Salutary Lessons: Ripping off the Mask

It doesn’t happen very often these days: The forced removal of the mask, I mean. Dramatic events tend to proceed it. Brutal, in fact – so much so that my inner scaredy cat or angry lioness come out despite my better judgement.

Wednesday morning was hellish. Frightening. Confronting. Forcing me, once again, to face the core of anxiety I usually take such pains to crush and hide. Briefly: Chest pain, at 2 am, and waves of panic (which, of course, made a bad situation worse), ended in a visit to the Minor Injuries Unit (and an ECG, among other checks), followed by a visit to the local surgery – and the instruction to phone for an ambulance if the pain returned and lasted for more than half an hour.

All the tests done in the hospital seemed to indicate that my heart was fine (though I am to have treadmill tests done soon) – but the anxiety flooding into my body made logic, battering impotently outside, unable to gain entrance.

Wednesday was terrifying, though a visit from a kind friend soothed me. I was due to attend a gig, in a local pub and in which a friend was playing, that evening. I nearly cancelled, several times. It all felt too unsafe, too many unknowns, nowhere to hide.

This is an old, old one, this need to squirrel away and hide, actually be unseen, when frightened. Safe, confined spaces are a part of my ritualising process, part of my way of trying to handle the worst of the panic. Difficult to explain to those who do not get anxiety.

I drove three of us down town and parked near the pub. Fear is like a feral cat: You cannot persuade it to behave normally, or to obey your commands and it can bite with no warning. Trying to stroke its fur doesn’t work because it has never been trained to react that way.

Panic set in as I prepared to get out of the car – and, for ten awful minutes (or thereabouts; I wasn’t looking at a watch, to be honest) my entire Jolly Strong Ali mask just fell away and that scared, shaky, insecure little girl stood there instead. I felt as if I were ambulance watching, waiting for pain which lasted a half hour, incubating something really scary and horrible…

…and I travelled back, to Winter 1963, when I was five. I can remember sitting on my mother’s lap, in our Drawing Room, wrapped in a tartan rug, gasping for breath, terrified (and catching the cadence of Mum’s terror too), hearing the siren of the approaching ambulance and trying not to cry because tears made the asthma worse.

‘Phone for an ambulance’ summons up such a weight of dread and fear: The countless times my father went into a diabetic coma and the sound of sirens zooming up our road; the night he died (which is vivid in my mind, although I wasn’t there at the time); other incidents over the years.

I can see, as a counsellor I saw last year pointed out, that I was brought up in a state of medical emergency; that family health problems dominated my childhood; that anxiety started early and had some justification in reality: If we did not treat my father’s collapses as ambulance jobs, as serious, he might die (as, in fact, he did after what turned out to be his final hypo). Waiting was not an option.

I can see that this has followed me into adulthood, this knee-jerk response to pain and physical symptoms, this need to get help immediately, this absolute terror of waiting.

When I am feeling relaxed, I can see the childlike mind clearly and can even begin to pick holes in its weave of fear. I can say to that littler self, ‘Not every medical problem ends in disaster – and not every symptom needs to be checked!’

But that five year old takes over all too easily still – and she was the one standing, small and bewildered, beneath the mask. Fortunately I was with two friends I trust – and this made the sudden transition from adult in control to frightened little girl a bit easier to cope with.

The evening was lovely. Listening to the advice of my friends, I allowed myself to relax with a small amount of alcohol. Later, inspired by the band, I danced crazily. In a sense, that passionate burst of movement was all about doing it anyway; it was all about putting two fingers up at the Grim Reaper and saying, in effect, ‘All right, if I am going to have a heart attack, let’s have one last frenzied dance first!’ It was anger (which has continued all of today) in the face of, and in reaction to, my own fear and sense of horrible vulnerability.

I was brought up surrounded by syringes in a big greenish glass box filled with fluid, and little bottles of insulin; I was weaned on blood tests and the counting of blacks and of tension as each meal approached. I was brought up thinking it normal that my male parent should come off his moped during a hypo, or cut his head open in Bury Knowle Library when skating too close to the thin ice of pre-meal danger. I was brought up in an atmosphere of medical unsafety, of physical fragility, of running away and trying to hide from fear.

I had to symptom-watch as a child. We all did. There was no alternative. We had to be on our guard. Unfortunately, the habit has followed me into adulthood. I can see this very clearly. But I seem to be powerless to overcome it and push it firmly into the past.

I think the removal of the mask is a good and healthy thing, however. I think it is an essential part of the healing and trusting process. It means that I am beginning to allow others to help me be on my guard and symptom watch – and this, in turn, may well eventually let me relax sufficiently to stop watching so zealously and neurotically.

The anger? Necessary. Feared all my life. No more to be said on that front today.

Down Days

I am feeling sad today. I think there is a sense of failure, of frustration (both directed at myself) in the wake of yesterday’s severe anxiety. There is a part of me that is angry that I still give way to the horrors of the panic attack – and still fear that the physical symptoms (which are often both intense and terrifying) are a sign of serious illness, and that I am (in my mind) being selfish and wasting precious medical resources for what is basically the physical effects of extreme fear.

