Holly - yes. I am the same. My attention to detail, the ability to think outside the box, and calmly find solutions amidst the chaos makes me an excellent producer for creative endeavours. Yet, like you, those very traits, when mixed with high anxiety can distort and catastrophically rearrange my calm into frantic in one short leap. The eagles, the cats, the death of your beloved dog, the near drowning of a child, a cancer diagnosis and the horrible loss of life in war - are valid triggers. I would be running back to check on my child, too. I struggle between listening to my gut versus my rather creative brain driven anxiety. Bottom line: Laughing at it is a kind and gracious solution to this ongoing dramatic, daily dilemma. Thank you.
^^ This is mandatory reading, Pat! You're right about it all, and especially about the role intuition (or gut) plays in all of this. I trust my intuition, deeply, but how to tell the difference between intuition and unfounded fear? Ah!
I am wired the same way as Pat. I think my attention to detail is both a blessing and a curse. I can anticipate when a child is about to tumble off of the jungle gym or a toddler is going to tumble into the pool. Even now that my kids are in their twenties, I project and catastrophize and warn more than I should. (Never mind the risky behaviors I engaged in during my youth.🤦🏼♀️)During the pandemic, my anxiety grew. I no longer trusted my intuition. It took time to hear my inner voice again. Once I had emerged from that suffocating bubble and re-joined the human race, I found joy and relief in welcoming the unpredictable.Being out in nature and unplugged from the doomsday news cycle is a salve for me. But it still wouldn't have spared me some alarming visions of performing the Heimlich maneuver to remove a lodged blueberry!😉
In my reply to Holly, I emphasized that you and I are woven from the same cloth. I have always been able to organize and multitask under the most chaotic conditions with calm and grace. But the pandemic upset my sense of balance. Safety vs. exploration, fear vs. joy. Now I am getting back on track and using this awareness as a guiding tool to assess the fine line between imparting my earned wisdom ( through years of motherhood), and allowing my loved ones to steer their own ship.
I, TOO, am a fatalist. I wasn't born that way. In fact, I was a serial risk taker throwing caution to the wind at every turn. But from many life experiences, now, when I play the movie forward, just the anticipatory thoughts send my heart into overdrive. Up until four years ago we lived on a small farm. I worried daily about Clifford, our lovely orange cat, being picked from the sky by an eagle. Or worse, a coyote sneaking out from the blackberry bushes. I come by that fear honestly having seen a stellar jay plucked from the peanut feeder by a hawk while I was gardening one day. Right before my eyes! An entire flock of jays happily and noisily feeding while I was leaning into a veggie bed when suddenly, a hawk swooped in and grabbed one by the wing. It swept that jay up and away with a chorus of jays squawking angrily in quick pursuit. I leaped over the pasture fence with my dog and raced across that field as if my shoes could take me airborne. Screaming and shouting all the way! No luck. The raucous cries from me, my dog, the jay's family flock all disappeared into the sky along with the hawk. Farming is physical. But it also hurts the heart. I wish I could desensitize what has become so fatalistic. I'm in need of a serious deprogramming. When I see a stray dog or cat posted on our local FB page I can practically hear the tires screech and a 'thump'. When I see a picture of a tear-stained face from a little child in Gaza, or piles of rubble and animals roaming for food, I practically stop breathing and can hear my heart beat in my ears.
It's a beautiful day here on the west coast. Heading out to hike my dog. A daily settling of the conflagration of emotions I feel daily. I love your posts as they stir up so much in me.
❤️ I share your affliction. I have had it since my first child came into the world. Now I am old enough to witness the same torment in a few of my grown children since having their own babies.
The dark scourge of "What if..." can be carried forward. But, then again, I never believed that an eagle could pick up a cat, until I saw it one day as I was driving to town recently. Actually, it was 2 juvenile eagles working in tandem to score a beautiful calico cat. Luckily, my car interrupted the whole affair on the side of the road, and the cat ran free....
