Caught on all sides...

Right now, my neighbors to either side are in the midst of their own battles with anger.  I know this because I can hear their rage through the windows I keep open upstairs and sitting on the back steps waiting upon Amos to battle his fear of the grass long enough to tend to his business.  I grieve for each family, knowing something of their pain and wishing I did not.  For me.  For them.

Their anger frightens me.

I learned a while ago to recognize ... to begin to recognize ... that I respond to anger in unconscious, intrinsic ways.  And that those responses are born of fear.  The reason I have begun to recognize this, however, is that the neurological disease magnifies so very many of my responses.  That coupled with PTSD means that, as I have written before, in a way I have little, if any, control of my body.

Something I struggled with, moving from the world of academia into the corporate world, was the anger that I witnessed within the workplace.  As a college professor, I never had colleagues yell at each other ... or at me.  In the corporate world, I encountered anger in the work place.  Anger unfettered by civility and directed at co-wokers.  More and more, from the time I left off being a professor until my last job.

It was at my last job, though, where the anger floored me.
Appalled me.
Terrified me.

Two senior staff regularly vented their ire upon their employees.  Everyone knew it.  Their departments were revolving doors.  Both were bullies, who spent much of their time at work making life rather difficult for everyone around them.  One also bullied those outside the organization.  To this day, I do not understand why it is that either has a job.

I can write of this objectively because the pro-bono financial advisor helping me, who is a Christian and a very, very gentle and gentile woman, had contact with one of those two senior staff.  I tried to prepare the financial advisor for how she would be treated, but there was no way for her to help me and avoid interacting with the staff person.  The financial advisor, who is a VP of a very well-known, national company, said that in her entire career she had never encountered such an angry person who treated others in such a horrible fashion.

But her encounter with the senior staff person was but a small, small glimpse of the tirades and verbal floggings we experienced on a daily basis.

Both women hated each other, as well, and so they often sent staff as emissaries, as a way to raise the other's ire and avoid her at the same time.  I loathed being a pawn and eventually girded my loins enough to tell the CEO that being caught between the two women was untenable and that I, personally, did not want to be in such a position again.  That conversation went nowhere.

And then the organization hired someone I knew and admired.  I thought, perhaps, the hostility might be curtailed a bit because she was such a strong, gracious person.  At least, that is how I knew her while working for and with her before.

In the months before I lost my job, when admittedly I was fracturing into pieces too small for me to hold together anymore, one of the senior staff and the new vice president got into a raging fight just feet from where I was.  Before I knew it, I was hiding beneath my desk.  I couldn't move.  I could barely breathe.  Fear overwhelmed my heart and mind and body.  With my whole being I wanted to flee the office, the day was not yet done.

I gave not a thought to finding myself under my desk.  Not then.

In the linked posted above, I wrote about discovering that I had avoided drunk people my entire adult life without realizing that that was what I was doing.  I discovered that because I encountered someone who was drunk and found myself paralyzed with fear, wanting to flee but unable to do so.  It was reflecting upon that moment, the reaction I had, many times that eventually brought my mind back to the day I hid beneath my desk ... a terrified child in a forty-three-year-old's body.

When I hear the arguing, the raised voices, and the sound of things being thrown and broken, I find myself wanting to hide. Though, thanks wholly to the sweet, sweet Gospel and the power of the Living Word, I ... mostly ... do not hide.  The pull of the response, though, is still there.

When I see a large dog, even on a leash, I become paralyzed with fear, often insensible.  I am some better from the pit bull attack, but I am also not ... better.  Yesterday, I discovered that two large, hulking, barking, jumping dogs moved in two houses down.  Amos and I were already outdoors when they were let outside.  I was appalled to see them jump higher than the half fence in their yard.  Amos was atop my shoulders really before I could comprehend what was happening.  We both had the same idea:  flee!

The thought of having to face another source of fear wearies me, fells me once again.  In a way, it is as if I am being pulled to the ground again and again and again, knowing that soon I will not be able to rise again.  I am caught in the moment of the pit bull attack, but it is my enemy, not a dog, pulling me down again and again and again.

I work and I work and I work to tell myself that things are otherwise than what I am feeling, but when my response is physical, I fail at convincing myself that I will eventually be safe.

For the longest time, I thought that the first symptom of Dysautonomia was the fainting.  Three years of pursuing that before I was diagnosed.  Granted, I gave up after the first year, and took up the request for help again in year three.  But, looking back, I decided that anxiety was more likely my first symptom.

Anxiety is one of those things I find myself despairing of trying to explain.  For the most part, the response I get from others is that anxiety is all psychological.  I understand that is a truth.  Anxiety can and is often caused by psychological factors.  But anxiety can also be neurological in nature.  It is that kind of anxiety that I believe was my first symptom.