I went to bed early last night – and cried, a lot: About Jumble; about this terror of being discredited and bullied if I write the truth on here; about feeling unsafe and afraid; about convincing so many people that the persona really is me; about my inability to ask for help – and the reasons behind it; about the fact that my courage failed me back in October and two posts about my marriage were put into the Private part of the blog after only twenty-four hours because I was so frightened.

I have always had problems with trust – and recent events, involving a tiny minority of people met in Glastonbury, have set me back a bit. I have become afraid of writing about certain things on here and have restricted my social life and where I go because of the above. The perennial fear of being unsafe, of being open to attack, has returned.

The problem, in part, comes from the vast disparity between the inner and the outer Ali. I have taught myself to be big and loud and jolly and bawdy, to dress in bright colours and to cheer others up. I let my guard down rarely – because to live with that degree of thin skin would be unbearable.

But bullies have always seen beneath the facade – and, in that way, I am a danger to myself: I assume I am convincing others, but the truly manipulative will ferret out the truth very quickly and, as is true of bullies everywhere, have few qualms when it comes to using private fears and insecurities against me.

Why do I write on here? Because, in part, it has helped me to recognise that I am not mad, not imagining things. When my mind has been under assault – often by another, though sometimes by the forces of self-doubt – seeing my thoughts manifested on the blog grounds me.

In a few days’ time, I will be going to see my mother (with Lad and Lass) in the new home she was moved to back in the autumn. She has Alzheimer’s Disease and will probably have no idea who I am or who my son is. This is all bringing a lot of grief and emotion to the surface. Relationships in the family fractured after my father’s death ten years ago – and there is a huge amount of hurt and distrust and sadness still. I have seen very little of my four siblings in the intervening years – and this is a vast source of unhappiness. As the oldest child, I feel responsible.

I can see that yesterday’s events are not surprising in the grand scheme of things. All my life I have been a bottler up of emotion. Often my body has to have a metaphorical tantrum in order to get my attention, to get me listening to the tumult in my mind and emotions.

Chest pain: Sadness and sense of loss. Yes, that makes absolute sense.

 

Carpeted: Panic Attack in Public – DP

https://dailypost.wordpress.com/prompts/cacophony/

This post captures real feelings. It tries to convey the physical nature of a panic attack. I have used emotions from the present and blended them with memories from the past. A panic attack is a form of cacophony; it is like a badly-tuned orchestra screeching away in the nerves.

The setting is the school where I used to teach, and the scenario one of the times, during my early years as a teacher, in which I was hauled into the Head’s office to be told off. It took me many more years to understand that there was a way of avoiding this horror: Lying. But I was never able to say the false words – and, to this day, if I have done wrong, I will admit it…

I drive, park. Like the deer I have now met so often, I am on high alert, sniffing the air. Clouds lower their burden, tip sideways, wait. A few lone drops escape the bulging bag. Autumnal eddies, picked up by still-gusting wind, moan and creak and rustle in dry death.

The car is safe. Baroque music’s beauty and order soothes: Telemann, a concerto with which I am familiar, early instruments by the sound of it. Radio Three. My comfort in times of deep distress.

Heater on, warm air stroking face and fugging up the glass of windows, I sit, delaying the moment. I am going to a meeting, to be told off. Fear clogs. I feel I am trying to breathe through water; a soggy remnant of childhood’s acute asthma threatens, flies in on dark wings, crows of black panic landing on the roof of the mind and toppling security.

It is time. I can delay no longer. The others will have arrived by now. My word is my bond. I do not like to be late. But the car seat lures me; its warmth comforts and I want, above all, to remain safe and, in a sense, hidden.

But I force trembling legs out, hear the dull thud of doors closing, make myself walk – with a fawn’s wobbly gait – to the place.

Words fail me. It is not a metaphor. The clonking of the mind’s machinery is clogged. It feels as if skeins of wool have become caught in the cogs. The giant loom of my speaking apparatus slows, stumbles, judders, stops. Briefly, I do not know who, or where, I am.

Threat is all around: Red wings flapping out their menace; the cawing of hatred; sparks of enmity striking the ground and sending up tiny flares of fire. The safe members of the meeting have not yet arrived. I am stranded. I bolt back to the car, lock myself in, turn Radio Three back on, tremble in terror, am unwomaned.

Sandpaper coats my throat. Parched, I cannot swallow. My heart is tap-dancing arrhythmically. I am light-headed, sweating. Lights flicker at the corners of vision. But I must do this. I cannot wimp out. Fear will not master me – or so I tell the last lamenting strains of an unknown piece by a renaissance composer.

The building’s corridor, the stairs up to the office, all seem like a journey of many hundreds of miles, and I have to touch walls and grip banisters in order to earth myself in reality. Floating away feels like a distinct, and perhaps welcome, possibility.

Carpeted, I am surrounded. Faces. People, clothed in the dark officialdom of suits. Stern faces. Angry miens. Visages revealing hatred. And, among the flock of raging birds, kindness and warmth. A bewildering scene.

