The Weight of Grief – Part 2
Originally posted February 12, 2020
“Just baby Corn Snakes. Non-venomous. Chill Ya’ll :)”
My response to a recent post on Facebook with a GIF of about 4 or 5 juvenile snakes peeking out of a flower pot, to which social calamity was ensuing over the physical embodiment of Satan himself in these tiny, harmless reptiles.
Someone replied to my response to a follow-up question where I went on to explain “how I knew” to identify them as Corn Snakes, and even went so far as to call me “odd” and suggested that “I find a better use of my time than waste it researching reptiles.”
Ouch.
Not going to lie. It would have been suuuper easy to pick up a weapon of offense and respond with something quick-witted and equally rude. But I didn’t. At least, I genuinely tried not to.
She has since apologized, and it’s fine.
But I started thinking about her comment “odd” – that’s probably what hurt the most, and it instantly reminded me of the collective “oddities” from one of my all-time favorite movies – “The Greatest Showman.” Am I odd like the bearded woman kind of odd? I’ve never had someone call me odd before, at least not to my face, so I guess that’s why it struck a chord with me.
In all fairness, I guess it would seem rather “odd” that a young female, nonetheless, would be so well-versed in snake identification, so let me unpack this…
I suffer from extreme anxiety.
80% of the day, my chest is tight. I have regular heart palpitations. I have twitches and tingles all over my body that I’m instantly aware of as soon as I find a moment of stillness. Muscle spasms. Weird warming sensations in my hands and feet, and let’s not forget the panic attacks – the sudden and often crippling belief that I’m literally going to die, right then. All physiological responses to anxiety that I have absolutely no cognitive control over.
Turns out, finding the person you love the most cold and lifeless in your kitchen only six short hours after you’d kissed them goodnight will do that to a person. The weight of grief and the burden of captaining the ship of life alone is apparently more than my mind and my body can physically take at times, and it’s been letting me know. I’ve been dealing with a lot of these symptoms daily for about 18 months now, even when I’m having a seemingly great day.
I never had issues with anxiety before my husband suddenly died. My mental foe has always been depression – an enemy whose tactics I could easily recognize after hours and hours of professional counseling and years on the battlefield of the mind. But this… this was something foreign to me.
I’d only been home from the hospital after giving birth to my youngest (who was born 8 days after his father died) for about 48 hours when my blood pressure spiked, I completely freaked out, convinced I was developing Post-Partum Eclampsia, and insisted on going back to the hospital. I remember crying silently on the way there, just feeling like I was going to die any minute and my kids were going to be orphans.
My Obstetrician was actually the On-Call doctor in the triage unit that night, so she came in and talked to me, ran a bunch of tests, kept me until my blood pressure went down a bit, and then said, “Listen, you’ve been through hell in the last 14 days. I’ll keep you if you want to stay, but I’m very confident that this is all anxiety.”
She ended up sending me home with two pills that made me sleep for about 12 straight hours, and that helped, for a while. But over the next year and half, so many strange symptoms started piling up on me.
At first, it started with unexplained pain in my abdomen. Then the tightness in my chest. Then random heart palpitations. Sudden nausea, a constant light-headed feeling, and not being able to sleep, which has never been a problem for me.
By the time spring of 2019 rolled around, I had so many strange and bizarre symptoms that I was convinced something horrible was wrong with me. I went to see my Doctor and she referred me to Neurology. The Neurologist again said, I think this is all anxiety, but some of your symptoms can be signs of Multiple Sclerosis, so we’ll go ahead and do a full brain MRI just to rule it out.
And you guessed it, results showed absolutely nothing wrong with my brain. The Verdict – Anxiety… again.
Strangely, after getting the all-clear from the Neurologist, almost all of my weird symptoms immediately stopped. Just further proof that knowing for sure that I didn’t have a potentially debilitating disease or brain tumor provided more mental relief than I could understand.
But eventually, they started creeping back in again. So I had to decide what to do about it. Instead of ignoring anxiety and hoping it would resolve on its own, I decided to engage with it, in an attempt to take control of it.
What does that even mean? Wouldn’t triggering anxiety actually make it worse? Let me explain.
