When I was young, I was a bit of a drama queen (assisted by the drug cocktail I had to take to recover from meningitis). I remember crying at the drop of a hat, and my dad sometimes referred to me as “Sarah Heartburn”, a sarcastic reference to French actress Sarah Bernhardt, dubbed the "the queen of the pose and the princess of the gesture". As I got older and accumulated more conditions, I got to a point where I could suppress most of my emotions, for better or worse. Except for that one thing.
I am a catastrophizer. In my head, I can spin a minor issue into the end of the world. Once, when I was in middle school, I had a meltdown because I hadn’t studied for a Spanish test, and I was afraid I was going to fail. My dad, who is fluent in Spanish, calmed me down, went over the material with me, and I did fine. And now he has an endless line about, “Remember that time when you . . .?”
That is something I have taken with me into adult life. If things aren’t going well, I will project disaster into the future. It’s no wonder. With the constant ebb and flow of new and old medical conditions, plus those of friends and family members, I have never been able to envision a safe, stable future. I have always dreaded that perennial interview question, “Where do you see yourself in five years?” I never had a good answer because every time I made plans, something would come along to change them, and I didn’t suppose “possibly dead” was a good answer even though it would have been funny to see the reaction.
Luckily, it doesn’t happen often. Generally, I stick to my practical, sometimes resigned mindset. But, as I mentioned in last week’s post, the pandemic has taken its toll on my peace of mind. It has been over 20 years since I was unemployed, and I never expected that finding a job would take this long this time, even though I am looking to change my career lane. In my head, I know that it takes time to find the right opportunities if you are looking for something different. But my psyche will only listen to my brain for so long. I am somewhat surprised that my anxiety took almost a whole year to become a problem.
For a while it was waking me up almost every night. I would just lie there for hours, maybe read something or watch a boring tv show, play a time waster game on my phone. Often, I could feel myself drifting off, but never quite made it. Every night it would take an hour or two to fall asleep again.
So, I called my therapist. She pointed out my tendency to catastrophize and that it was a fear response. I wasn’t actually in danger of losing my apartment or not being able to afford groceries, as so many were and are. I was worried that if things stayed the same, I would be.
It also triggered my longstanding fear of retirement. That is, the fear that I won’t have enough savings to support myself. It’s a projection of the next step beyond what could happen in the short term. I have been afraid of my own retirement since I was 20. I know my medical needs are going to be expensive, and who knows what Medicare and Social Security will look like by the time I want to retire? That fear compelled me to buy long term care insurance when I was 29. (A new employer was offering it without a medical exam. I was pretty sure I would never have that opportunity again, so I jumped on it.) Fifteen years later, I think I am still the only one of my peers to have invested in that kind of insurance.
Add to that an unemployment-induced hit to the savings that I do have, and my panic response seems to be making itself at home in my brain in a way it never has before, even with all the diagnoses. At least the panic response from those can be deflated through learning and discussion with my doctors.
Knowing all of this – an advantage of seeing the same therapist for 20 years – she suggested that the next time I woke up in the middle of the night, I remind myself what was causing it, and that what I feared wasn’t what was happening, just what could happen. As someone who always had trouble imagining what the future would look like, was there any point to worrying about what might happen? Easier said than done, that kind of mental adjustment, but it definitely helps to recognize the behavior and remind myself that I’m not there yet.
At least for the moment, it’s really not that bad.