Day One

It's not really day one, it's more like day 17. But if knowledge is power, then today is the first power day. Still, you may wish to be brought up to speed on what the hell is going on, or even what happened 17 days ago.

I went to church.

Which isn't actually that remarkable for me. In fact, what is more remarkable, but not surprising is not going to church for the last 6 months. And what scared the hell out of me, although I didn't know until yesterday, is that I've been coming unglued for the last 2.5 weeks. Like, skin crawling, don't touch me, can't sleep, weep copiously several times a day, freaking out at work unglued. And then doing all the things I learned and that have always worked before in order to manage my social anxiety disorder.

And nothing. Just nothing.

So, screw this, I've got insurance and low copays, I'll go see a therapist. It is definitely something I don't have a handle on, and that whole be strong thing is for shit. It is not working. And there is no point. I've learned a lot about the intersection between willpower and biology, and the willpower is losing.

I tell the therapist as briefly as possible about the last 7 years, particularly the bit where it all flushes down the toilet because I make the skin crawl on one person (and I must because otherwise, she really is a sociopath) and another group of people are at best practicing benign neglect. To which the therapist, like every other person I have told, says, that fucking sucks. (Ok, he didn't say fuck, but the look on his face did, for sure.)

And then tells me that what I am describing, especially since I am doing all the anxiety management tools I have learned and they are not working, is that it sounds like a phobia. And that he doesn't want to tell me how to feel, but could I describe how I feel as angry, perhaps. And I look him straight in the eye and say, well, I'm not screaming or throwing things (which my husband will say is totally untrue - since I have thrown a few things at him recently, and my aim is perfect when I actually am angry, although I am not angry at him) and anyway, that is all I know about angry.

So, I blamed my mother for that. Because when the voice in my head says "if you don't have anything nice to say, don't say it at all" it is totally in her voice. Or maybe her mother's - it's definitely something my grandmother would have said, and it is totally in a "mom" voice no matter what. And I do know that to this avery moment, I cannot walk up to someone and say - "I hate you, you totally fucked me up and hurt my feelings and I think you are a complete douche. Go die." (My daughter can do that - and while I think it makes her a bit of a bully, I am totally proud that she can, and I will tell her to be judicious with it, but I won't ever tell her to stop.) Furthermore, I did a lot of work in the last couple of years learning to not talk shit about people behind their back and to assume they are doing the best they can and other DBT (this is dialectical behavior therapy - I talk about therapy a lot, I found it totally useful and helpful and I highly recommend it to anyone - maybe not the talk about your victimization stuff, but the only type Kaiser will pay for, i.e. the tools, skills, drugs to be better already dammit. I'm all for that.)

Anyway, the result of all this is that maybe I do have a lot of anger but I'm really lacking the outlet for my own. The therapist actually said to me, "anger is about injustice and this seems pretty unjust to me." I do a lot of social justice stuff, I do a lot with power and privilege of white people, and especially the injustice of the church, but I totally missed putting myself and my situation in those terms. Yeah, me.

This is what happened yesterday. The very nice therapist told me the unkind truth, which is that I actually need the amygdala and the cortisol and my whole frontal lobe, in fact, and so there really isn't any medication that is going to make a phobia go away. But he gave me a nice form to fill out to record my AT's when I am feeling distressed. I haven't even written any down on the paper yet, because I realized while driving the kids to school, every time I thought about church, or my friends from church, or passages from the bible or lines out of the prayer book - I got agitated and started to cry.

Awesome. I am allergic to church. Yesterday, even though I gave myself a migraine, I thought, it can't be that bad. But it can be that bad. This morning, I decided, yes, it can be that bad, and screw that - I'm going to blog all this and make my own book, and go around, someday, when I can go into a church again (because I'm freaking out right now just typing that I might go into a church), I'm going to do a tour and talk to church people about how they totally make people allergic to church. People stop coming to church not because it's boring but because they are actually physically ill. It puts a whole new perspective on every person I ever talked to who was sitting in the back of a church crying through the service. Now that I am one, I can see even more the places where I might have inflicted church damage on someone else.

It might seem that this is an easy fix. I mean, plenty of people go through life without ever stepping into a church and are leading happy, productive, meaning laden lives. So, I could just never go to church and be fine. Right? Wrong. You see, I was planning to be a priest, and I've been totally engrossed for the last 7 years in church business. I even spent 3 years in seminary, studying. The form of my days and the thoughts in my head are all organized around church. Imagine being allergic to your job, or English.  Because it feels like being allergic to English. All the words and the metaphors in my head are church words. And I can't help but run into them. When I think about wanting to talk to someone, a friend or whatever, better than half the time, it's someone I know from church. Now, I have a really excellent group of friends that don't have anything to do with church, so I'm not completely destitute in the relationshop department, but they also don't get what I mean when I say, I'm allergic to my own self because for them, it's probably like smoking - for me, it's more like overeating. Some things you can't just quit because, like breathing, it's not optional. I don't mind that my head is full of theology, but if it's going to be in there, we are going to have to find a way to live together.

A lot of my church friends, for the last several months, have been really worried about my relationship with God. And really, that is what church is supposed to be all about, people having a relationship and creating meaning around the idea and the presence of God. Well, God and I are doing just fine - except for that problem that a lot of the language and stuff that I use to interact with God are church things - like the Bible and Communion and the Prayer Book. But I don't confuse God with the church or the stuff that churches use ritually. That stuff is real and important precisely because people are not God and you gotta find something besides getting stoned to get the feeling that God is real. So, for the people who worry about that - I never felt abandoned by God when the people who should have had my back failed to speak up, and the committee failed to set clear parameters, and made shit up as they went along and didn't tell anyone, and then didn't know what he hell happened when they let the priest change the rules, and start spinning the story while doing it. I felt, I feel pretty abandoned by those people, and I even feel a bit abandoned by the part of my own self that can't stand up and make a fuss over my own justice. Ok, I feel a lot abandoned by that part of me. But I'm good with God. We hang out in other places, that aren't church buildings and with other groups of people, that don't use the  words that I'm freaking out over. (I think I am starting to get a feel for why people change denominations, though.)

That's it. That is where I am on Day One. Well, that and I got some recommendations for sleep aids from the nurse practitioner and made an appointment to talk to a med management psychiatrist tomorrow, because as long as I can still have the thoughts, so I can find them, I'd like a little distance from them, so I can start creating an exposure therapy (ET, this means in short, things that I think won't freak me out too bad, but that I can do to overcome the panic. It's CBT, cognitive behavioral therapy, and it totally works. And it is this that I imagine is going to be the most ridiculously hilarious part of all this. Thank God, who totally has my back on this, that the church I totally had a panic attack in is the only one I can imagine would be down with helping me do exposure therapy to get over the phobia.)

Life is too strange to not have a God. Seriously. I can't say I recommend church these days, but I can totally recommend a God.