The Way Back ‘Don’t Let Your Self-Care Stress You Out’

The Way Back-3-color

 

Broken birdsong. Branches, unbudded, striate the sky. The bench swings slowly back and forth at the Whaleback Shell Midden in Damariscotta.

I need to do nothing.

This is as good a place as any in Lincoln County to lie back, look up, let go.

The picnic table on Bunker Hill in Jefferson is another. So is the one at Ice House Park at Damariscotta Mills. Of course, the Pemaquid Lighthouse in Bristol.

But I need places I can get to shortly when I take a break to do nothing. Pemaquid involves planning – and driving – and all that seems more like something.

I spend a lot of time thinking about how to do nothing and what counts as nothing in the great schematic design of downtime.

Downtime. My doctor’s recommendation for the cumulative effects of stress.

Because all the self-care in the world isn’t calming my nervous system.

Panic sneak attacks me at the grocery store, when I brush my teeth, eat toast. It startles me at work, when I am editing, replying to emails, or savoring a homemade lemon roll in the shop kitchen.

It comes out of nowhere. Yet I know it’s always there.

The seizing terror of breathlessness, followed by needing to think about breathing, like the part of me that makes it automatic has a glitch and I need to do a manual override.

I have to stop whatever I am doing to inhale.

Exhale.

Breathe.

There is nothing physically wrong with me, I learned, at my routine annual exam. That affirmation of health reset the glitch for a hot second. Then it came back again folding laundry.

If you’ve never had a panic attack before, it’s like this:

You are minding your own business, say, by a stream (a metaphor perhaps of everyday life). You’re doing your routine thing, whatever that is. Then someone sneaks up behind you and shoves your head under water and holds it there for no good reason (not that there’s ever a good reason). And you swallow your breath because your amygdala took over and that reptilian part of your brain is wired only for your survival.

Except no one did this to you. It just happened.

One minute you’re feeding your cat, and the next, you are sitting beside him stuck to the kitchen tiles remembering inhale, 2, 3, 4 … exhale, 5, 6, 7, 8. You get up when you can swim again, but you can’t shake the feeling that it’s coming back for you.

What’s “it” and who knows when? Maybe while you’re matching socks or peeling potatoes. You stay primed for the next siege. You’re stalked by your own dislocated psyche, swishing its tail for the next chance to pounce.

All of which makes it hard to do nothing. Got to stay ahead of the huntress.

I take walks, keep house, solve Wordle, Quordle, and Spelling Bee. I cover the news, an ultimate busy maker.

I lay down my mat once in awhile at Lulu’s Barn on Westport Island to do yoga with alpacas, whose heads peek through the window between the barn and the fairy house studio. Their outsized teeth smile at me from Seuss-creature faces.

But at the moment, with more effort than it should require, and with great intention, I do nothing.

Except glide back and forth on the Whaleback bench, breathing in, breathing out wet earthy spring.

What looks like a harbor seal camouflaged by the blanched oyster shells on the midden across the river suns itself on a somewhat submerged rock until it picks up its head to watch a boat trawl past.

“Do you see it,” a woman with a bowser dog on a leash asks me. She’s stopped to let the hound sniff

in the wet leaves. So many people I meet in Lincoln County speak to me in this familiar way, as if we’ve been having a conversation all along, even though we are complete strangers.

“I do,” I say.

“He comes here all the time,” she says.

It’s a good place to do nothing, even for a seal.

When I get back to my office, I will Google “seal medicine card.” I’m always curious when animals cross my path, especially ones I do not expect to see. I am open to all sources of information – from creatures, clouds, striped stones, sand dollars found along the way.

It’s tricky to verify tips by a subject like a seal, but I “fact check” reflexively.

According to whatismyspiritanimal.com, “Seal arrives with the message it’s okay to take pause and move away from all the chaotic ‘noise.’”

A-ha. Yes. My body will corroborate this story with a bone deep sigh.

What is this “noise”?

I am hard pressed to come up with any single reason why I am on this safari of personal distress. My righting reflex fails me now for as soon as I say, oh yes, this or that one thing is the reason I am so off balance, here let’s fix it, 20 other things queue up and crack their knuckles for the chance to strangle me.

I rattle off all the many possible reasons why to my doctor.

She settles on one that I missed. Pandemic stress.

I guess I am reluctant to excuse the general, yet mostly manageable anxiety, I’ve lived with all my life – obviously in overdrive lately – because people died and are dying still in this bleak time.

