Day Four

Last night we went to a party. Dude, I haven't stayed out until 3am in a long time. And I'm going to do it twice this week - Hobbit opening night for Francis' 15th birthday. I think I'm too tired to need the sleeping pills after all, but it is nice to have them.

Took another beta blocker this morning. Yesterday was a totally functional Saturday, which really means I only got 25% of what I wanted, done. Today, about the same. I never get as much done on the weekend as I want. But the lazy days are pretty important, too.

Of course, I drove past a lot of churches with bells and people walking in. None of them were Episcopal, so it seems to have been just fine.

I did find myself several times today replaying last spring and the arguments in my head. I don't readily see what type of thoughts they are, so I think this is going to take awhile. Perhaps I do have general anxiety disorder, just that I am not highly suggestible. Probably, I am just more subtle and clever about talking shit to myself.

What I did notice, I was able to tell a story to someone last night that I have only ever been able to tell two other people - ever. I'm not typing it in here, because it's someone else's story and more intense than is really appropriate here. I don't even know if it is relevant to this particular thing I'm working on. But the point being, it's been this huge traumatic thing for nearly 20 years, and I could talk about it without crying.

I'm really perplexed by the not crying all the time. I wonder if if this is how everyone else feels all the time. I wonder if I even can cry on these things. And I wonder about my emotional eating - sometimes I eat a lot and sometimes I stop, it just depends. So, I wonder what this will do. The side effects are certainly leaning towards a weight loss plan.

Day Three

Well, I didn't try the sleeping pills last night because I fell asleep while meditating with my daughter, and she fell asleep too, and I didn't want to wake her up so I laid there mostly awake all night.

This morning, I made breakfast and took a beta blocker. Wow. Let's just sum it up by saying I love you, I really do, but I can't feel you at all. And when you hurt my feelings, I can say, right out loud without pausing to push down the tears, hey, that hurt my feelings. Because I can't even feel my tears. I rode in the backseat on the freeway and I didn't even bite my nails or jump or anything - unfortunately, I still got carsick, but hey, I'm not ticking like a clock while looking for a bucket.

Is this what other people feel like all the time?

My husband fears I might become a sociopath, or that this in fact does make me a sociopath, but I think a moral compass is something more than just your adrenal glands burning out - and I have both philosophy and theology degrees to back me up on this. In fact, I could probably even look at a theology book without crushing despair and get some theologians to back me up.

I can't actually say that for sure, though, because I am still giving myself permission to stay as far away as I want from church and religion. And it occurs to me that without the weighty dread, I may not be able to find the AT's that are the problem, but I will probably be able to finally seek out a spiritual director who can help me out with them.

And, again, can I just say what a completely bizarre feeling it is to jump and catch your breath when something scares you, but not have the emotional surge that goes with it. It is a huge relief after the last 3 weeks. Heck, I may not even need the sleeping pills. We will just see how I feel about it when I go to bed tonight.

Day Two

So day two was mostly spent with the prescribing therapist. After the ridiculous amount of time it took to get to the doctors office at all because some idiot thought planting succulents in the 1 foot margin between lanes of traffic on 19th was going to impact global warming. Keep dreaming San Francisco.

The advice nurse yesterday said I would like this psychiatrist because she was professional. I thought, that is a weird thing to say, I would hope all psychiatrists would be professional - I mean, they are going to mess with my brain chemistry, but I am agitated enough that I'm game. And it turns out, I think I know what she meant. I watched the psychiatrists and psychologists come out to the waiting room for patients and so many of them were so casually and comfortably dressed. My doctor had on a suit. That gave me more confidence than the woman in head to toe purple tie dye, with purple crocs. And yes, she was a therapist, the person sitting next to me got up and went with her when she called their name.

So, this managed to be a 50 minute appointment, and I am pretty sure that the details are still a little unclear but we managed. It turns out there is not a drug that cures "I am crawling out of my skin" and "practically crashing the car when the phone rings" but we decided, as they often do, that the stuff that is technically for depression will work for anxiety. And I now have 3 prescriptions. Interestingly, all three of them mess with my serotonin, and one of them says to watch for serotonin syndrome if I am taking multiple serotonin drugs. Two are for getting me settled down while the third starts to take effect. Nothing like jumping in with both feet, I suppose. As long as I don't wind up in emergency. But, she was wearing a suit, and this is a usual combination for her to prescribe, so, I'll trust the suit.