I can feel my breathing ramping up, my stomach clenching in pain, the door to my throat clanging shut. I wait, sacrificial lamb, for the wolves to gather and circle and bite. I wait, in the deep snow of fear, for blood to pour from sundered veins. I wait for death.

The world is both tiny and terrifyingly vast.

Words fall from my accusers, a torrent of cold fact. I am stymied, wordless. I have become anxiety. I cannot defend myself. There are no lies I can tell, no superior acting ability to bring to my aid. In the battle of my word against theirs, I will lose because I have never learned to embrace falsehood, always blurt out the truth.

‘Yes, I did it…’ I stumble out the fragments of a sentence. ‘…and I am very sorry…’

The car door slams behind me. John Stanley’s Trumpet Voluntary has just started. Radio Three, my comfort in times of deep distress.

Tears fall.

 

Critical Mass and Social Anxiety: not getting the subtler rules?

https://dailypost.wordpress.com/prompts/critical/

I am best in a one-to-one situation where other people are concerned. Once a group reaches critical mass, I start to unfurl like a badly-made flag, and can easily come apart at the seams.

You see…

…I suffer from social anxiety. Crippling at times: large groups of people I find completely overwhelming, and usually have to hide myself away after any gathering in order to recover my shape.

But it is more than this. I often fail to understand the nuances, the subtleties, the unspoken rules of social intercourse. Inclined to take things literally in this most-demanding of spheres, I am caught out time after time by social niceties which I take as promises or statements of intent. I assume that gushing statements like,  ‘We’ll be in touch before such and such a date…’ are genuinely meant, and not, as it sometimes appears, throw-away lines used to deflect and distance.

I do not have the equipment to deal with this kind of social code. It is beyond me. I feel excluded by it most of the time.

If the event has a purpose, I can cope – usually; but unstructured time filled with social chit-chat drives me into silence and panic; I ‘disappear’ because I have nothing to add to these kinds of conversations. I do not get them, by and large, and feel isolated, weird and alone when surrounded by them.

Such formlessness (in my eyes) becomes rapidly unbearable, even threatening, to me – and I have had to walk out of such meetings on more than one occasion when a full-on panic attack has started. For this reason, I found meetings at school – whether full Staff or departmental – almost beyond belief awful and would, I am ashamed to say, disrupt proceedings simply to try and release the ghastly tension a bit, to try and move things on from the endless turgid maundering.

I now know, to my vast relief, that I am not alone in this; that several people I have befriended here in Glastonbury find socialising as enigmatic, painful and discombobulating as I do. I know, finally, that I am not a failure; that, however you define it or label me, I was born with this lack of social grace, confidence, awareness, ability – and that many of us are so disabled. Call it being on the Autistic Spectrum, if you wish (many have!), or socially clumsy or whatever pejorative term grabs you!

I am coming to terms with the permanent nature of this condition. No therapy has made a blind bit of difference. Not because I am stubborn, lazy or blind to my own faults, but because, like my asthma and, more recently, low-acting thyroid, it is a lifelong state of affairs; it is bred in the Alienora Browning genetic make-up, that is to say. I am not alone in my family: several distant relatives had more severe cases of this exact syndrome. I am, I suspect, relatively high-functioning in this regard, which is why others have always accused me of being difficult rather than considering a familial social dis-ease.

I have learnt ways to mask the depth of my anxiety. I have learnt behavioural tricks which enable me to join in as best I can. I spend a great deal of my time listening to others, which can disguise the problem to a certain extent.

There are other parts to this which I am not going to discuss today. Boundaries are an on-going problem for me – and I am having to set firms ones in place because my social persona has, not for the first time, given a wrong impression and encouraged an unwanted incursion into my private space.

I am learning new and lovely ways of self-soothing, however – and, once I have posted this, will return to the glory of making stewed apple (from the garden) and blackberry compote, and then sitting out in the garden surrounded by therapeutic warmth, earth, plant life and colour.

 

Panic: Tracing it back to 1988 and earlier – Survive

https://dailypost.wordpress.com/prompts/survive/

This will be hard to read, for some. It was hard to write, harder still to experience. But I want to say one thing loud and clear: My attacker was never caught. Many are not. He did not actually rape – and, therefore, his actions were seen as, in some way, less serious, less damaging. This angers me still.

I write this in order to use the harrow to plough over the fear, churn that bitter soil into something of goodness and potential nourishment.

The man whose actions triggered panic the other night has made me think – and remember. Not him. He is not at fault. Simply, his movements took me back. Only this time, the man – a dark, wiry shape exuding menace – was approaching me along a narrow street, late at night.

Do you know: After all these years, I can still remember what I was wearing: A flowery longish skirt in shades of cream and crimson; a white blouse and a crimson fluffy cardigan. Thirty years old, I was, pretty, slim – and drunk, though not incapable.

Normally, these pavement passings lead to one person letting the other through, or a brief nod of acknowledgement.