I’m a lucky one. COVID washed over my family in the omicron surge, and though held down by the wave for a couple weeks, my two kids and my husband who got sick came up again.

Are random panic attacks really that big of a deal compared to the grief of those who lost people to the scourge of SARS-CoV-2, or who struggle now with something called “long COVID” (signs of which I am on constant alert for in my family)?

I learned well growing up that regardless of my own discomfort in any given moment I should think of others less fortunate, and be thankful (happy even) with whatever ultimately meaningless (in the greater scheme of things) situation I might face.

I had to learn this because I was born “spleeny,” my mother would say. Everything was too hot or too cold, too scratchy, too tight, too loose. I was never comfortable. If there was something wrong, I’d find it, and make it my personal problem, amplifying it to anyone who would listen; until I accepted that my sensitivity to even the slightest grievance (real or imagined) could be tuned to consider others far worse off than I.

It took my mind off my own troubles. Never mind what I needed to do for myself. How could I help someone else?

Now, I think of others automatically … the way I … well, the way I used to breathe.

My doctor tells me pandemic stress is real. It will take years even to begin to understand the ways in which our lives are being shaped by the mass effect event of COVID-19.

Pandemic stress is not all that ails me, I am sure, but I allow that I am not immune to it, even that it may be a large factor in my present overall state of being.

She asks if I am taking care of myself and I itemize the ways. Yet all the walking, yoga-ing, whole foods eating, meditating self-care doesn’t stop my (apparently fragile) system from stuttering, especially when the last thing I want to do is any of it.

I explain I’d rather walk only the distance of my car to a gas station door where I meditate on the perfect slice of pizza turning on a rack in its heated glass case, all of my intentions fixed on timing the yoga of removing the right bubble-crusted piece before it merry-go-rounds away, balancing it without losing any toppings on a pie server to my flimsy paper plate.

All so while I eat it in my car I can think of that self-caring salad I abandoned in the fridge at work.

“Well, you won’t eat gas station pizza forever,” she said.

What?

Wasn’t my doctor supposed to admonish me for gaining 30 pounds in the last two years, and go over healthier choices?

She elaborated only enough to say, “Don’t let your self-care stress you out.”

Can you get more downtime? Can you ever just do nothing?

I show up at the shell midden at least once a week to try.

Water slaps the hull of a boat navigating the mid-tide channel from Great Salt Bay to the sea. Dog tags clink on a collar. Small feet pound the path between apple trees, running ahead of mom chatter.

More people come to check out the seal, crowding the space between the swinging bench and the slope to the water. I am drawn out of myself and into conversations.

“There’s never enough time to do all the nothing you want,” according to Calvin & Hobbes creator Bill Watterson.

There’s always, always something.

Yet the dog inside me lies down, breathing mindlessly in its autonomic slumber. It may wake up again and throw itself against the chains of my mind, teeth bared and frantic. Probably. Probably it will.

But for now, I make my way back to the parking lot, one step, one breath at a time.

I’ve lived with general anxiety disorder for a long time now, incorporating all the self care I described (not doing) in my daily life to manage it. It is likely that abandoning these practices is the biggest contributor to my system meltdown. Yet I take my vitamin supplements every morning, drink herbal tea at night, show up in friendships, engage in meaningful work, and see a therapist. It is quite literally the least I can do.

One thing that has helped me is tuning in with all my senses when I am out there doing nothing – five things I see, four I can hear, three I smell, two I can touch, and one I can taste. (The last one is highly situational and often only when I take my gas station pizza to a picnic table).

I offer my personal story about pandemic stress with the hope that if someone is struggling, they might feel less alone. I am learning that an ability to self-reflect can be as helpful – maybe even more so – to others as taking on and trying to solve their problems for them.

I am no kind of medical or therapeutic professional.

If self care is failing you now, too, and you find yourself out of sorts, please make an appointment with your primary care doctor, who can hopefully reassure you that your physical body is intact and functioning well.

Panic attacks are terrifying and it helps also to have people you can call. Talking to someone – even about nothing – can be a good distraction. If you need more help, call the NAMI Maine helpline at 800-950-NAMI (6264). If you’d rather text, send your ZIP code to 898-211 to be connected to 211 Maine’s directory of services.

(“The Way Back” is a monthly column of reflections and revelations by editor Raye S. Leonard. Do you know a great place in Lincoln County to do nothing? Email her at rleonard@lcnme.com.)