronicle the things that i know about fall, that i hope to love about fall in this valley between the mountains. i know, because my memory tells me so, that the leaves will begin to turn colors — in fact, a few patches amongst the forest already have. i know that the temperature will begin to drop, the dew on the grass in the backyard will turn to frost. i know that the night will cut further and further into the daylight, and soon, i’ll be driving to and from swim practice in the early evening in the pitch black. i know that the bountiful green will turn, slowly, to brown, but not before a triumphant celebration of foliage. i know that my sock drawer and sweater basket will get heavier use. i know that my hand will wrap tighter around my coffee mug in the morning.
i know that i will become a bit smaller, my skin will harden just slightly, the cocoon will appear, and i will feel like i’ve been dropped off of the edge of the world, falling into a boundless void with no sky and no ground.
and i have to remind myself that this is temporary. that i am brave enough to feel what i don’t want to feel. that by feeling this experience, in its entirety, i am reminded of my humanness.
in an open water swim last week, i dissociated. it’s happened before, but this is the first time i’ve been fully alert to the process.
i became disoriented in the water, the sky was so gray that it was hard to tell the difference between where the clouds ended and the water began. rotating my head every three strokes to look at the horizon line, whether to my side or in front of me, i lost sense of my body in space. i swam to the two friends in front of me and alerted them to the disorientation. but i didn’t think much of it, because it’s just the sky and the water as the same color, right?
by the end of the swim, i knew i had misplaced my rationalization. i was entering into fight-or-flight mode. i didn’t want my head to be underwater, the water was too dark to see anything, i couldn’t feel my body in the water.
knowing that i wear my lime-green fins and highlighter-pink buoy for this exact reason, i rolled to my back, held onto my buoy, and kicked until i reached the shore, staring up at the masked sky and finding a place to breathe in my chest.
once on shore, a panic attack loomed on the horizon. i felt my chest tighten. i knew i had become removed from my body. time slowed and crept and crawled and it felt like i was in a fish bowl, unable to interact with the outside world.
when i’m having a panic attack, i feel absolutely alone. i feel like crawling on the ground and tucking myself into the smallest possible ball, i feel like there will be no happiness now or in the future, i feel like the world is filled with only sadness, i feel like i will never be liked or loved again.
the words come out of my mouth in choppy spurts. my movement slows. i can only focus on one thing now, and that thing is either going to be my impending doom or the sound of a voice that i trust.
now that i know what a panic attack feels like, i can tell you, dear reader, that i’ve had a panic attack at least once a week for most of my life. to grow up in an environment that fosters complex PTSD means that this feeling compounds on itself: i didn’t have a release valve, there’s no way for the pressure to escape. i was constantly on edge. and there was no wind down from the panic attack. they just kept coming. there was always another threat.
the panic attack last week happened six weeks after the previous one. this is more of a win than i can even begin to put into words to you. to go from 52+ panic attacks a year to less than 9?
i believe that as i continue to feel safe in my body, safe in my feelings, safe in my space, that the frequency with which my body flies into an alert state will decrease.
softness is imperative. with myself and with those i love.
a voice in my head told me to hide my fear away from those i love after the swim. i was changing at my truck, and it said: “just sit here, be small, no one wants to see you experience this.” but these loves are newer loves. most haven’t seen me have a panic attack before even if we’ve talked about what happens when i do. so i walked over to one of my people, sat down, looked at them and said: “there’s a panic attack quickly approaching for me. can you pick any topic and talk about it?”
and you know what they did, dear reader? they picked a topic. they talked about it. when i needed a different way of working through the panic attack, i said so, and they listened. they! listened!
they didn’t shame me for having a panic attack, they didn’t ask me why i was having a panic attack, they didn’t make me feel like i was an alien on the planet of humans.
they sat with me. they talked until they noticed that i was returning to a sense of self. they didn’t leave me by myself.
what happens when i’m brave enough to feel what i don’t want to feel? what happens when i let go of the fear-based beliefs that got me to today, that protected all of the younger versions of sara? what if this season will pass, like it always does, and another season emerges?
i’m learning that it will. that as i feel the things i don’t want to feel, the feelings move through me — they begin to dissipate. that the people i love will keep loving me.
i don’t know if i’ll have panic attacks for the rest of my life, but if this is some indication of progress, i’m hopeful i won’t.
this season will change. the best thing i can do is live in it while i’m here and admire the leaves as they turn colors.
onward,
sara
A beautiful and poignant post.