From the beginning of my journey through loss, I’ve tried to be what I like to call a “pro-active griever.” Meaning, once I’ve identified a grief trigger (and have recovered from the initial explosion from that landmine), I purposefully decide to expose myself to it in an attempt to desensitize the shock when I come across it randomly in public. I don’t like feeling blindsided by grief. It’s not completely avoidable, but I do everything in my power to prevent it.
I’ll never forget the first time “our song” came on the radio while I was in the car. I was on my way to counseling, and BAM!… First strum of that acoustic guitar and my heart knew exactly what song it was before a word was even sung. Instant explosion of tears.
Good thing I was going to see my counselor anyway. I cried about it for a while. I might have even played it for her. I don’t remember exactly. But I do remember leaving her office thinking, “This is dumb. I’m not going to be afraid of a song on the radio making me sad every time I get in my car.”
So I decided I’d listen to it until it didn’t trigger me anymore. I listened to it on repeat for days, and now almost two years later, it doesn’t make me sad at all. I actually still really love the song.
I’ve done a lot of things like that since he died. I call them controlled detonations. I find the grief landmine and blow it up myself. It hurts less when I’m not caught of guard by it, and it greatly diminishes my anxiety by eliminating that element of surprise.
This has been working really well for me in regards to grief specific things, so I decided to try it out on my anxiety as well. When I can identify something that is or might cause me anxiety, I proactively try to combat that anxiety with information that can shut up my emotions and calm my mind.
Enter the snake identifying…
Last summer, I found a dead snake in my driveway, and like 99.9% of everyone I know, I freaked out. I’ve never liked snakes. I’ve actually never come a cross a real one outside of a display box before, so I was ultra freaked. “Where did this guy come from? Are there more? Are they going to attack my kids while they’re playing? I won’t survive losing one of my kids. I’ve never killed a snake. I don’t even know if I could kill a snake. What if it bit me, and I died… and my kids are orphaned (always the root of my anxiety)?”
Stress. Fear. More Stress.
When you’re the only one at your house handling spur of the moment incidents, even something small and inconsequential like finding a snake weighs on you.
So I joined a snake identification group and started looking at pictures of them and learning how to identify them, usually at 3 am when I’m not sleeping anyway due to other anxiety related issues. And now, after months and months of looking at pictures of snakes, I’m pretty confident that I could identify a venomous one if I ever come across another one. Snake anxiety resolved… for the most part.
“But Shannon, isn’t that a bit excessive? Shouldn’t you just have more faith that God isn’t going to let anything happen to you? I mean, you’ve been through so much. He loves your kids too much to let them lose you too.”
I’ve heard this statement plenty of times about so many of my fears that I’ve shared with others. That’s all anxiety is – Fear. But here’s the thing, and I hope you are paying attention, because this is important:
Your level of faith and trust in God has no direct correlation with your level of physical safety in life.
I, if anyone, understand that random and tragic things happen to people who know and love and walk with God. We’ve all seen evidence of just that this last week with the tragedy in Moore when a very God-loving teenager of very God-loving parents was senselessly mowed down by a complete stranger. To use the cliche – “Bad things happen to good people” all the time.
My faith in God is knowing beyond all doubt that my eternity is settled.
My trust in God is believing that even if the worst thing I could imagine happened and my kids did end up orphaned by some tragic event, that God, in His love and mercy, would provide for them.
The most frequently given command in the Bible is “Do Not Fear”… used over 300 times, in fact. Do Not Fear. I said it before, that’s all anxiety is, is fear. More specifically, it was a fear that was allowed to grow like a cancer in the mind of its host until eventually it became so large, it demanded its own blood supply, sucking energy and resources from the rest of the body, until one day everything revolved around what the cancer is doing.
How’s my anxiety today? Is this going to trigger me? Am I about to have a panic attack?
I do a lot of things to combat anxiety. In truth, I’m trying to choke the life from it by doing the things I do. I take medication. I talk to people. I’ve changed my diet. I exercise. I write. I pray. I do things to build my relationship with God. I process my grief to the best of my ability, and I confront my fears.
In 1 Corinthians 6:12, Paul says we aren’t to be mastered by anything in this life. I started out identifying snakes because I was afraid of them, and I resolved to never let fear be my master. And if that makes me “odd”… well, then so be it.
Blessings!
Shannon
