Simmering Stew

I awoke today in a simmering stew of anxiety. This happens sometimes. It used to happen all the time. So much so that I did not even notice it as odd until a therapist asked me if I ever woke up that way. Then she asked me how far back could I remember waking up that way. Way back into childhood is what I remember. I can see the view from my bed in my old bedroom, right there beneath the window, and I can hear the starlings in the hedgerow of trees out back. It is autumn and the early sky is pale grey and I am a simmering stew of worry. Living with crazy alcoholic parents can lead to that. You never knew precisely what to expect from them, but you always knew it would be something. To paraphrase Rick Bragg in his memoir "All Over but the Shoutin'", when you have drunks for parents you know in your bones it is all going to fall to shit again eventually.

Regarding this morning, I know a therapist would ask me, "What do you think set this off, Rozenkraai?"

I will try to be a good student of my mood disorders and tentatively answer this way: the annual time change. We turned back the clocks this weekend. I hate change, particularly fundamental change in the structure of my reality, such as that was. It rattles me despite my best intentions for it not too. All tangled up in the stew of awakening worry was a dream I was having. Part of it concerned anxieties I have about my daughter and the process of her applying to and being accepted to college, a process she is currently engaged in. The other part had to do with time. My bedroom clock, a tiny travel clock I keep under my pillow where I can grab it easily when I want to see it, had, in the dream, needed new batteries. I could not get its face to light up and so see the time. That worried me. I had batteries for it, but when I replaced them, I could not get the clock back together in one piece. That really worried me. And so, after the sequence in the dream where I confront my daughter with my fears about her apparent sloth and inertia regarding her college obligations, I am out walking unknown streets alone, my tiny clock in my hands, trying earnestly and somewhat desperately to get it back together.

And then I woke up in a stew of worry, a thick stew that would suffocate and drown me. And what have I found to help me in these times, here in my latter days of trying to manage PTSD and depression (in the same way other people learn to manage diabetes, for example)? Prayer. Scripture. Hymns. The word of God, of Jesus, as assurance and balm, as if a gentle caring person was there beside me, consoling and soothing me.

So today I started with prayer, fervent, scared prayer. That got God's attention. Then Scripture came to mind, where Jesus tells his terrifed disciples (they are terrifed that he is going to leave them, because he is, but not really, a glorious, mystic truth of our Savior, he is with us always, as he tells us, 'even to the end of the age') that what he is leaving them, as a kind of parting gift, is his peace. But he goes on to explain that his peace is nothing like the world's peace, and that he does not give it in the same way the world gives. And because of that, "Do no let your hearts be troubled, and do not be afraid." (This is in the Gospel of John 14 : 27. I find John to be the most mystical and least literal of the Gospel writers, and so he appeals greatly to my poetic mind.)

I repeated that for awhile and eventually began to feel a soothing white light enfold me. I felt held in the arms of angels, or maybe even Jesus himself (I did not open up my eyes to look, merely accepted this miracle of God's love with a grateful heart). And as I surrendered to his love surrounding me, I began to breathe the word peace in and out, inhaled peace and exhaled peace, and that peace finally soothed my rattled, ragged mind and calmed my painfully beating heart.

But having been shaken to the ground by fear too many times in my life, I still feel its after shocks. Even yet this morning I jump at sudden sounds (Luke the cat appears unexpectedly beside me and meows) or I find myself intensely irritated by the sound of Little Bear digging away at an itchy spot in his thick fur. Thankfully, I have learned from experience this jumpiness will subside as the day goes on, just as earthquakes finally, eventually, stop shaking the earth. "Peace is what I leave with you; it is my own peace that I give you. I do not give as the world gives. So do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not be afraid." Amen.

Until next time, I remain, your friend, Rozenkraai