Once, I had friends visiting from the city who laughed at me when I stepped onto the porch at dusk and called for my cats to come inside for the night. "You can't call cats," they said. I showed them! I like my cats inside at night to keep them safe, but also because I need them to do their actual job: keeping the mice at bay.
Holly - I get so excited to read your work. Whenever you post, I know I will experience craft, thoughtfulness, nuance and relevance. I have been going through this exact thinking and I would say it is related to motherhood but that is hard to know for sure because of COVID. I have a specific memory when Max and I were in Brooklyn about whether we would leave our apartment after our landlord decided this was a perfect time to paint the vestibule. The painter was talking on his cell, we could hear him telling whomever was on the other end that his brother had COVID. We decided we would stay indoors for 2 weeks. We had stockpiled all the things… soup, frozen food, toilet paper… this was it… 2 weeks. Then, in a matter of minutes Max went downstairs for something. I lost my mind. I still remember thinking, this is it, we are all going to get COVID and the worst would happen. F was 18 months. However, I was recently looking back at pictures and boy did we also have so much fun. We bought her and indoor slide and she mastered it by the end of the day and even seemed to enjoy face planting🥰👶🌊
Gosh, Maura, I can't tell you how often I've had the, "Is this motherhood or residual COVID anxiety?" question run through my mind. I had a baby in January of 2020, and so that baby (and me) spent all of the first two years of his life completely isolated from anyone (easy to do where we live, but hard on the mind.) I appreciate you!
I am not a Mom, (well, Im a dog Mom) and yes I would consider myself a light weight worry-wart.
One of my girl friends incessantly teases me about worrying all the time. My boyfriend thinks Im a fatalist. Sometimes, I can just see all the worse case scenarios flash in front of my eyes because, maybe its experience? Maybe I just dont want to be asleep when something goes awry? I want to be prepared always. Sometimes I think its just awareness and its OK and probably normal. Usually, my worries are short lived, but Im sure my "awareness" has made me put into place preventatives that have prevented crazy stuff from happening!
I just like to think of it as "awareness"! Its a superpower!
"Maybe I just don't want to be asleep when something goes awry." This is a beautiful way of putting what I think often. I stopped listening to my beloved true crime podcasts because they started to seep in too deeply. At first I told myself I was just equipping myself with knowledge but it started to engulf everything. TBD if it makes a difference!
I, too, am a consummate worrier. I worry about damned near everything and, on some days I even manage to conjure up some seriously stupid things to worry about. The thing is, I know it’s completely irrational; I’m even capable of, “talking myself off the ledge”, yet I persist. Nothing I have ever worried about in my 70 years has ever come to pass. You’d think that would provide me with a solid reason to say, “enough”, right?
Yes, to all of this. Thank you for making me feel so seen and accompanied in a time of my life where my anxiety is at an all time peak. Giggling at the ridiculousness of it all is so often a soothing antidote. Thank you again 🧡
You capture it perfectly. I never knew this feeling until I had children and then, the haunting began. After they left home, it took a while to fade. My neighbor, a few years ahead of me in child-rearing, set a hopeful stage. She said, you will learn to appreciate the freedom after a while. Your brain will try to hold the vigilance, but you won't be able to sustain it. You have no idea where the are and what they are doing, so the feeling will gradually release. She was so very right. Of course, I still worry, but not the way you so beautifully describe. I now hold the worry with a gentle nostalgia. Ah.
Oh my. You validate me and my heart hurts for you at the same time. Thank goodness we have words like "catastrophizing" and "magical thinking", words I have recently learned, to help put definition and order to these thoughts that can feel like a hijack of the brain... hijack, carjack, brainjack?
Your essay could have had my name on it, right down to the career choice and my son's love of berries!
Fast forward - The Fifties...
I fnally made it to the "new thirties". I'm in a fairly new and sweet marriage and I have a great teenage son, we live in a lovely mountain setting in TN, I feel good about myself, I'm 27 years into my career - I'm thinking "Sweet Spot"!
And then...