Did I feel the energy within? Yes. It was acidic, deranged (or drugged), barbed wire instead of muscles; it was chemical scent and blackness. But I was still unprepared for the pounce, cat upon a dozy mouse; I was still in innocence when it came to hard fingers, with sharp nails, prodding and poking beneath the waist line, into territory I had, previously, associated mainly with pleasure. The thought that someone could press fingers hard enough into my breasts to leave marks, bruises, which stayed for ages, would never have occurred to me. The punch to my face, which left a bruise and cracked a tooth, was completely outside my experience.

Perhaps the most disturbing thing of all was that this man was not aroused, in any normal sense. It was not about sex. It was about anger, violence, the need to hurt someone.

But at least – as some people said, as if I had been making a huge fuss about nothing – he did not rape me. True. But not the point.

Fast forward a few days – though, muffled by trauma as I was at the time, it could just as easily have been months – and, calling a taxi, I made my first trip into town: I had run out of food, did not drive in those days. I asked – then, and for some time to come – for a female driver.

I can remember standing on the bottom step of the side entrance to Weston-super-Mare’s Tesco, shaking, cotton wool in my head, trying to get the courage to take that first step, literally and metaphorically.

A dishevelled man, rough, smelly, swaying, chose that moment to stagger out of the store. He was mumbling under his breath, swear words a vomit-like stream being puked out of his anger-bag. I can see now that he was mentally ill, that his life of decay was, in all probability, not his fault; that the system had let him down. More to be pitied than censured, in other words.

Then? He was lurching in my direction, clearly not in control.

I froze. Breathing accelerated to a frantic gallop. The space where my brain was, where control arose, dissolved into an echoing cavern. I recall it vividly still. Legs and arms began to shake. Tummy was prodded with terror’s sharp and painful sticks. Light-headed, I was certain I was having a heart attack and would die, right there, in front of this guy – and maybe, at some level, this is what I was hoping.

All thoughts of food and shopping abandoned, I ran, crying and jagged of breath, certain that he would catch up with me and hurt me.

He didn’t. I did not figure in his tormented inner landscape; I doubt he even saw me.

That was where it began. And yet it wasn’t and didn’t. For there were other contributory factors which, buds in themselves, only flowered in the aftermath of that early September night in 1988.

I am not writing this for attention, or pity, or because I am a Drama Queen (all of which have been levelled at me at some point); I am tracing the present by accessing dark parts of the past. I am attempting to gain control of my current panic by going back to the origins.

The man in the Assembly Rooms the other night, battling his own demons, inadvertently pulled out the stopper of the bottle which holds mine. His lurching walk, his aura of barely-suppressed rage, reminded me of my attacker.

But maybe this unknown man in 2017 has done me a big favour. Maybe that bottle needed to be smashed open, in panic’s flailing around; maybe I needed, once again, to face that night and see the attack again.

Maybe I needed to experience what is now beginning to rise: Rage at my unknown assailant.

 

Exposed: Delayed Threat Response: Pain and Tears

https://dailypost.wordpress.com/prompts/exposed/

I woke with intense upper-back pain today – and it turned into a panic attack, as such things have done so often in the past. Rarely since I moved here, however, so I do feel terribly disappointed and, I will confess, a touch annoyed with myself for this illogical response to any kind of threat.

But there’s an awful lot going on emotionally behind the scenes of my apparently open and candid blogging. My personal pieces on here are but the tip of the metaphorical iceberg = and I am hurt in ways, and places, I cannot always even access consciously myself. At such times, the pain comes out somatically. But, for those inclined to pour scorn on such matters, the word ‘somatic’ means ‘mind and body’ and the pain is genuine.

Much I cannot divulge. But I will share what I am convinced has triggered this latest pain/fear response: A sense of being utterly vulnerable, threatened and open to actual violence.

Let me share a little irony with my readers first: The problems I see in my new role as supply teacher are not viewed the same way by those who see me in action. To put it another way, I am better than I often think I am; more of my classroom management skills have survived than I give myself credit for.

I am terrified of two things: Losing control and being attacked, the latter either physically or psychologically. Last week, both of those aspects were broached – and, I am privately sure, the terror-hunching which followed (and of which I was unaware at the time) has given rise to my current back pain.

Tuesday, I had a notoriously difficult year eleven class – all boys – who had no work to do and were disruptive, rude and out of my control. My attempts at sorting things out resulted in one of the lads threatening me with violence. This, at a very deep level, triggered memories of an actual attack, seven years ago, by a seriously out of control year nine boy – and I was so afraid I actually felt light-headed and tempted to run away.

Friday, my arrival in a year nine class was greeted with cat-calls, jeers, personal (and unpleasant) comments and refusal to listen to a word I said. Nightmare scenario. Any teacher’s worst nightmare – or at least one of them. Losing control of a class is frightening. Very. I suspect I stiffened with fear, hunched in on myself for protection.

Last lesson, I had the ring -leader (or one of them) in another class – and had to send her out in the end for persistent poor behaviour and rudeness.