Tonight I will take the sleeping one, and see how that helps. If I don't like it, I don't have to take it, and the melatonin seems to have worked ok last night, so I might just stick with that if this new thing makes my mouth taste like vomit in the morning. It turns out that  I've got to be really, really desperate before I am willing to wake up with vomit mouth, which I did when I took a muscle relaxer to slow up that migraine I gave myself the day before yesterday. 

Last night was actually quite fine. First, I let myself not talk to anyone about anything I didn't want to, and I let myself not think about anything I didn't want to think about. Second, I went to a chapter wide logistics meeting for the Red Cross. And I got to hang with the guys and no one cares if I feel all weepy, so consequently, I don't get all weepy. And I get to talk systems, which just makes me happy all over. And I totally abandoned my people to their own devices and I was gone for 5 1/2 hours, 2.5 of which was spent in traffic. Not awesome, but I did try to leave San Francisco at rush hour. 

I count today a win. Except for the 50 minutes spent sobbing in the psychiatrists office, I only burst into tears 3 times. Well, it's 2:30 in the afternoon, so I suppose there is still time, but really, the shaking has stopped and although my hair is still making my skin crawl, at least I'm not considering shaving it off anymore. ( I did this in college. Some girls look totally hot with really short hair, I am not some girl who looks hot with really short hair. And I hate the 3 years of grow out that it takes to have long hair again. Even when I am not twitching with anxiety and panic, I can't stand hair in my face, and I actually will still chew on my hair like a grade schooler without even knowing. I'm 40 now. If I can't quit, I can at least be old enough to stay out of those situations.)

Goal for tomorrow. Taking the beta blocker one, and seeing if I get too dizzy to drive, which, if that is the case, will put them right out of the running, and then, probably I won't need to worry too much about serotonin syndrome. 

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.

Money on the Table

I went to lunch with a friend today and we, as usual, ranged through any number of topics in the church. One that we covered was the trendy option of leaving the offering plates on the altar during the eucharistic prayers.

And I think this is wrong. Not because the money is not a offering to God, it is, but because it is in fact of a different kind than the bread and the wine. With the bread and the wine, we are offering something to God, who transforms it immediately into something different for our immediate use. The gifts come in, the gifts go out, in what can and ought to be a beautiful and seamless stream of grace.

We come to the rail and are given back the bread and the wine. I have yet to be handed a quarter.

I suppose for me, it just feels a little too much like brunch, as though, perhaps, God is our waiter. It comes back, I think to my problem with ritual.

Got Ritual?

"Got Ritual?" is a pretty clever catch phrase. I've seen it used in a wide variety of contexts, church and otherwise. It appeals, I think, to our sense of relevance. We feel sort of hip to ironically reference a popular commercial.

But to what purpose? The 'Got Milk" campaign is older than my marriage, so it's hardly fresh - no offense Dairy Council. And more importantly, if doesn't say anything about ritual, it just asks if you have one. Since a ritual is hardly more than a habit with style, I expect most people have plenty of ritual. 

Now, there is a new advertisement that I absolutely love that references ritual. And the beer isn't bad, either.

"Good to know there is a ritual, so when you come across it, you can enjoy it properly."  Spoken, of course, with a contested accent. 

What I really like about this ad campaign, and in particular what it says about ritual, is that unless you know it is a ritual, it's just some weird bartender showing off for a pretty face.

What I really wonder is why we think that ANY ritual is identifiable, or definable, by our mere presence at it's performance? 

Tit for Tat

I'm reading Pareto's little monograph called New Theory of Economics, or something like that. And I am struck not so much by the Pareto principle (aka the 80-20 rule) as I am by his disgruntlement that people don't get his point - to wit, that it is a different thing to reason from scientific, aka, mathematical principles than it is to reason from what he calls art, aka, philosophy.

He is writing at the turn of the 20th century, and what I seem to be reading is a fairly concise explication of the modernist conception of specialization. What I notice is that he isn't saying that morality has no place in economics. Or vice versa. He is saying that they specialize in different places. And he is trying to say that figuring out the most objective truth we can, about how things actually work, is a separate endeavor from what to do with that knowledge. But he isn't saying that one or the other is more valid. And I don't believe he is saying that there isn't a place where those two fields intersect (I'm not done reading it quite yet, so here begins my speculation.)

It seems obvious to me that the place these intersect ought to be the public sphere, the place of public discourse, but what I mostly notice, in whatever is passing for the public sphere these days, is that we are arguing one specialty against the other.

And one side can yell "how" all they want. And another side can yell "why" all they want. But as long as the how and the why can't talk to each other, we are never going to figure out the "who," the "what," or the "when."