Living with the anxiety and uncertainty every day is brutal. When you are married, you live with the other person’s version of these emotions which is an additional challenge. Everyone’s experience is unique to them and each person experiences these emotions on a different time frame so when you are feeling one devastating set of emotions, your spouse is feeling their own version. It makes it impossible to coordinate good days and bad and to know when to offer support and when to stay out of the way.
Frankly, this is the kind of crisis that drives some people to commit suicide. Others escape into alcohol, drugs, overeating, affairs, criminal behavior, abusing their spouse, abandoning their families, or retreating to bed curled up in the fetal position. If you do none of the above you are already ahead of the game.
If you want to handle this onslaught successfully and with any shred of dignity, believe me, it feels like you will never get through it. For me, the most important thing I have found to deal with this is to show up every day. Just be there to deal with each thing that comes up the best I can. It is that simple and yet that is by far the most difficult thing to do.
Sleeping a full night has been impossible. The hours of midnight to 4 a.m. are when my panic attacks show up to race around in my body. The physical stress to your body cannot be underestimated. It seems impossible to sit with yourself while your mind is screaming with a thousand terrifying thoughts and your chest is so constricted it is difficult to speak. It is brutal. But every day that I get through I consider a success story. Some days are rocky, emotional and I am in floods of uncontrollable tears. But the next day is there to conquer just by showing up.
I know this may sound trite. I wish I could offer more profound thoughts. Or say I began running five miles a day, started a freelance consulting firm for bankrupt single women and started volunteering at the animal shelter to manage the stress but, no, I haven’t.
I try to find books to escape in to, a movie to watch, or walking with the dogs. I have a pre-occupation with doing laundry. My little dog Carlotta and I spend lots of time kissing each other. I am writing as a kind of therapy to sort out the noise in my head and bring some sense of order to the chaos.
Beyond that, I think one of the most important things I can do for myself is to find something, anything, to be thankful for everyday. And that can be really annoying. Some days the only things I can come up with are those things that haven’t happened. No car wreck, strokes, deaths in the family. On other days I try to remember that there are people who are in worst situations than I am. That’s sounds lame, but again, it is very true.
Most importantly, I am thankful that I have a truly brilliant and creative husband with an unstoppable determination to conquer adversity and succeed. And supportive family and friends. And these things are the most important assets of all.
One day soon that curtain will eventually come up and we will see where we are. I look at this as an opportunity to re-evaluate what we want our lives to look like in the future and move forward from here and I am sure that we will.
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