Maybe not all teachers respond to threat the way I do. Maybe some don’t even notice these scary undercurrents and shifting urges for violence and retribution amongst some of the kids. Maybe some teachers are genuinely so involved in the minutiae of their subject that the individuals who comprise the class are little more than receptive blurs.

Unfortunately, I have always been sensitive to underlying atmospheres, both in and out of the classroom. The children’s moods are, to me, like weather fronts and can be clearly discerned without a word needing to be spoken. And, as a supply teacher, I start with a disadvantage: We, as a breed, are seen as fair game and do not command any kind of respect en masse.

There is a school of thought which is self-protective, probably eminently sensible and with which I wish I could genuinely agree: That it does not matter whether the kids do the work as long as none of them actually kill/maim anyone else in the vicinity. Unfortunately, I have carried the discipline I used as a full-time English teacher (or tried to) into this very different role – and herein, I suspect, lies my mistake. The children do not know me and have no reason to respect me or obey my rules. I have no idea who they are (although we get lists of names, few schools include mugshots/seating plans as well) – and, as any teacher will know, trying to tell off a naughty child when you have no idea who he or she is does not end well.

The agency with which I signed on is excellent. But I think I am, at present, simply too fragile to do this job effectively. It is ripping too many scabs from wounds inflicted when I was a permanent teacher.

Have children become more difficult to handle – or is it simply that I have become, at fifty-nine, old, set in my ways and inflexible? The latter is probably true. But I also think standards of discipline have declined in our schools, partly in response to an increasing sense of having rights (but no responsibilities) amongst both the kids and, more worryingly, their parents. There is an increasing tendency to upbraid the teacher for being ‘aggressive’ or ‘confrontational’ rather than looking at the, at times appalling, behaviour of the class.

At one school I taught at, the person who was supposed to be setting the work refused to help me for the last two lessons because I had made a perfectly valid, if critical, comment about the quality of work set earlier.

What I am about to say will not surprise many of you, I suspect. Put it this way, I rarely experience teachers’ best and brightest classes when I come in as a supply teacher! As a breed, teachers take time off rarely and reluctantly and, when they do cave in, it is often the thought of teaching 11Z last thing on a Friday that influences them. Most of the groups I have taught last lesson at the various schools I’ve visited have been either bottom set or known to be tricky or both. In all honesty, most classes I have covered have been the kind of combination of miscreants who cause their regular teachers stress and illness in the first place.

It doesn’t matter how good I was as both teacher and disciplinarian in the past. In the present, in lessons which are one-offs and in which I have no knowledge of the kids, my past makes no difference at all. My classroom management strategies are irrelevant and, I suspect, seen as old-fashioned by many of the teachers I come across. The profession has moved on since I left – and some of the new ways of doing things do not, in my view, work.

But it is no longer any of my business. If teachers want to seat their pupils in sixes round three tables put together, that is up to them. I am, I suspect, seen as a reactionary old bag because my preference is to have the little dears in twos, and avoiding friendships duos, in serried ranks facing me! My habit, with really difficult small classes, of putting the buggers one to a desk would, I feel sure, be seen as Victorian and bordering on child abuse.

I feel really disheartened at present and very stressed by the whole thing. Today’s back pain is, I feel, a warning sign. It is my body communicating pretty strongly. It is a physical acknowledgement that I am not, sad to relate, in step with the current education system or the philosophy behind most schools’ treatment of poor behaviour.

I do not give up easily – and I am not going to rush into a decision with regard to supply teaching either. There have been some lovely days, and some of the schools have been a real joy to work in. Many of the children are delightful, though held back by their naughtier, more dominant, classmates. But I may have to admit defeat in the end. It may be that I – rebellious, lively and inspiring as I was – have become a dinosaur, a creature which has become extinct and is having trouble admitting to that.

I cannot resume a life of pain and constant panic. I have had quite enough of that over the past few years. My aching back and the unstoppable, albeit brief, monsoon of tears, do not constitute a good sign. I have ignored warnings of this nature in the past – and the result has never been positive.

The dinosaurs, dying, gave way to other creatures better adapted to the landscape as it evolved. So in teaching: Younger minds are, I am sure, more elastic and, thus, better able to cope with the slings and arrows of education’s more outrageous fortune.

An Alienora may not be what the modern educational world needs/wants – and that world may not be good for me.

Yes, I feel exposed.

Return to the classroom: Overwhelming

https://dailypost.wordpress.com/prompts/overwhelming/

There is something so horribly physical – actually painful, often acutely so – about post-traumatic muscular kick-back. It is a form of anxiety with which I am all too familiar – and it is, to me, utterly overwhelming and very difficult to handle in any kind of mindful, let alone insouciant, way.

Let me explain: The whole process of resuming my teaching career, albeit on a part-time basis, has been overwhelming, both emotionally and physically. I became incredibly tense beforehand, on both occasions, and was very nervous, and barely slept, the nights before going into previously-unknown schools. The disruption to my routine (in so far as I have had one) has been a huge shock, and I have known, at some level, that my muscles and nerves would, inevitably, have their say eventually; they always do.