Perhaps Bettina could say, but I honestly know not when it started.  However, I do know the first anxious-Myrtle I noticed was trying to pack to visit my best friend.  I would fret and would find myself unable to make decisions.  Eventually, Bettina would coach me through packing.  And the few times she did not I was ... at the time ... inexplicably frustrated with her.  There was no trauma associated in visiting her.  In fact, visiting with Bettina fill the highlight reel of my life.

Bettina knew me before.  Bettina knows/knew what I call the sane Myrtle.  Not, really, that I am insane, but she knew the real me ... or the other me.  Truth be told, I oft wonder if that is why she is still my friend even when being so is difficult, even when I make no sense to her.  But, in any case, I did not understand what was happening then, nor did she.  I did not know how to voice what was happening or how to ask for the help that I needed. Now, she understands and she helps even before I ask.

But the reason I have become rather firmly convinced anxiety was my first symptom is that my first physical response to fear that I noticed was a searing flash of nerve pain radiating from the center of my chest out to the ends of my limbs.  The first time, I was driving in the car ... a tiny bit fast ... and passed a police car.  I was sure that I had earned myself a ticket.  And I felt the pain race along beneath my skin for the first time.

[Need I mention that I hate when it happens?]

The dogs.  Sounds outside.  The voices.  A particularly bad session of innards writhing.  A new high heart rate.  A new low blood pressure.  A knock on the door.

Over the past two years, that searing flash has grown stronger, deeper, more intense.
And more frequent.
Despite now understanding the why of it.

These days, I feel as if I am caught on all sides. If not one thing, it is another.  I have to talk to myself constantly, trying to calm one part of me or another, trying to endure one moment from the next, trying to face one battle after another.  Caught and being destroyed.

...we are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not despairing; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed; ~2 Corinthians 4:8-9

Oh, the times have these verses been taught to me as instruction for Christian Living and felled me in the knowledge that I failed living them!  SIGH.

[I know, I wrote that just recently.  Perhaps I should try to compile a list of popular verses given in the mainline evangelical church as instructions for godly living?  Of course, my rememberer would have to work properly to do so.]

On a friend's blog today, I wrote about how I have come the believe that there is this terrible habit of taking verses and chew and chew and chew on them, making them all about Christian living, until the concept becomes the message, instead of the actual Living Word.

So, when I consider the verses above, my response is what a poor job I am doing at being a Christian! This is because I struggle with despair and such.  But thinking about what I wondered the other day, about whether the character proving hope was not mine but Christ's, I dared to look up those verses in a larger context:

For we do not preach ourselves but Christ Jesus as Lord, and ourselves as your bond-servants for Jesus' sake.  For God, who said, "Light shall shine out of darkness," is the One who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ.

But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, that the surpassing greatness of the power may be of God and not from ourselves; we are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not despairing; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed; always carrying about in the body the dying of Jesus, that the life of Jesus also may be manifested in our body. ~2 Corinthians 4: 5-10

Well, then, at least this seems less and less about my "working out my faith or my relationship with God" and about Jesus.  But I still feel the failure thinking about how the reality is that I am caught on all sides.

Of course, the confessional Lutheran in me wondered if that "whole carrying about in the body" business was somehow a reference to the Lord's Supper.  I also noted, with pleasure, another reference where the light shining is being done by Jesus, not man, so there is no landing back in the trap of thinking I need to make the light of my faith shine bright enough to be a good witness for Jesus.

Still, as I noted, where is faith in the thoughts and feelings I have about battling through nearly every moment of every day?

For example, having spent two weeks now, languishing in bed, trying to recover from the physical exhaustion and pain of the trip to my father's funeral, yesterday I resolved to watch the finale to Downton Abbey "live," meaning to get out of bed and watch it from the GREEN chair. Of course, I had already been up and on my feet making basil burgers (and discovering the joy that is using fresh basil paste in the recipe). And I decided to take a shower before the show started so that my hair could dry whilst not lying atop the ice packs I use when lying down. Stepping out of the shower, my heart rate was at 206 with my blood pressure at 76/39.  In that moment, I was terrified of the response of my body and worried what the next moments would hold.

My heart rate slowed (given that I was no longer straining my body by both standing and by using my arms above my heart) and my blood pressure rose (given that I was supine once more) and the fear passed.  But the lingering of that moment is with me still, thinking how that was a new high for one whose heart rate is usually in the 60s and the 50s.

I loathe that I am so aware of the beating of my heart.
I loathe how I feel when it slows.
I loathe how I feel when it races.

And I struggle ... deeply ... with the fact that facing my errant heart is not all that is before me, even in the moments after showers.  I have to think about eating after a shower, so as not to have a blood sugar crash. I have to think about not fainting from the warmth of the shower.

And, as is often of late, I had to face my physiological response to the sounds of anger coming through the open window, in addition to hoping that none of that would trigger another migraine or fuel another night terror or night mare.

I do hide in the Psalter.
But, I fear, I am also beginning to slip back into hiding even from myself.
Because of fear.


Lord, I believe. Help my unbelief!