My mom is in the hospital again... as my brain floats between the worst possible case scenario to an overly sunny outlook, and everything in between; my body and brain's natural mode is to disassociate. My brain is floating, my emotions are distant, and it feels like... it's so hard to describe. It feels like I'm not actually connected to anything. Not so much how I've heard disassociation described where people say it feels like it's something happening to someone else - it definitely feels like it's happening to me. But maybe it's like, I'm watching it happen to me from afar. I'm in some distant, hard to concentrate place, just spinning from thought to thought. And I've learned tools recently that should help me move out of the disassociated state... and logically I know that I should tap into those tools... But I also know that this is my brain's way of trying to protect itself. And I know that the alternative may lead to a severe anxiety attack. Is it so bad to just let myself float for a little bit? Probably... the down side to disassociation, or at least the down side in the past, is that when I come back to myself, the anxiety is so much worse. Floating is just so... easy. And that's the rub, isn't it? Nothing should be easy, it always has to be hard before it can be easy.
On the other token, we really don't know what is going to happen. She's in the hospital, but she's alive, we're awaiting results of a brain scan to see if she needs surgery or recovery. So I would kind of like to just float until I know if I should actually feel anxious... which I also recognize is not really logical either. But emotions aren't logical. It's not that I feel nothing. And it's not like I don't feel the anxiety waiting on the side of the shore. It's out there. My chest is tight. My brain is also incredibly foggy. I also have a day job and work to do... wither I'm floating or anxious, that's going to be a bit tough today.
I suppose if I address the disassociating (which I guess by writing I'm starting to do), and then deal with the inevitable anxiety, I could just to get myself to a somewhat, what, non-anxious state? Is that even possible? The answer to that is that I don't know. And I hate not knowing. I had not knowing what is going to happen to my mom. I hate not knowing what my body and brain are going to do at any given moment.
And all of that not knowing just feeds off itself pushing me further and further into a state of... well, a battle between disassociation - lost in a sea of floating - and the anxiety; waiting on the shore for me to come back to myself so that it can hit me like a sword falling on a solder who saw the battle coming and is there to counter the sword - either by their own sword or their body, uncertain which way it will all come down until the second it does.
Is it any wonder why my brain decided that taking itself away from itself was the way to go as a kid, and has been hanging on to that ideal for all these years? In counseling, we talk about this tolerance window, and expanding that window so that we can do what we need to do without either extreme. And that makes sense. I get that my goal is to expand that window so that generally speaking most things are within that tolerance window. But life is so full of extremes, and difficult situations. Is it any wonder that I find myself often outside of a tolerance window? I don't think so. But... here's what I'm avoiding, I think. My tolerance window is small, yes. My mom being in the hospital is an extreme situation, also true. But if my tolerance window were larger, maybe less would feel extreme so that when something extreme does happen, I am better equipped to handle it; maybe even extreme situations would still fall partially in the tolerance window. Or at least things outside of the tolerance window wouldn't put me into such an extreme variation of floating or anxiety.
Fuck, I guess I better do the exercises that I should do to bring my back to shore. Then I will deal with the anxiety waiting for me, that fucking asshole.
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