Both teaching days, I was up by six in the morning. It all felt so weird, as if I were a different person, an Alienora I thought I had left behind. Climbing into formal clothing felt strange. There was a stiffness about it, a lack of freedom, a tension – and the old pull between understanding that I need to look professional and wanting to simply be my usual self.

Adrenaline surges were vast throughout both days – but, while Tuesday was good, Thursday was the kind of nightmare all teachers, no matter how experienced and talented and able, face from time to time and dread with every fibre of their beings. I had occasion to comment in a recent post about the effects climatic conditions have upon teenagers – and Thursday was rainy with a high wind, absolutely the worst kind of weather in which to meet unknown children and attempt to teach an unfamiliar subject.

I shall say no more in terms of detail, concentrating instead upon my own response. I felt completely overwhelmed, terrified, so tense that I could have been carved from wood and bubbling up with oceans of tears. Failure seemed to be staring me in the face. My new start, I feared, would finish prematurely.

When I got into the car, to drive home, I had to stop after a few minutes because the tears started and would not stop. My teaching blouse was sodden within seconds. But, back driving again, I realised that this sorrow had touched a spring far more profound than the immediate incident; I knew that I had been feeling overwhelmed for a very long time, and for a variety of reasons – and that the loss of control in the lesson actually triggered, and echoed, a far wider spectrum than that produced by a less-than-successful teaching experience.

We teachers fear losing control of our classes. It is, perhaps, the most fundamental fear in teaching. For all our bluster, and education, we are one against many – and our bluffing teeters on the edge of profound vulnerability all the time. We are open to abuse, even assault. Being adult, having degrees, trying to engage with the children – none of this guarantees our success or our safety. It it, consequently, very easy to feel very small and easily broken when things get tough: To feel totally overwhelmed by the strain of having to keep the wild animals in their cage. As it were.

Fear of abuse lies at the heart of it, I am certain. And this is very painful territory for me, for many of us. Being overwhelmed by stronger, more ruthless adversaries has been a constant theme in my life in recent years – and the fear of certain personality types is an ongoing battle. It is easy, when threatened, for me to slide into a state of paralysis, to see myself as weak, useless, ineffectual, doomed to fail: To become, in a nutshell, overwhelmed by past programming and unhelpful habits.

Today, the pain has been bad again, as my muscles – so cramped through fear yesterday – spasm and whinge and moan. This morning, walking Jumble, I had the closest thing to a full-blown panic attack I’ve experienced since moving to Glastonbury – and, yes, I was tempted to give up my teaching plans, to give in to the fear.

But, looking at it logically, I have a 50% success rate thus far – and I can hardly make a valid judgement of anything after only two days. I am, as I have intimated on here many times, easily overwhelmed and very prone to a strong, usually unpleasant, somatic response. My body screams when my mouth cannot.

To me, one thing is very clear: It is time I faced this fear of being overwhelmed, of losing control, of being attacked and abused, laughed at and ridiculed. It is time I realised that the bad moods, nastiness and malice of others directed at me do not mean that I am necessarily at fault – or that I am a feeble, pathetic human being.

We all feel overwhelmed at some time in our lives – and often expend great energy trying to pretend that this is not so; trying to put on a brave, or hard, face; hoping to convince others, if not ourselves, that we have rhino-thick hides and are tough as the proverbial old boots.

So, this time, I am facing it: Yes, I felt, briefly, not just overwhelmed but, actually, obliterated. It hurt, horribly. It was a blow to my self-esteem, my confidence, my security. But, glancing back over the past year or so, such blows have been frequent – and often far more truly devastating than Thursday’s moment of misery. Of course, my body has no sense of relative values when it comes to threat: It clenches the muscles into excruciating knots, and pours out the gallons of adrenaline, regardless..

I will not flee, however. I will not run away from this fear of being overwhelmed by a stronger, attacking other human being. I will not back away from my terror of losing control in the classroom of my life. I will not give in, even thought the orcs of pain pull viciously at me and waves of anxiety climb and climb.

Better by far, I say, to be capable of being overwhelmed by life than to live in a constant state of unfeeling satedness, underwhelmed by everything.

Migraine: First in ages -irksome, to say the least.

https://dailypost.wordpress.com/prompts/irksome/

I am irked: Could do without this, frankly…

They started in my mid-teens: Disabling headaches, with accompanying aura, which had me bed-bound and moaning with pain in a darkened room. In 2003, I was hospitalised (and had a brain scan and lumbar puncture) with the worst migraine thus far: It went on for ten days or more.

What can I tell you? Severe, or continuous, stress brings them on. The one in 2003 came about three weeks into jury service in a murder trial. As a result, I had to be removed from the jury.

Saturday morning, I woke feeling dizzy, had vertigo, muffled hearing, tinnitus and strange alterations in my vision. Panic too. In retrospect, the hours at the laptop were not a good idea – but we do not always think these things through, do we? Besides, it had been such a long time since my last migraine that I assumed, and hoped, that they were finally behind me for good.