Husband suffers, and is permanently disabled, by a stroke, months later I lose my job, months later start a new job for the first time in 29 years, months later I am diagnosed with breast cancer, we move downtown for job & constant medical needs, months later my mother moves in with us, weeks later my beloved brother ends his life. Two years later, COVID and an unexpected family break (estrangement of stepson, daughter and three grandsons...), grief, loss, isolation, caregiving.
A year later, we cautiously peek out of our bunker, my job is full-time, remote at this point. So, back to the mountains we go with Mom in tow. It's perfect! North Georgia, Cumberland Plateau, waterfalls, creeks, woods, fields a home with a perfect layout (Mom space!), a garden spot, a bluff facing into nightly amazing sunsets, deer, fox, turkey, owls, birds, wild blueberries! Oh how sweet 2021 was to me...
Oh now this looks beautiful and serene, add a little more dirt and..... Wait! Darn It! How did I trip INTO my raised bed? My head hurts, my neck hurts, my shins hurt, my elbows hurt and I now sit in the middle of my garden bed, a gardener turned into a pumpkin!
The rest of the story... Broken Neck. C1 & C2 vertebrae broken with Jefferson Fracture, it's the same fracture common to those who dive into shallow pools.
I used to practice catastrophizing thinking.
Then I survived a decade of catastrophe
Now.
I am beginning to stop reeling and start recovering. I am taking steps to grow my faith, love my people, and explore my gifts and passions.
I just turned 60 and I refuse to feel trepidation for what's next. Instead, with head held high and stepping even higher (no trips!), I planted my garden!!
Holly - yes. I am the same. My attention to detail, the ability to think outside the box, and calmly find solutions amidst the chaos makes me an excellent producer for creative endeavours. Yet, like you, those very traits, when mixed with high anxiety can distort and catastrophically rearrange my calm into frantic in one short leap. The eagles, the cats, the death of your beloved dog, the near drowning of a child, a cancer diagnosis and the horrible loss of life in war - are valid triggers. I would be running back to check on my child, too. I struggle between listening to my gut versus my rather creative brain driven anxiety. Bottom line: Laughing at it is a kind and gracious solution to this ongoing dramatic, daily dilemma. Thank you.
^^ This is mandatory reading, Pat! You're right about it all, and especially about the role intuition (or gut) plays in all of this. I trust my intuition, deeply, but how to tell the difference between intuition and unfounded fear? Ah!
I am wired the same way as Pat. I think my attention to detail is both a blessing and a curse. I can anticipate when a child is about to tumble off of the jungle gym or a toddler is going to tumble into the pool. Even now that my kids are in their twenties, I project and catastrophize and warn more than I should. (Never mind the risky behaviors I engaged in during my youth.🤦🏼♀️)During the pandemic, my anxiety grew. I no longer trusted my intuition. It took time to hear my inner voice again. Once I had emerged from that suffocating bubble and re-joined the human race, I found joy and relief in welcoming the unpredictable.Being out in nature and unplugged from the doomsday news cycle is a salve for me. But it still wouldn't have spared me some alarming visions of performing the Heimlich maneuver to remove a lodged blueberry!😉
Exactly. 😁
In my reply to Holly, I emphasized that you and I are woven from the same cloth. I have always been able to organize and multitask under the most chaotic conditions with calm and grace. But the pandemic upset my sense of balance. Safety vs. exploration, fear vs. joy. Now I am getting back on track and using this awareness as a guiding tool to assess the fine line between imparting my earned wisdom ( through years of motherhood), and allowing my loved ones to steer their own ship.
Marnie - great replies. We are finding our way back to ourselves. And, carrying on with new insight and grace. Wishing you all the best.