The aura manifestations continued all over the weekend. I was not able, unfortunately, to find, let alone press, panic and worry’s off button. The situation I am in is so stressful and anxiety-inducing at present that, in a sense, I am only surprised that it has taken this long for my head to get in on pain’s act.

The headache (huh! such an anodyne word for migraine’s ghastliness) struck yesterday evening. I got into bed and lay in darkness, the way I had as a teenager. Flashes of dark light seemed to be zooming through my skull. I couldn’t get comfortable, no matter how I lay. Cotton wool filled my mind, barring coherent thought but, most horribly, allowing the demons of panic (particularly those which insisted that I was having a stroke) to gibber and snigger and tweak my fear response to their evil hearts’ content. The unremitting hammers of pain thudded up and down. I felt sick every time I moved. I wanted to cry – but knew, from ancient experience, that it would make things worse.

It is like a heavy band round the head, a constricting circle of intense pain, a crown of thorns. My eyes look bloodshot and are sore. I feel shaky and afraid this morning. The ringing in the head remains, as do wispy clouds of pain, and surges of nausea.

If I could just stop worrying, it would help. But there is no time out from my current situation. I’ve got to see it through to the end – an end I hope will be the polar opposite of bitter. But I am up against it. My positive visions are, in a manner of speaking, doing battle with much darker and more negative ones – and, unfortunately, I do not have the power to banish the latter because they do not emanate from my mind. Arrowing them back to sender has had no effect thus far, though I do take my inner bow and fire strongly and accurately.

The migraine has been a nasty jar, an unpleasant surprise. But, given my somatic history, it shouldn’t have been, should it?

Anxiety/Panic Attack: Urgent

https://dailypost.wordpress.com/prompts/urgent/

The word which comes to mind when thinking about prolonged anxiety and/or panic attacks is ‘urgent’ because the physical symptoms ape those of well-known, serious emergencies – and the sense of emotional desolation, of raw terror, is so extreme that the sufferer feels in need of urgent and immediate assistance.

The problem is that the very intensity of the feelings makes a cry for help all-but impossible. The fear of being out of control is very real.

Let me try and explain because I am in the midst of the longest wave of anxiety in a very long time. I have become the hurt child I once was. My mind and heart are inarticulate with pain. I am scared of being betrayed. I am scared of trusting. The tidal waves of adrenaline defy all logic and become a thundering torment like tinnitus affecting the entire body. I feel utterly unsafe and exposed. I cannot settle, or sleep; eating is almost impossible. It is a necessary emotional crisis. It has been brought on by a multitude of things, including my tendency to deny and bottle up my so-called negative emotions.

I am not cracking up. I am, rather, cracking open.

However, knowing this does not lessen the intensity and anxiety of the experience.

No good advice, or sensible practice, helps: I am unable to calm down. I am constantly awaiting the next shock, the next blow, the next cruel act.

But I am adult. I am also in charge. If I don’t move things on, the current stalemate will persist. If I don’t face pain and the past and the wounds flying around, no one else can or will. I have been attacked on many levels in recent days and weeks. My foundations feel very shaky as a result, and I fear that the whole structure is going to collapse.

My most vulnerable state is being seen when I am like this – and, for that reason, I tend to hide away and contact no one directly and wait it out, wait until the worst is over before sharing my feelings. Or, if I do express this inner desperation and urgency, it is in the form of written words rather than a raw cry, or a terrible scream, from the over-burdened mind and bemused, battered heart.

I can talk, often articulately, about how I am feeling, but it is very rare for me to cry in front of anyone. Why? Because my emotional fragility has attracted one too many predators: People who appear so empathetic and caring and say all the right things and then take my halting, weeping confessions and use them, with calculated and cold ferocity, against me.

We are back to trust again, aren’t we? Trust. That most difficult of trials for me. Trust. That which many people feel in my presence with such ease – and yet which I almost never feel in return.

The sad truth is this: People – even close friends, family and partners – hurt others deliberately; they betray; they use confidences for power or with malice; they reject and ignore and make other people feel small and unwanted and inadequate; they manipulate and intimidate and threaten and play horrible head games just for the fun of it; they make little children wait or frighten them deliberately and find it funny; they home in on weakness like hyenas…

You see: Those who we love can hurt us more than anyone else in the world – because they know us and know which buttons to press; because they may not love us in return and so our love makes us into prey animals; because they are frightened of, or indifferent to, intimacy – and, therefore, have to damage, even kill, it in order to feel safe in a world of superficial connection; because they have a lust for power and control, and we gave ours away into their apparently kindly and loving hands far too quickly and far too long ago.

We die alone. All too often, we also go through the Pain Process alone. Why? Because even those closest to us find our anguish difficult to deal with – and there is a tendency to use one of the five bullet points below when a friend is in the midst of severe anxiety or a panic attack. Very often, another’s crisis triggers off memories and emotions that we struggle to cope with, let alone face in our friend – and the desire to be dismissive, or to soothe our own anxiety by giving the friend reams of advice, can be overwhelming.

Just being with a suffering person is incredibly hard for many, I think because jagged and raw emotions are, by their very nature, confronting and alarming.  And some of the symptoms of a panic attack can be frightening to watch: The gasping for breath, the shaking, the inability to talk coherently, the clutching at the chest or abdomen at moments of severe physical pain, the pallor, the wide scared eyes, the dizziness…

A person in such a state becomes convinced, very quickly, that urgent medical help is needed. It doesn’t matter if you think they are being irrational; to them, the emergency is very real and absolutely terrifying.

I am coping as best I can. I am trying to trace these traumas back to their source in order to loosen their powerful grip on my present-day existence and self. I am telling individuals I trust the specific details.

But I would say this: We tend to think that everything can be fixed, cured, as long as those suffering have the right attitude and take the right advice. I think we lose sight of the fact that not all ills can be treated successfully – and that deep, long-standing wounds can take a very long time to heal.

Sometimes, all that is needed is a listening ear, a calming and kind approach and the willingness to stay without impatience or an unhelpful agenda.

It also helps to know – and I can tell you this from personal experience – that those who are suffering from acute panic are not shamming, or looking for attention or acting out; they are in the grip of such petrifying fear that their bodies are actually mimicking the signs of heart attack. Telling them to snap out of it as if they were hysterics shows a lack of compassion which can easily make things worse.

It is this intense at present because, for too long, I have swallowed the pain down, pushed it away or assumed a very shallow level of calm meant that healing was well underway. It wasn’t. The full force of it is being unleashed. It is not pleasant. It is vile, frightening, at times almost unbearable. I have denied my strongest emotions so consistently in my life that the eventual bursting was always going to be like a volcano erupting. The agony really does, at times, feel as if I am being flayed, mainly inside, by molten lava.

I have also, on too many occasions, carried on with a relationship despite it giving me little but pain – and have denied myself the right to leave, to stand up for myself, to demand respect.

When this state struck thirty-four years ago, I did not allow it to reach its natural climax; I throttled it back – and there it remained, growing bigger and more dangerous as the years went by.

Sometimes, we just have to face this emotional energy, this lifetime’s backlash. Sometimes, there is nothing that can stop it, or help, in the short term. Sometimes, the intensity of the process means we have to move through it alone. It is challenging. Very. Excruciating. Regularly. But there is a true emotional urgency at stake, because not facing it is far more damaging. Ultimately, we just have to go through it as best we can, using any techniques we think might help – and, when nothing does, being prepared to ride that surging wave until the tide turns.

I know that there are people who will be with me on the Inner during this time – and this gives me comfort and strength for what lies ahead. I am using the influence of the recent Super Full Moon in order to surrender, let go, and pull away.

A black and painful night and a bright flowering

Sometimes, it is hard to keep believing, hard to keep the vision bright and present, hard just to push one aching hip in front of the other.

Yesterday, I was alone in the house, my son having gone to his girlfriend’s – to avoid the chaos of decorating; my ex-partner (who, like me, like our son, still lives here) having gone on holiday to Crete for a month.

The decorators are rejuvenating those parts of the house which had become old, wrinkled, slack and sad. This is all to the good…

…but, we all agreed at the start that any moving of our things prior to each day’s painting would be done before the duo arrived each morning.

Result? I ached all over, have cricked my neck and my back was very sore once again.

But the main feeling – after a night crammed with nightmares and fear – was lonely terror, a fear that I was doing the wrong thing, that I couldn’t cope with all of this (selling one house; trying to buy another; liaising with solicitors, estate agents, surveyors, mortgage advisers and so on) alone.

Why? Because I might, in my naivety, be taken advantage of; I might agree to terms which are not in the wider best interest; I might mess things up for years to come…

This is how little belief I had in my own capacity to make sensible and rational decisions. This is what years of being told that one is showing signs of imminent madness, incipient Alzheimer’s Disease and renewed Menopause do to even the most intelligent of women.

I know that none of those accusatory misfortunes are true of me – but there is always that tiny little echo of, ‘What if I am deluding myself and everyone else can see that I am incompetent?’ which, typically, floods me in the early and sleepless hours with its tsunami of self-doubt.

A flotilla of forms arrived, relating to the sale of this house, which I had to fill in. This triggered the worst panic I have had for quite some time. My immediate feeling of, ‘I can’t do this,’ actually prompted gales of weeping.

But, I have done it! I have filled in most of the boxes on all the forms (with a small amount of input from my ex) – and they are now ready to be added to the house-changing mix.

As I put the final page to one side, then clipped them all together, a thought, a dazzling realisation, hit me:

My ability to handle these documents, to keep going with determination, to pick myself up and keep going, to apply a logical mind to business matters shows none of the hallmarks of insanity or early dementia. I know because I watched my mother in the first throes of the latter, and saw how it altered her ability to do even the simplest of tasks.

I ache all over from the physical lifting, and am feeling sad and torn from the emotional freight of it all – but I no longer doubt my ability to deal with the situation, and I know that, even though I am feeling down in spirits today, my vision of this next phase in my life remains as bright and beckoning as ever it did.

Goddess, it’s hard hard work, though. So please bear with me if I have not responded to recent comments.