I, TOO, am a fatalist. I wasn't born that way. In fact, I was a serial risk taker throwing caution to the wind at every turn. But from many life experiences, now, when I play the movie forward, just the anticipatory thoughts send my heart into overdrive. Up until four years ago we lived on a small farm. I worried daily about Clifford, our lovely orange cat, being picked from the sky by an eagle. Or worse, a coyote sneaking out from the blackberry bushes. I come by that fear honestly having seen a stellar jay plucked from the peanut feeder by a hawk while I was gardening one day. Right before my eyes! An entire flock of jays happily and noisily feeding while I was leaning into a veggie bed when suddenly, a hawk swooped in and grabbed one by the wing. It swept that jay up and away with a chorus of jays squawking angrily in quick pursuit. I leaped over the pasture fence with my dog and raced across that field as if my shoes could take me airborne. Screaming and shouting all the way! No luck. The raucous cries from me, my dog, the jay's family flock all disappeared into the sky along with the hawk. Farming is physical. But it also hurts the heart. I wish I could desensitize what has become so fatalistic. I'm in need of a serious deprogramming. When I see a stray dog or cat posted on our local FB page I can practically hear the tires screech and a 'thump'. When I see a picture of a tear-stained face from a little child in Gaza, or piles of rubble and animals roaming for food, I practically stop breathing and can hear my heart beat in my ears.
It's a beautiful day here on the west coast. Heading out to hike my dog. A daily settling of the conflagration of emotions I feel daily. I love your posts as they stir up so much in me.
I can say with full confidence I would've chased that hawk, too. I'm glad I wrote this post if just so I could read your comment.
❤️ I share your affliction. I have had it since my first child came into the world. Now I am old enough to witness the same torment in a few of my grown children since having their own babies.
The dark scourge of "What if..." can be carried forward. But, then again, I never believed that an eagle could pick up a cat, until I saw it one day as I was driving to town recently. Actually, it was 2 juvenile eagles working in tandem to score a beautiful calico cat. Luckily, my car interrupted the whole affair on the side of the road, and the cat ran free....
Right! These fears are not unfounded, which is part of what makes them so hard to dismiss.
Eagles prefer to fish, but an owl will take a cat quick. I used to herd my cats in at twilight.
Mothering is a difficult art.
Once, I had friends visiting from the city who laughed at me when I stepped onto the porch at dusk and called for my cats to come inside for the night. "You can't call cats," they said. I showed them! I like my cats inside at night to keep them safe, but also because I need them to do their actual job: keeping the mice at bay.
Holly - I get so excited to read your work. Whenever you post, I know I will experience craft, thoughtfulness, nuance and relevance. I have been going through this exact thinking and I would say it is related to motherhood but that is hard to know for sure because of COVID. I have a specific memory when Max and I were in Brooklyn about whether we would leave our apartment after our landlord decided this was a perfect time to paint the vestibule. The painter was talking on his cell, we could hear him telling whomever was on the other end that his brother had COVID. We decided we would stay indoors for 2 weeks. We had stockpiled all the things… soup, frozen food, toilet paper… this was it… 2 weeks. Then, in a matter of minutes Max went downstairs for something. I lost my mind. I still remember thinking, this is it, we are all going to get COVID and the worst would happen. F was 18 months. However, I was recently looking back at pictures and boy did we also have so much fun. We bought her and indoor slide and she mastered it by the end of the day and even seemed to enjoy face planting🥰👶🌊
Gosh, Maura, I can't tell you how often I've had the, "Is this motherhood or residual COVID anxiety?" question run through my mind. I had a baby in January of 2020, and so that baby (and me) spent all of the first two years of his life completely isolated from anyone (easy to do where we live, but hard on the mind.) I appreciate you!
I am not a Mom, (well, Im a dog Mom) and yes I would consider myself a light weight worry-wart.
One of my girl friends incessantly teases me about worrying all the time. My boyfriend thinks Im a fatalist. Sometimes, I can just see all the worse case scenarios flash in front of my eyes because, maybe its experience? Maybe I just dont want to be asleep when something goes awry? I want to be prepared always. Sometimes I think its just awareness and its OK and probably normal. Usually, my worries are short lived, but Im sure my "awareness" has made me put into place preventatives that have prevented crazy stuff from happening!
I just like to think of it as "awareness"! Its a superpower!
"Maybe I just don't want to be asleep when something goes awry." This is a beautiful way of putting what I think often. I stopped listening to my beloved true crime podcasts because they started to seep in too deeply. At first I told myself I was just equipping myself with knowledge but it started to engulf everything. TBD if it makes a difference!
I, too, am a consummate worrier. I worry about damned near everything and, on some days I even manage to conjure up some seriously stupid things to worry about. The thing is, I know it’s completely irrational; I’m even capable of, “talking myself off the ledge”, yet I persist. Nothing I have ever worried about in my 70 years has ever come to pass. You’d think that would provide me with a solid reason to say, “enough”, right?
Giggling at this comment, but also relating at the same time.
Ahhhh Holly. (and Pat) Well said and perfect timing for me today. Thank you.
Yes, to all of this. Thank you for making me feel so seen and accompanied in a time of my life where my anxiety is at an all time peak. Giggling at the ridiculousness of it all is so often a soothing antidote. Thank you again 🧡
❤️
You capture it perfectly. I never knew this feeling until I had children and then, the haunting began. After they left home, it took a while to fade. My neighbor, a few years ahead of me in child-rearing, set a hopeful stage. She said, you will learn to appreciate the freedom after a while. Your brain will try to hold the vigilance, but you won't be able to sustain it. You have no idea where the are and what they are doing, so the feeling will gradually release. She was so very right. Of course, I still worry, but not the way you so beautifully describe. I now hold the worry with a gentle nostalgia. Ah.
The haunting! Yes. Thank you for passing on your friend's wisdom to me. I won't forget it.
You are blessed to have eagles so close! I am fortunate enough to have seen eagles in the wild on several occasions. It is always a treat.
Yes… Beautifully written!
💕
Oh my. You validate me and my heart hurts for you at the same time. Thank goodness we have words like "catastrophizing" and "magical thinking", words I have recently learned, to help put definition and order to these thoughts that can feel like a hijack of the brain... hijack, carjack, brainjack?
Your essay could have had my name on it, right down to the career choice and my son's love of berries!
Fast forward - The Fifties...
I fnally made it to the "new thirties". I'm in a fairly new and sweet marriage and I have a great teenage son, we live in a lovely mountain setting in TN, I feel good about myself, I'm 27 years into my career - I'm thinking "Sweet Spot"!
And then...
Husband suffers, and is permanently disabled, by a stroke, months later I lose my job, months later start a new job for the first time in 29 years, months later I am diagnosed with breast cancer, we move downtown for job & constant medical needs, months later my mother moves in with us, weeks later my beloved brother ends his life. Two years later, COVID and an unexpected family break (estrangement of stepson, daughter and three grandsons...), grief, loss, isolation, caregiving.
A year later, we cautiously peek out of our bunker, my job is full-time, remote at this point. So, back to the mountains we go with Mom in tow. It's perfect! North Georgia, Cumberland Plateau, waterfalls, creeks, woods, fields a home with a perfect layout (Mom space!), a garden spot, a bluff facing into nightly amazing sunsets, deer, fox, turkey, owls, birds, wild blueberries! Oh how sweet 2021 was to me...
The garden, my most favorite project - Plant.Learn.Plant.Fail.Plant.Succeed.Plant.Eat.Learn.Plan.Plant.Eat.Can.Eat.Grow... up the garden game by installing raised garden beds.
Oh now this looks beautiful and serene, add a little more dirt and..... Wait! Darn It! How did I trip INTO my raised bed? My head hurts, my neck hurts, my shins hurt, my elbows hurt and I now sit in the middle of my garden bed, a gardener turned into a pumpkin!
The rest of the story... Broken Neck. C1 & C2 vertebrae broken with Jefferson Fracture, it's the same fracture common to those who dive into shallow pools.
I used to practice catastrophizing thinking.
Then I survived a decade of catastrophe
Now.
I am beginning to stop reeling and start recovering. I am taking steps to grow my faith, love my people, and explore my gifts and passions.
I just turned 60 and I refuse to feel trepidation for what's next. Instead, with head held high and stepping even higher (no trips!), I planted my garden!!
💚🦋